From visual poetry to digital art : image-sound-text, convergent media, and the development of new media languages

• Main Author: Mencia, Maria
• Published: University of the Arts London 2003
• Subjects: 302.23; Digital Media Design
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.405458

This research arises from my practice as a professional artist and my concern with issues of language and communication, particularly, the investigation of ways that arouse emotion and rational thought at once through language. Visual Poetry is a form of expression, which provokes both, and I saw the potential to expand its underlining principles further with the emergence of new technologies. With the digital medium, the main elements of visual and sound poetry: image, sound and text, can now be incorporated into the same piece of work. The aim of this study is to explore new digital communicative systems that interweave visual, oral and semantic elements of language, to produce new media languages where the pre-linguistic and linguistic maintain their symbiotic identities. This study examines theoretical and artistic concerns emerging from the area in-between, which is created by interlacing image, sound and text in the same artwork. It addresses the following series of questions: How to transfer the main concepts from Visual Poetry to Digital Art? How does computer technology transform image, sound and text to create new media languages? What is the role of the author, reader, writer, producer in these new interactive textualities of image, sound and text? How has this affected the new conventions of reading, looking, producing, using and thinking? What does the digital add to the interactivelexts of Visual Poetry? What new meanings and processes of thinking, understanding and interpretation are appearing? In which way do new technologies enhance the collaborative nature of practice? This investigation brings knowledge from other disciplines into the art field and it explores different serniotic models such as the linguistic the visual and the aural. It blurs the barriers between the visual and the linguistic: between different art forms such as fine art, visual poetry and sound art/poetry in a new digital and technological arena. It questions the conventions applied to these critical areas with the aid of the new tools and critical concepts available through digital technology. This study challenges the viewer/listener/user with an interface of signs from different languages and serniotic systems: the visual (still and moving images), the audible and the linguistic, to participate and explore the multiple possibilities within a work. This investigation seeks to contribute to a new body of knowledge in the development of the areas of Visual Poetry, Digital Art and the new genre of Electronic Poetry, by creating new, innovative, digital artworks for which, as a new form of expression, critical and analytical conventions are still in the process of development.