Originally published in the Proceedings of the Fifth InternationalSymposium on Display Holography, Tumg H. Jeong, Editor, Proc. SPIE2333, Bellingham, WA, pp. 138-145 (1995).



HOLOPOETRY: THE NEW FRONTIER OF LANGUAGE

An interview with Eduardo Kac


by IV Whitman

"Everything has been said . . . provided words do not change theirmeanings and meanings their words."
Goddard, Alphaville


According to some critics, Brazilian poet Eduardo Kac might be aheadof his time. The axiom, which was no less responsible for describing thelikes of John Cage, Guillaume Apollinaire and Marshall McLuhan, is fittingfor the likes of this artist who is a descendant of the legacy of visualpoetry and also a skilled arbiter of the new media of art, namely, technology.

Kac's works are each exhortations to view and interpret media and languagewith new eyes. A digital field reduced to semantic structures and "discontinuoussyntax," as he likes to say, provides an environment where the textmoves in space as the viewer attempts to perceive the textually woven colorfield Kac calls the "holopoem."

Because the varieties of perception are infinite with a holopoem, thisnew breed of highly refined and meticulously calculated art is as mystifyingto the viewer as it is to its maker. Kac has taken language and added atwist to the traditional left to right, top to bottom reading process:the "z" axis and a new kinetic factor. This fourth dimensionnot only allows the words to float, but, more importantly, gives the wordsnew meanings as they are layered, forced on top of each other, appear anddisappear, in clouds of mist and fields of color.

Born in Rio de Janeiro in 1962, Kac experimented with a variety ofpoetic techniques before he appropriated holography in 1983 and began tocreate his holopoems. The following consists of excepts from an interviewduring the course of two hot July days in the summer of 1993 in Chicago.

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The two of us walk toward Lake Michigan at dusk on Sunday night-microphonein hand as we move down the street. Cars drive by and, finally, as we reachthe lake, the water slaps the concrete jetty we sit on. The sky is clearand the air is warm and humid; hardly the Chicago one would imagine. But,it's summer. Our conversations begins to pick up and I turn on the recorder.I interrupt Eduardo mid-sentence in order to officially begin our interview.

WHITMAN: . . . say that again. I liked what you said about .. .

KAC: If I had to take a poet's work to a desert island, I wouldtake Cummings' because I think he is unique in several ways. First of all,Cummings was not creating his unconventional style just to write non-semantic,abstract compositions. He always wanted to communicate something but feltthat traditional means were not sufficient for him to express what he wantedto express. He needed to change the nature of the medium he was workingwith. I emphasize with that a lot because I felt that I could not workwith the traditional, printed page medium anymore. I had to change my mediumaltogether to be able to do what I wanted. And although Cummings did notdo that exactly, he made use of the graphic components of our written languagein a way that was highly visual: the white space, the breaking of the line,the regular spacing of the typewriter. The geometry of writing impliedthe typewriter.

I do not use holography as it was handed down to me, as holography isnormally understood. I really change the way, or at least I came up withmy own way, of using it, in a way similar to the way that Cummings usedthe typewriter. The typewriter was meant to write linearly and he saidthere is something else here that is not being explored. So he examinedwhat its potential was. Holography is traditionally known for the duplicationof three-dimensional objects. I do not, however, believe that three-dimensionalityis what holography is all about. Creating a three-dimensional structurewith a hologram would simply be an extension of the two-dimensionalityof the printed page which, to me, is missing the point. What I do is tryto recover a temporal dimension to the word that otherwise would be lostin the third dimension. Holography has a unique potential for storing informationin a non-linear way and this is what I try to explore more than anythingelse.

I use what I call "discontinuous syntax." So, instead of creatingcompositions that remain fixed on the surface of the page or the film orthat remain stationary as a three-dimensional volume, I break that spacein different ways. Each piece deals with this problem in a unique way.But what underlies them all is that I break that space into zones in sucha way that you can never have the full gestalt or the full view of thepoem at once. It's totally broken into different viewing zones that askyou to navigate in that space, oscillate with the poem, and create yourown reading. So there is this breaking down, this collapsing of the two-dimensional,stable surface which physically makes my writing possible.


WHITMAN: Do you see your work in any way similar to what theCubists were trying to explore in regard to the concept of simultaneity?


KAC: No. Simultaneity is a characteristic of print-based visualpoetry and is not a characteristic of holographic poetry. Most visual poetsfrom the 10's to the 70's wanted to create texts using the same kind ofstructures the painters used. The line, the color, the graphic forms --all were used together on a two-dimensional surface in a way where thereis pretty much no hierarchy. You can look at the background, you can lookat the landscape on the background or you can look at the people in theforeground of the painting. You can concentrate on different areas, ifyou will, but the picture acts as a whole. All the elements are workingtogether simultaneously on the picture plane to create unity, that whole,which is the painting.

What visual poets tried to do by using typography and new printing techniqueswas to break away from the linear structure that characterized poetry.They tried to work more along the lines of the painter and the visual artist.Therefore they gave up the line, the one dimensional line, as the basefor writing and assumed the two-dimensional surface of the page as a newcompositional unit. From then on it was a clear step to the three-dimensional,solid form of objects. I think that there is a clear direction towardsa four-dimensional immaterial medium which is holography because I am dealingwith three-dimensional space as well as time.

A lot of the syntactic and semantic efficiency of visual poems createdby poets associated with movements such as Futurism, Cubism, Lettrism,and Concretism resulted from precise information about each letter. Bythat I mean that each letter has a specific color and size, each letterhas a position on the page, each letter has a relative position in relationto another letter on the page and there it stays. But all this breaks downin my writing. Words and letters don't have a specific position. The positionchanges depending on what point of view you see the poem from. And, therefore,I emphasize less the structure than the behavior. The simultaneous structureimplies a stationary, stable form that you can look at and the behaviorimplies a more interactive, a more discontinuous syntax. The letters dosomething as part of their signifying process.

Additionally, if we are both looking at a holopoem, what I see willbe different than what you see. We are both looking at the same physicalpoint on the surface of the hologram, but I will see it differently thanyou. We will never have a complete perception of the text because thereisn't such a thing. It is a text that implies non-completion and that leavesa lot of room for the reader to create his or her own paths and choicesand decisions.

I believe in the more interactive, viewer-activated text that reallydepends on the reader to release its potential in a way that is not metaphoric,but in a way that is actual and literal, actively involving perceptionand cognition together -- to probe the text, to change the text in orderto read. So reading becomes this very kinetic, very dynamic activity, sometimeseven sending completely different inputs to each eye-which I call "binocularreading" because, in a sense, for the first time you are really readingwith your two eyes.

This has never been meaningful in the process of reading itself. Lookingat the printed page here, what I see with my left eye is just a differentviewpoint of what I see with my right eye. Retinal rivalry is not a poeticissue, but what matters is that in a holopoem you can read a text thatis fluctuating, that has this conflict between the two inputs.


WHITMAN: But you are creating a new non-language from whencecomes the difficulty of trying to reconcile the dilemma people have whenthey see a language that no one speaks but you.

KAC: Isn't that what poets do?


WHITMAN: It is! But there is friction between this non-senseand sense which I think could be called "idea" in regard to yourwork.


KAC: It's true that there is a tension between sense and non-sense,meaning and non-meaning. But what's different is that now you have a textin which you are in between, and most of the time you spend there. Whenyou are in that transitional zone, what you see oscilates without havingto flow in any particular direction. My idea is to ask you, the viewer,to read something in between those two or more words. I do this by makingthe letters force their way into each other and dissolve into each otherin order to suggest meanings between the words in a way that I could notdo with straight forward language.

For example, if you think of two extreme concepts, black and white,you can clearly think of a third term-gray. Gray defines a very clear zonebetween those two ideas. Now if you think of metal and sugar, there isn'ta word that clearly defines the mid-point between those two ideas. Whyis that relevant? Well, that's what poetry is all about. It is the investigationof hidden meanings and hidden possibilities in language. What I want todo is reach that middle point between sugar and metal withoutinventing a word. I want the words to battle, let the words go at it, letthe words collapse, let them dissolve, let them move and let the viewerexplore that transition in space and time and try to respond to these words.


WHITMAN: So, you are dealing with two things that depend on theviewer's movement in front of the hologram, that is, the optic sensationsthat occur with the left eye and the right eye and the tension that iscreated there optically, as well as the interpretive tension, that is,trying to figure out what the words are trying to say and that fight thatgoes on there.


KAC: Exactly. And you see the words express that conflict ina sense in Amalgam,(1990) for example, because the poem has words such as "vortex"and "flow" where there is something implied which is a very subtle,very quiet, very congenial motion contrasted with something that is wild,chaotic, that drowns, and implies destruction.


WHITMAN: A classic example would be Adrift,I think . . .


KAC: In Adrift[1991] you see the word "subtle" and you pretty much don't quitesee anything else at that point if you're looking like right there. Whenyou see the word "subtle" in black against a color background,you don't see anything else. So you are looking through a viewing zone.As you leave that viewing zone the word disappears altogether and you seethe words "lightning" and "when," almost disappearing.You then see the words "gears and" and in the viewing zone thatyou are in now you don't see "butterflies," or "breathe,"for example . . . So these are discontinuous viewing zones and they neverallow you to grasp them at once. Also, when you move in front of the holopoem,you perceive different viewpoints and you perceive the words changing andfloating.


WHITMAN: What has been the role of the computer in your holopoems?


KAC: Computers have given me more freedom in terms of typographiccreation and spatial organization, but more importantly they have allowedme to explore new linguistic behaviors. In Adrift,for example, I combine digital and holographic spaces. The letters in theword "breathe" are blown away like leaves by the viewer's gaze.Also, computers have stimulated me to try to push further the principleof syntactic discontinuity. For example, in Adriftthe passage between viewing zones kind of flows; it's not abrupt. But inmany other of my pieces there are big gaps between the viewing zones andthese gaps do not have any semantic function, like the white space in "AThrow of Dice" by Mallarmé or in the concrete poem. They areempty. It's just emptiness: non-semanticized space that has a structuralfunction in the reading process but that does not resonate as silence inthe way that the white space on the page does.


WHITMAN: So, in formalist terms, you don't have positive andnegative space?


KAC: Right . . .


WHITMAN: You just have positive space.


KAC: That's an important discussion right there because of thesedualisms -- positive and negative, presence and absence. The black inkof the printed page in the concrete poem stands for the voice, the sound,or the word as opposed to the silence of the white space. I do not operatewithin that dichotomy at all. I am much more interested in the graphicsubstance of the word and I de-emphasize the acoustic dimension of theword. I am more interested in the word, the written word, the specificityof the written word, in itself as a non-secondary system in relation tothe spoken word. I am not aiming at an oral resonation of these words.These holopoems cannot be recited; they cannot be performed at all andI find that to reveal the ultimate specificity of the discontinuous syntax.They are not meant to be performed; they are meant to be experienced asa new kind of written word, a new kind of visual poetry that exists ina space that invents its own rules.

.

We get up from our concrete seats beside Lake Michigan on Columbus Driveand Jackson Blvd. around 8:15 p.m.. A fire burns in the distance to thenorth, somewhere in Chicago, and dragonflies are everywhere. We walk afew blocks to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and take the stairwellto the basement which echoes with our voices as we walk down its paintedbrick hallways. We continue our conversation from the lakeside . . .

WHITMAN: So, how could one discuss your work thematically?

KAC: Thematically? Well, I think poets have always written aboutthe same things: human concerns, life and death, relationships, love, hate,social issues, the things you see, the things you think about. SometimesI look at what I've done so far and there really isn't a thematic concernthat I try to pursue. As far as that goes it's very spontaneous, you know.I don't have an agenda for themes.

But if I look back at what I've done so far, the Cabala, the permutationcharts of the Cabala . . . . You see, in Hebrew the numbers are also letters,so every word has a numerological dimension to it. My first computer holopoemin Chicago was a piece called Multiple(1989) that consists of four signs that traverse the film plane, perpendicularto the viewer. So if you move to your left, you see the word "poem,"but that word is written in such a way -- tilted in space -- and with atypeface that resembles numbers so much that when you look from this sideyou see the numbers, 3-3-0-9, which is a simple equation: 3x3=09. I'm attemptingto recover some of the hidden meanings of the Hebrew alphabet in that piece,and, of course, all the meanings that the number 3 has in numerology andmysticism.

Abracadabra,(1984/85) my second holopoem, also was influenced by the Cabala because"abracadabra" is a Cabalistic word. Lilith,(1987/89) a piece that I did with Richard Kostelanetz, was heavily influencedby the Cabala. Shema(1989), a piece that I did in memoriam to my grandmother, the only piecein which I actually used the Hebrew language, in a sense, is also influencedby the Cabala, because I'm talking about the recovery or about the integrationof the soul after death, to nature and the sun.

WHITMAN: Mysticism is one thing that all your work has in common. . .

KAC: Cabalistic mysticism, specifically. I am not interestedin other forms of mysticism.

WHITMAN: But your holopoems I think are mystic in some way becausethey are mysteries. You have to search for these mysteries that are withinthem and without light they aren't there. So, there are certain things,there are certain metaphors you could use to explain them in a mysticalway, but also they are elusive.


KAC: That's a word that very well describes . . .


WHITMAN: They are very elusive in the same way that mysticismor spirituality is. So if you try to describe a holopoem, you couldn't.You would have to see it in the same way that you have to experience it.And I think there is a kind of mystery in technology that you touched on.As much as we try to explain what the hologram is and how the film reactsto the light, there is something . . .


KAC: Fascinating! To pursue that line of thought of the themes,I can clearly see that in "Abracadabra," "Multiple""Lilith" and "Shema", I am being influenced by my interestin the Cabala.

But if you look at the other pieces, another area of concern of mineis the natural phenomenon. This amazing thing I discovered here in Americais how fast the clouds move. Clouds here in Chicago move so fast. You don'tsee that in Rio. It's just that peaceful, sunny thing throughout the wholeyear. Here you have the typhoons, the cyclones, the earthquakes, disturbances,the earth being alive and moving and changing. I want to recover or recreatethat in language: to disturb language, to make language uneasy, to makelanguage collapse, to make language fall and break and pulverize and transformitself, escape through your fingers. I want that chaos, that recycling,that destructive power, that power that takes things away from their place.I want all of that in my poetry.

This fascination with natural phenomena that I was never so much awareof . . . you can see that in the behavior of the letters and words in thecomputer holopoems. They are much more disaster prone, if you will. I'minterested in appropriating this sort of natural behavior into language,but in a way that would expand what language can say beyond its ordinaryuse or meanings. In Adriftit says, if you translate it linearly: "subtle lightening when gearsand butterflies breathe." Seeing gears and butterflies breathing issort of seeing the whole, or how everything is connected: man-made andnot man-made, being alive and breathing in this convulsive environment,in this ever changing environment.

Science fiction is another theme that recurs, I think. When I was 7years old I was reading comics or science fiction books and it was no bigdeal to me for people to actually land on the moon, for example. I stillhave a comic book from 1969 in which the super-hero fights this holographiccriminal. And in order for the super-hero to fight him, he has to becomea hologram himself. All of that, in a sense, belonged to the imaginationof a child growing up with comics and television.

So, the SouvenirD' Andromeda (1990) piece, in my mind, is a souvenir that somebodybrought from Andromeda for you. And traveling to Andromeda and experiencingAndromeda is something that cannot be described with language as we nowit here, stationary, on printed surfaces and so forth. Language has tobe, in a sense, reinvented to express that space travel experience. That'ssomething that poets always did. You know, poems about environments theyhave experienced. The whole tradition of the haiku and being observationalabout the seasons and about nature, that's something that poets alwaysdid.

Appolinaire wrote in 1918 in his The New Spirit and the Poets: "Poets will carry you, living and awake, into a nocturnal worldsealed with dreams. Into universes which tremble ineffably above our heads.Into those nearer and further universes which gravitate to the same pointof infinity as what we carry within us." So, it's along these lines.

The other piece, Astrayin Deimos, (1992) reflects a similar interest. Imagine that somebodyvisited the smallest moon of Mars and wrote a poem about it. But to expresswhat he saw, that poem must be in a language that has that metamorphosis,that transition to convey what he felt and what he experienced about thatlandscape.

And another recurring theme, perhaps, is vision, vision not on a banal,mechanical level. My first holopoem is a sort of manifesto for a new wayof seeing. Holo/Olho,(1983) "olho" meaning "eye" in Portuguese, and youhave all the fragmentation in it that tries to create a syntax based onthe idea that the part contains the whole and the whole contains the part.So, "Holo/Olho" syntactically tries to appropriate a unique featureof the holographic space, which is the fragment containing the whole andvice versa. It tries to recover that in the structure of language itself.

So, vision, the deeper meanings of vision and visuality, apparently,are a recurring theme, too, like in Omen(1990). In this piece you have the word "eyes " that can be readin different ways and that emerges out of a cloud of smoke and then disappears,dissolving into this cloud of smoke. It is ambiguous as something you cansee through but at the same time blocks your vision. "Omen" impliessomething that occurs in the future, so there's that whole idea of lookinginto the future. There's a whole metaphor, a visual metaphor, being createdthere about seeing and not seeing and that, in a sense, reflects what Ifeel is going on in my life.


WHITMAN: What do you think the public's and the critic's reactionhas been to your work here in the United States?


KAC: I guess that depends on what you call critics because, youknow, traditional literary critics won't consider this poetry at all. [Claus]Clüver is one who I think acknowledges merit in what I am doing. Idon't know if Clüver would be a critic; he's a comparative literaturescholar. I think Eric Vos, an experimental poetry scholar from Holland,and Richard [Kostelanetz] see significance in what I'm doing. Also,new media arts critic Louis Brill has written about my work. The public'sreaction? I don't know. Loren Billings, the director of the Museum of Holographyin Chicago, told me that a lot of families came into the museum when Ihad my work there and they had a lot of schools and tourists and she saidthey spent quite awhile looking at my work, trying to put the pieces togetherand trying to understand what was being communicated and so on. It's hardfor me to know. I think that a lot of people may still find the work verydifficult to understand because, first, people are not used to seeing hologramsas art works. People are used to seeing holograms that pose no interpretiveproblems: holograms of clowns, holograms of reclining nudes, hologramsthat conform to habits of looking. Holographic art works do not, and I'mnot only talking about my own, but holographic art works, the significantones, the ones that deserve to be called so, do not conform to traditionalhabits. So people are just not yet used to looking at holographic art assuch, period.

Visual poetry, you must admit, is not a field that is well known bythe common audience. People don't know that there is such a thing as visualpoetry. They have seen advertisements that were influenced by visual poemsand maybe they've even seen visual poems, but they don't know there isa tradition that is a literary genre. So here comes this guy who tellsthem, "This is not only holographic art, but this is also visual poetry.And you can never see the whole thing from one view point." Most peoplestill look for the literal meaning of the words and most people will notallow themselves to read the transitions in the sense that they read colorfields blending into one another in a Mark Rothko painting. I think thatthis is an issue of conventionality. Maybe if I keep making holopoems andif more people explore this concept, then it might not be so difficultto understand in the future. But I can't give up the issues I'm dealingwith in order to make the work more accessible.

The whole motivation for me is to investigate new possibilities of language.I create these works because I want to see them. That's the bottom line.I only make a holopoem if it's something that I think would be great. Thatmotivates me to go ahead and spend all the money, to spend nights in thelab and so forth. To see something that I want to see present, here, thatotherwise wouldn't be. I know I won't see it if I don't make it. So thereis a fascination with making it and looking at it and saying "Incredible!Language can do this. Language can behave in this way. Language can communicatethis way, also." That is the biggest motivation for me to go aheadand make it.


IV Whitman is a writer who lives in Providence, Rhode Island, USA. Hehas published interviews with writers and artists such as Dick Higgingsand Jenny Holzer.


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