“Alire: Une Experimentation De Poesie Informatique En Lecture Privee” presented by Bootz
Symposium:
Session Title:
- Interactivity and Fiction
Presentation Title:
- Alire: Une Experimentation De Poesie Informatique En Lecture Privee
Presenter(s):
Abstract:
Since 1989, alire1 has been offering, in private reading, that is to say at home, poetic works created on computer and designed to be read on this medium. She thus anticipated a movement now common to the Internet, considering that the screen would become a reading medium as normal as the book. But she did not just advocate a change of text support. It took into account the dynamic character that ensued, introducing, through animation, temporality as a natural syntactic dimension. It also considered that the display device is not reduced to a screen, but that it consists of a much more complex machine for performing calculations, logical operations, processing and storing information. not intended for reading, so many possibilities absent from classical literary devices. The most important point, in this second remark, is the voluntary addition of information not intended for reading. This simple fact suffices to assert that the computer device introduces some opacity for the reader. A gap is growing between the author and him; the device increases the distance between them. Such an upheaval can only engender a change of textual archetype and bring out new literary forms. But it takes all its importance in private reading, a situation that allows time for the reader to integrate the work, and therefore to rub his potential opacities, to experience them. It seemed obvious to us in 1989 that an editorial system favoring private reading at the expense, perhaps even of a spectacularity adapted to public presentations, would lead to productions of a different type. The electronic journal on diskette, then on CD-ROM, seemed to us at the time to be the appropriate vector for such a project.
We did not think then to discover a behavior of the works as it appears to us today, of kind to move a little more still the definition of the text. The text can not be limited to observable objects, it is above all functioning, and even constitutes a complete system endowed with the three faces of the system: ontological, functional, organizational.I propose to present the main characteristics of this private reading, as they have been treated by the authors published in ALIRE.
