Performative poetry as program, programmed poetry as performance

Abstract

Innovative forms of poetry such as language art and experimental poetry have adopted intersemiotic processes and linguistic constraints in their codification, promoting rereading and transgression of technical apparatuses from the techno-capitalist societies. In addition, new inventive forms of digital language art, such as electronic poetry, have integrated generativity, indeterminacy and combinatorics in their programming, stimulating the reinvention and subversion of computing mechanisms from the networked societies. Through the appropriation of media, poetry articulates creative strategies that question the interface between arts and languages, forms and mechanisms. The experimental attitude of performative poetry presents itself as a program. Similarly, using the potentialities of the computer as a semiotic machine, programmed poetry can be regarded as performative, producing unique, unrepeatable events. Poetry and performance can thus be regarded as floating entities, promoting the transition from a fixed order to an economy of circulations. This scenario fuels the discussion concerning the connections between poetry, performance and program, supporting our reflections through the presentation and description of different examples of poetic intervention in the Portuguese context, which use programming and coding to reconfigure the awareness of language and mediation.