Seiça, Álvaro. "Kinetic Poetry.

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 15
Kinetic Poetry

Álvaro Seiça

The kinetic poem may still be in its infancy.

—MARY ELLEN SOLT (1968)

The term “kinetic” derives from the Greek verb kinein; that is, “to move.”
Therefore, action and movement infuse kinetic poetry as it describes poetic
works that employ motion. Within the realm of digital poetry, where it is
today mostly deployed, the composition of methods that output textual
movement—such as transitions, timeouts, and intervals—incorporate
temporality in the process of coding and display of writing. Yet a discussion
of current works of kinetic poetry must be situated in the wider flux of
aesthetic, artistic, and media antecedents that pervaded the twentieth
century. These antecedents inform us about the will to move beyond the
static linearity of the printed page and the notion of poetry as living in

I want to express my gratitude to Rui Torres for his contribution in suggesting and outlining
this chapter from the point of view of kinetic forms. Many thanks to Scott Rettberg and
C. T. Funkhouser for their revising suggestions, and to a number of poets I interviewed during
2013–16: [Link]/channels/setintervalconversations. I would also like to thank Richard
Kostelanetz, Johanna Drucker, Chelsea Spengemann, Violette Garnier, Fondazione Bonotto’s
Luigi Bonotto, Patrizio Peterlini and Enrica Sampong, Eduardo Darino and Philip Steadman for
insightful information; and to Stephen Bann and Brona Bronaċ Ferran for generously providing
materials and feedback. I am aware that this brief history of kinetic poetry is mostly centered
on Western Europe and the Americas. It has been difficult to access bibliographies from Asian
and African literatures on this theme. I am sure there are works out there that complicate and
redefine my focalization, and as such, I appreciate comments in order to complement or refute
it. This chapter was made possible by funding from the University of Bergen and, in its final
stage, the European Commission via the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action ARTDEL, and the
Norwegian Research Council.
174 ELECTRONIC LITERATURE AS DIGITAL HUMANITIES

a single medium. The most obvious animation medium is film, but many
animation mechanisms preceded film. Kineticism can be traced back
to the invention of technical apparatus such as the kinetograph and the
kinetoscope, developed by Thomas Edison and William Dickson at the end
of the nineteenth century.1
In order to create bridges between narratives from different fields and
artistic movements, I will focus on five forms of time-based kinetic poetry:
mechanical poetry, film poetry, videopoetry, holopoetry, and digital poetry.
These five media-specific forms are better seen as media clusters with
resemblances, not as groups of homogeneous media artworks, even though
they all rely on temporal and spatial dimensions to achieve literary and
artistic expressiveness. What they strictly have in common is the way poets
and artists engage with a broader vision of “poetry in motion;” that is,
kinetic poetry. They are operative insofar as they execute a set of instructions
or algorithms, being that of the time slots between frames in a storyboard,
or the intervals set for transitions in digital poetry. Even if this chapter offers
relations and points of departure, a concise history of kinetic poetry cannot
be grasped without understanding some of its immediate antecedents:
Mallarmé’s exploration of space in the page, Morgenstern’s phono-visual
poems, the Futurists’ typographic quest to set “words in freedom” (Govoni
and Marinetti’s parole in libertà), Apollinaire’s calligrammes, the Dadaist
random and sound performances, the abstract films of the Modernists,
and the postwar experimentalism involving sound, text, and image with
spatialization, collage, montage, and other techniques unfolding with the
concrete and visual poets.

Kinetic Origins
Throughout the history of writing, modes of textual inscription have been
dependent on space, but rarely on time. The printing process activates text
as a discrete element to be displayed on a planographic surface. In film,
video, and the computer, textual inscription is presented in different outputs,
and potentially acquires new forms of artistic expression—given that it
allows for displacement, tridimensional space, time scheduling, and media
integration. Certainly, poetry’s progressive transition from static to kinetic
media owes its roots to investigations and transgressions done by poets and
artists working with visual text from the antiquity to the baroque period,

1
These machines were envisioned upon earlier chronophotographic techniques developed by
Marey, Reynaud, Demeny, Anschutz, and Muybridge, to mention but a few, in order to build
stop motion devices that would set the illusion of movement: the magic lantern and the flip
book (kineograph), the thaumatrope, phenakistoscope, zoetrope, praxinoscope, zoopraxiscope,
electrotachyscope, and the “photographic gun.” Dickson also developed the mutoscope.
 KINETIC POETRY 175

via the late nineteenth century and Modernism. Stéphane Mallarmé’s work
is symptomatic of a quest to stretch the boundaries and conventions of
words and blanks in the page. Mallarmé’s poem “Un Coup de Dés Jamais
N’Abolira le Hasard” (1897) is notorious for the displacement of words
in space, creating voids and pauses in the free poetic line, and extending
the reading area to the double-page spread. The suggestion of movement
in the page was later explored by Guillaume Apollinaire in Calligrammes
(1918), whose visual component is achieved by calligraphic elements that
are syntactically and graphically arranged in relation to semantics.
It is within the Modernist period that kinetic works start to be technically
activated. In the 1910s, Italian and Russian Futurist writers envisioned a
world in which the machine and speed would set words free, with effect on
literary expression, spatial composition, and cacophonic phonemes. During
the 1910s and 1920s, painters, sculptors, architects, photographers, and
filmmakers, used to material experimentation, engaged with mixed media
that allowed for motion techniques. Futurist abstract films from the 1910s
and Marcel Duchamp’s “assisted readymade” Bicycle Wheel (1913) can
be seen, in this sense, as some of the earliest kinetic artworks. Duchamp’s
piece is a sculpture that simply modifies two objects, although in 1920, with
an engine, Duchamp assembled Rotary Glass Plates (Precision Optics), an
installation which produced both kinetic and optic rhythms. Naum Gabo’s
Kinetic Construction (Standing Wave) (1919–20) is a further step in kinetic
art, insofar its mechanical motor creates four dimensions by vibrating. Gabo
and Antoine Pevsner’s Realisticheskii Manifest—where the ideas of kinetic
art were introduced on August 5, 1920—paved the way not only for the
establishment of an abstract constructivism, which contrasted with the
political Soviet Constructivists but also for what would follow in kinetic
arts: “Space and time are the only forms on which life is built and hence
art must be constructed. (…) We affirm in these arts a new element the
kinetic rhythms as the basic forms of our perception of real time” (Gabo and
Pevsner 1957: 152, emphasis original).
Celebrating their hundredth anniversary, kinetic arts have traversed
multifaceted experiments with artistic and literary forms in diverse media.
Always connected to changes in science and technology, kineticism rapidly
became a source of fascination: from László Moholy-Nagy’s lumino-kinetic
sculptures and abstract films, to Hans Richter, Man Ray, and Fernand
Léger’s movies; from Duchamp’s kinetic mixed-media objects, sculptures,
and films, to Alexander Calder’s air stream mobiles. Kinetic art emerges in
the 1920s and remerges in the 1950s postwar. In 1953, Yaacov Agam’s solo
exhibition Peintures en Mouvement at the Galerie Craven in Paris singles
kinetic paintings out, which will resonate in the 1955 collective exhibition
at Galerie Denise René. The exhibition Le Mouvement/The Movement,
curated by René and Pontus Hultén, compiled kinetic and op(tical) works
by Agam, Bury, Calder, Duchamp, Jacobsen, Soto, Tinguely, and Vasarely.
176 ELECTRONIC LITERATURE AS DIGITAL HUMANITIES

Today, it can be considered as a pivotal point in kinetic arts, signaling but

also amalgamating two different branches of artistic motion: kinetic art,
involving applied physical movement, and op art, suggesting movement or
illusion.2
The post-Second World War era certainly provoked a need for
artistically reimagining the world and experimental art soon blended even
more media. But the effect of war, with its human cruelty and sadistic
technologic development, had already shaken the artistic milieu during
the twentieth century. During the First World War, Dada artists in Zürich,
Berlin, and New York embraced the absurdity of human existence in face
of war, and reacted, by turning chaos and meaninglessness into manifestos,
literary and visual works, like Hannah Höch’s photomontages, and sound
performances. Sound poetry arose from the Dadaist tradition of phonetic
experimentation, playful and performative randomness, in now emblematic
works by Hugo Ball, Raoul Hausmann, or Tristan Tzara, which resonated
in Kurt Schwitters’s Ursonate (1922–32). Following upon innovations in
electroacoustic music, such as Pierre Schaeffer’s musique concrète, sound
poetry continued as a concerted movement in France and elsewhere in the
1950s, with Henri Chopin, François Dufrêne, Ilse and Pierre Garnier, and
Bernard Heidsieck placing emphasis on language’s oral atomization and
deconstruction via vocal techniques and reel-to-reel tape recorders. Poets
also resumed research with the movement of letter shapes influenced by
flows of practice that came from before the war and continued to occur
during war time. But the typewriter began to be used by younger poets
to establish visual patterns of linguistic signs in a new semiotic reading
experience.
As the narrative usually goes, concrete poetry was initiated by Eugen
Gomringer and Öyvind Fahlström in Europe, and the Noigandres group
in Brazil—Augusto de Campos, Haroldo de Campos, and Décio Pignatari.
According to Emmett Williams (1967: vi) and Solt (1968), Fahlström and
Gomringer/Noigandres were unaware of each other’s work. In fact, by 1951
Gomringer had already conceptualized some of the “constellations” collected
in Konstellationen (1953), while Fahlström had published “Hätila Ragulpr
på Fåtskliaben” (1953–4), a text that became known as the “Manifesto for
Concrete Poetry” only in 1966 (Olsson 2005, 2016; Bäckström 2012). Yet
E. M. de Melo e Castro (1962), in an eye-opening TLS letter for the United

2
Future exhibitions during the 1960s—such as Kinetische Kunst in Zurich (1960), Bewogen
Beweging (1961) in Amsterdam, the Nove Tendencije (1961–5) and Tendencije (1968–73)
series in Zagreb, Arte Programmata (1962) in Milan, The Responsive Eye (1965) in New
York, Kinetika (1967) in Vienna, Cinétisme Spectacle Environnement in Grenoble (1968), or
Cybernetic Serendipity (1968) in London—would depart from Le Mouvement, or expand its
scope around constructivism, concrete art, conceptual art, cybernetics, and electronic art.
 KINETIC POETRY 177

Kingdom’s poets, affirms that concrete poetry was born in Brazil. Franz
Mon (1988: 31), on the other hand, attributes its beginning to the work
of Italian Futurist-descendent poet Carlo Belloli in 1943, an author earlier
credited by Emmett Williams in An Anthology of Concrete Poetry (1967)
and by Mary Ellen Solt in Concrete Poetry: A World View (1968). If it is
true that Belloli’s Parole per la Guerra (1943) follows a Futurist graphic
treatment, several poems in Testi-Poemi Murali (1944) and Tavole Visuali
(1948) already show a break that resembles what would be called “concrete
poetry” by the 1950s. According to Belloli’s remarks to Solt (1968), even if
he saw his work as a precursor of concrete aesthetics, he preferred the term
poesia visiva because it conveyed an approach to visual poetry that was
semantic, not asemic.
The 1950s concrete poets absorbed creative and theoretical influences
that came from “the area of fine arts, primarily those of de Stijl, Theo
van Doesburg and Max Bill [concrete art]” (Mon 2011: 28–9). To these
references, it is important at least to mention, from the part of the Brazilian
Noigandres poets, Ernest Fenollosa’s and Ezra Pound’s writings about
oriental ideograms, James Joyce’s and e. e. cummings’s work; while from
the part of the Swedish- and German-speaking poets, the influence of Hans
Arp’s concrete art, concrete and electronic music. Eduardo Kac (2015) goes
further along these lines and re-contextualizes what are, to be sure, the
multiple origins of concrete poetry: Vasilii Kamenskii’s 1914 visual poems
and subtitle reference Tango s korovami. Zhelezobetonnye poemy [Tango
with Cows: Ferro-Concrete Poems], and importantly, for his immediate
antecedence, the less-acknowledged Brazilian poet Wlademir Dias-Pino,
whose 1940s work greatly influenced the São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro
concrete groups prior to the neoconcretism split.
These influences spread at different pace and via different networks
of friendship and collaboration. Yet the core notion to retain is that the
concrete poets pushed forward in radically transforming the disposition
of letters and words with new semantic, syntactic, phonetic, and visual
compositional strategies that aimed at reinventing poetics and breaking
away from verbose lyricism and discursiveness—what Rosmarie Waldrop
(1976: 141) called “a revolt against [the] transparency of the word.” The
influence of ideogrammatic writing helped in approaching the grammar
of mass media, advertisement, and information aesthetics via typography
and industrial design. Letters, symbols and words were seen as atoms and
sequences ingrained with power—what Gomringer (1954) described as
“concentration and simplification.” Furthermore, the political repression in
which some of these authors lived in, or would live in, both in Europe and
Latin America, would have an impact on works of a second wave of concrete
and visual poetics. Like Ilse Garnier, Bohumila Grögerová, Ana Hatherly, or
Salette Tavares in Europe, in the United States Mary Ellen Solt infiltrated
178 ELECTRONIC LITERATURE AS DIGITAL HUMANITIES

the male-dominated concrete poetry scene with her inventive Flowers in

Concrete (1966). If we are to assess today’s legacy of concretism, we have
to necessarily address the gendered canonization at the global scale of the
movement. But this fact is not new either, since there have been occasional
attempts since the 1970s to claim back territory and rewrite the narrative
of women’s role, perhaps starting with the yearly expanding exhibition
Between Language and Image, first organized in 1972 in Italy by Mirella
Bentivoglio (Zoccoli 1976).3

Mechanical Poetry: Motorized Sculpture

Machines
By the 1960s, compelling examples of flip books, object poems, and scroll
poems, such as those made by Japanese Vou group member Takahashi
Shohachiro in the Poésieanimation series (Toshihiko 1977; Donguy 2007:
227, 236) show that the scroll and the signifiers could create the illusion
of motion. But there was more: artists were also constructing mechanical
motorized sculptures with textual elements that actually moved by
themselves. That was precisely what the First International Exhibition of
Concrete [Phonetic] and Kinetic Poetry aimed at in 1964, in Cambridge,
United Kingdom.4
The exhibition’s poster includes a poem by Pierre Garnier that suggests
movement due to its visual rhythm (Figure 1). Organized by Mike Weaver,
with the assistance of Reg Gadney, Philip Steadman, and Stephen Bann, it
recognized kinetic poetry as an expanded form of poetry, especially because
Weaver was “soliciting poem-sculpture proposals” (Thomas 2019: 135). For
Weaver (1964: 14), “In kinetic poetry the boundaries of the visual poem are
extended in time.” At this point, some poets and critics thought of “kinetic
poetry” as dynamic visual poems, flip books, or book objects (artists’ books)
that would convey the illusion of movement, such as those by Williams or

3
See also Emerson (2011), Beaulieu (2013, 2014), and Barok (2018). It is impressive the lack
of women authors selected by Williams in his anthology (Ilse Garnier, Bohumila Grögerová,
and Mary Ellen Solt), but even more so in Max Bense and Elisabeth Walther’s Konkrete Poesie
International (1965), Stephen Bann’s Concrete Poetry: An International Anthology (1967), or
Gomringer’s anthology of German-speaking authors Konkrete Poesie (1972): zero! This is at
odds with Solt’s broader study and criteria, which is neither alphabetical nor linguistic, but
rather geographical, in Concrete Poetry: A World View (1968). In contextualizing, Solt refers
to the work of Ilse Garnier, Bohumila Grögerová, Elisabeth Walther, Salette Tavares, Blanca
Calparsoro, Pilar Gómez Bedate, Louise Bogan, and her own, even though the panorama was
larger. I am thinking, for instance, of Ana Hatherly.
4
The poster and the catalog titles in fact differ (Bann 2020). The “Catalogue” (1964) included
the term “phonetic.”
 KINETIC POETRY 179

FIGURE 1 Poster of the First International Exhibition of Concrete and Kinetic

Poetry, St. Catharine’s College, Cambridge, Nov. 28–Dec. 5, 1964. Poster designed
by Philip Steadman with poster-poem “i (prinzIp)” by Pierre Garnier. Jasia Reichardt
Archive of Concrete and Sound Poetry, 1959–1977, Getty Research Institute, Los
Angeles (890143B). Copyright Pierre Garnier and Philip Steadman. Courtesy of
Violette Garnier and Philip Steadman.

Ian Hamilton Finlay (Solt 1968; Bann 2015), or typewriter patterns that
would produce optical effects, like Timm Ulrichs’s Typotexture (1962)—all
of which seem closer to op poetry.5

5
The “actual” and “virtual” (effect on the retina) kineticism of these works is debatable. See
Vasarely’s “cinétisme” (1955, 1966), Weaver’s distinction (1964), Bann’s unity and diversity
(1966b, 2020), and Popper’s historical threading (1968).
180 ELECTRONIC LITERATURE AS DIGITAL HUMANITIES

For those engaged with art, science, and technology, alongside an idea of
the neo-renaissance and interdisciplinary artist, kineticism meant another
possibility—kinetic art; that is, mechanical moving art. This tradition was
inherited from the 1920s kinetic arts and acquired momentum in postwar
arts.6 Visual artists got also interested in exploring the potential of moving
text. From 1960 onwards, Liliane Lijn created kinetic cylinders in which
she would by 1962 include text in a series of mixed-media “poemcons”
and “poem machines,” such as Time is Change (1964–5), a motorized
conic turning sculpture using stenciled text. Also drawing from kinetic art
and under the aegis of Dom Sylvester Houédard, Ken Cox started adding
letterforms to his motorized sculptures, such as Shadow Box, Four Seasons
Clock (1965) and Three Graces (1966–8), which were seen as “kinetic
poems” as well as “poetry machines” in a posthumous exhibition given the
artist’s premature death.
For the First International Exhibition of Concrete and Kinetic Poetry,
the four members were crucial in compiling their contacts. Gadney brought
news about kinetic art from Paris, such as Frank Malina’s, and thus the
attempt of Weaver in intersecting concrete poetry and kinetic art in order
to forge an exhibition on kinetic poetry as well. This context would drive
the exhibition’s organizers to conceptualize kinetic poems, some of which
materialized, like Weaver’s motorized poem “Tempoem.” John Sharkey
devised the film poem OPENWORDROBE (1964), while the kinetic artist
José María Cruxent included text, for instance, in the Métromane (1964)
installation. Groundbreaking in scope and geography, the exhibition ended
up focusing more on its concrete than kinetic dimensions (Bann 2015;
Gadney 2017).
Concretism—and by extension experimentalism—seems to be of the
utmost relevance for the development of kinetic poetry. Various movements
that constitute the landscape of experimental poetry draw from the
synthesis and compression of language in mixed-media approaches. They
also tend to place an emphasis on visual materiality as a communication
means, processuality, collaboration, and participation, which are decisive
in the experiences with film, video, and computers enacted by many of
the same poets that started in the realm of concretism. Like Fluxus and
other groups or movements that populated the landscape of 1950–60s
experimental arts, experimental poetry was concerned with the expanded
possibilities of media and the materiality of language. At this point,
poets were creating and theorizing about a proliferation of non-verbal-
bound poetics: visual poetry, auditive poetry, tactile poetry, respiratory

6
Besides those exhibiting at Le Mouvement, collectives working in this area included Group
Zero, Group N, Group T, Group Y, Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel, and Dvizhenie. Individual
artists were numerous—see the catalogues of the exhibitions indicated on footnote 2.
 KINETIC POETRY 181

poetry, linguistic poetry, conceptual and mathematical poetry, synesthetic

poetry, and spatial poetry (Melo e Castro 1965, 2014). This galaxy of
proliferating media-oriented poetics finds echo in Adriano Spatola’s “total
poetry” (1969, 2008) and Dick Higgins’s “intermedia” and “metapoetries”
diagrams (2018 [1967, 1978]). This sense of innovative poetries led by
material or media-specific dimensions—instead of psychologic content and
discursive communication as the basis of poetics—operates a rupture that
emphasizes media poetry as form. On the one hand, the historical thread
that derives from kinetic art repurposes kinetic poetry as mechanical
moving poetry. On the other hand, it is clear why poets working with film,
video, or computers felt the need to name their artworks not “kinetic” but
rather “film poetry,” “video poetry,” and “computer poetry”—not only to
signal the importance of technics but also to point out what it culturally
meant to shape poetry with newer media.

Antecedents: Abstract and Animated Films

Abstract films from the 1920s were singular for their unique vocabulary in
relation towards moving image, shape, expressive time, spatial movement,
and light. However, even if lost today, during the 1910s Futurist artists and
brothers Bruno Corra and Arnaldo Ginna were already pioneering abstract
films: Corra’s Musica Cromatica (1912) and Ginna’s Vita Futurista (1916).
In the same year, their manifesto “The Futurist Cinema” called for “filmed
words-in-freedom in movement” (2009: 233).
By the 1920s, the concern with film as a dense and pictorial medium with
a specific visual language, as well as unconventional explorations with the
camera as a mechanical apparatus and hand-painted film became primary
directions for artists working in Weimar’s Bauhaus, Berlin, and Paris.
Walther Ruttmann’s color film Lichtspiel Opus I (1921) acquires cinematic
flow by way of organic and dancing forms. Temporal dimensions and form
are clearly investigated in Richter’s Rhythmus 21 (1921), in that squares
are used to reinforce and choreograph the frames’ transitions like breathing
organisms. Viking Eggeling, Richter’s companion, created Symphonie
Diagonale (1921–4), a silent film full of dynamism and rhythm because of
shapeshifting forms that recall musical intervals. Richter’s Filmstudie (1926),
on the other hand, differs by combining abstract film with Surrealist collage
in a nonlinear montage whose soft-edge forms show kinetic text. At the same
time, Man Ray, who directed and collaborated in many experimental films,
also signed Le Retour à la Raison (1923), a Dadaist film which incorporates
kinetic rayographs, or photograms, a photographic technique used by Ray
to create images without camera, that is, solely with light exposure. Léger’s
Ballet Mécanique (1924), which is a film without scenario initiated by
182 ELECTRONIC LITERATURE AS DIGITAL HUMANITIES

Dudley Murphy and Ray (later redacted from the credits by Léger himself),
operates by nonlinear, but also sequential association of abstract geometric
shapes and figurative depictions, in line with Léger’s Cubist paintings and
Ray’s random shapes.
A seminal work from this period, due to the materialization of kinetic
text, is Duchamp’s Anémic Cinéma (1926). This 35 mm film uses moving
rotoreliefs—double-sided 40 rpm disks—with hypnotic patterns that
combine cinematic montage, optical tridimensional illusion, and text
movement. The film’s composition features absurd and whimsical lines of
text that act as wordplay and turn in spiraling circles mounted on disks.
Seminal contributions came as well from the author of The New Vision
and Vision in Motion, Moholy-Nagy, whose experiments in lumino-
kinetic sculpture would openly influence his own filmic production. In
Ein Lichtspiel: Schwarz-Weiss-Grau (1930), likewise Richter’s Filmstudie,
Moholy-Nagy uses film techniques, such as multiple exposure and negative
image, while developing a very specific vocabulary in terms of light, shades,
and geometric sculptural patterns with the Light-Space Modulator. Early
abstract films thus make evident Cubist, Dadaist, Expressionist, Surrealist,
and Constructivist affiliations, which would resonate in the experimental
films of the 1950–60s.7

Film Poetry
Besides early 1920s experimental film, authors working at the intersection
of cinema, animation, and visual arts devised as well other influential pieces.
These include Sergei Eisenstein’s, Dziga Vertov’s, and Len Lye’s 1930s
textual and typographic incorporations in long feature films and short
animation movies; for instance, in Vertov’s 1931 Enthusiasm (Symphony of
the Donbas) and Lye’s A Colour Box (1935) or Trade Tattoo (1937). One
of the interesting features about Lye’s work is the combination of collage
techniques with cameraless hand-painted celluloid film. Lye has been credited
as an important precursor of kinetic poetry (Dencker 2011; Rettberg 2011,
2019), though Vertov’s specific contributions need to be further highlighted
(Dencker 2011). Among the many fascinating aspects of his oeuvre, Vertov
is particularly important because of his early and inventive use of animated

7
The First International Avant-Garde Film Exhibition (1925) at the UFA Theatre in Berlin
speaks to this prolific moment in experimental film production. The “Absolute Film” show
included Richter’s Rhythmus 23 and Rhythmus 25, Eggeling’s Symphonie Diagonale,
Ruttmann’s Opus III, Léger’s Ballet Mécanique, Hirschfeld-Mack’s live performance, and René
Clair and Francis Picabia’s Entr’acte.
 KINETIC POETRY 183

typography in film, while exploring its relation with sound and rhythm, in
“musical and literary word-montages” (Vertov 2011: 2).
Today, kinetic poetry can be investigated from an array of fields and
lenses: literature, visual arts, media, design, film, animation, or social
semiotics. To be sure, animated movies and the design of text and film
opening titles are among other areas that contributed for reimagining textual
movement.8 Moreover, the titles and credits of movies started to be treated
as living animations, and so semantics and semiotics gained an additional
layer: motion. Kinetic semantics represents meaning-making not only from
lexemes but also from their movement and relation in space-time—what
could be described as an additional modality in semiotics.
Yet “film poetry” and “film text” appear consistently described as such
with the experimental poets.9 Experimental film poetry was influenced by
Surrealist and Lettrist film, but even more so by concrete poetry.10 Marc
Adrian was one of the early inter- or transmedia artists connecting these
traditions, while working with a range of media including analog film and
computer-generated processes such as randomization. In the silent, and
black and white 35/16 mm film poem WO-VOR-DA-BEI (1958), the artist
creates movement by alternating close-ups and distant shots of permutated
syllables (Husslein-Arco, Cabuk, and Krejci 2016). In Schriftfilm (1959–60),
Adrian makes use of word replacement with combinatorial game at the level
of substantives and verbs, whereas Random (1963), Text I (1964a) and Text
II (1964b) are permutation films with sound developed in Berlin with a
Zuse computer.
Ferdinand Kriwet, who also worked across media, composed with
Teletext (1963) a very different collage film. Teletext appropriates found
footage, radio, and popular music, as it intersperses signs, letters, urban
symbols, and advertisement with a sharp multiplicity of sensory inputs. It
reads as a critique of capitalism, the consumer society, mass media, war, and
acceleration. It is a subliminal window into the 1960s, as political and pop
culture events unfold at a pace that shows the contradictions of the decade.

8
Lotte Reiniger, Oskar Fischinger, Berthold Bartosch, Norman McLaren, Mary Ellen Bute,
Saul Bass, Pablo Ferro, or Daniel Szczechura bridged the divide between experimental and
mainstream animation film, and the boundaries between art venues and the commercial
industry. On Bass, see Cayley 2005.
9
For the sake of compression, I am departing from the way authors describe their creative
works, rather than opening up the discussion about what constitutes “poetry,” “text,” “text-
based art,” “language-based,” or “language art.”
10
Films such as 1951 Isidore Isou’s Traité de Bave et d’Éternité, Maurice Lemaître’s Le Film
est Déjà Commencé?, and Gil J. Wolman’s L’Anticoncept. Surrealist and Lettrist film also
influenced a different type of experimental film that developed in parallel, often using found
footage and nonlinear montage: for instance, with French cinepoésie, or Italian cinepoesia,
such as Gruppo ’70’s Volerà nel 70 (1965).
184 ELECTRONIC LITERATURE AS DIGITAL HUMANITIES

The montage and multichannel-like simultaneous techniques impress, but

more so do the visionary kinetic effects that ignite the sense of information
overload and vertigo that are now commonplace in the media-polluted city,
as well as in the internet. Kriwet addresses the infant television network by
alternating the textual noise of the cityscape, radio and newspapers with his
own newspaper collages and circular poems. The alternation of disparate
images and text create a tension between legibility and readability, in such
a way to destabilize perception modes (Benthien, Lau, and Marxsen 2019).
The radio cut-ups are also precious: “Save now, buy later!” or “The New
York Times: You don’t have to read it all, but it’s nice to know it’s all there.”
Gerhard Rühm, the Vienna Group co-founder, was another poet
who strongly emphasized the materiality of language across media. In
3 Kinematographische Texte (1969–70), Rühm creates a series of three
black and white kinetic texts. The first silent film poem contains white
shapes that progressively form the glyphs :, i, !, o, a, q, d, b, and p, while
recombining as molecules via elongations and contractions. The second
silent film shows dislocations of gehe, gehen gegen, geben ruhen, eben,
benen, rufen, enge, ende, dehnen, neben, nahen, gab and, at the end, the
verb gehen (“go, move, walk”) blinks with a fade-out. The third film,
with sound, involves an interplay of the “written” and “audible” words
du, durch, dich, ich, da, haus, hausmann, und, undundundundun, und,
undundu. Questioning the relation between signifier and signified, Rühm’s
sensual and multimodal language explores poetry aesthetics as a written,
sonic, and visual art.
Adrian, Kriwet, and Rühm were not alone. In fact, there were plenty
of artists working with text and film.11 This artistic landscape was indeed
diverse and spread across geographies. In Finland, filmmaker Eino Ruutsalo,
who collaborated with electronic musician Erkki Kurenniemi, created the
vibrant Kineettisiä Kuvia (1962)—the title reinforces the very nature of
moving images as “kinetic pictures.” In the United States, the increasing
immersion of artists in collaborative computer environments contributed
to another type of experimentation with moving image, text, and sound.
At the Bell Telephone Laboratories, Kenneth Knowlton developed the
programming languages BEFLIX and EXPLOR. He further assisted the
artistic work of Lillian Schwartz and Stanley VanDerBeek in the creation
of computer-generated films, as computers and microfilm recorders could
process and integrate various data formats.
VanDerBeek’s collaboration with Knowlton resulted in the Poemfield
series. Poemfield No. 2 (1966, Figures 2a and 2b) is a fascinating 16 mm

11
Klaus Dencker, in the monumental study Optische Poesie (2011), refers to other equally
influential schriftfilme and textfilme by Eric Andersen, Szczechura, Dieter Roth, Ernst Schmidt
Jr., or Ulrichs.
 KINETIC POETRY 185

FIGURE 2A AND 2B Stan VanDerBeek, Poemfield No. 2, 1966 (Film stills). 16

mm film, color, sound. Soundtrack by Paul Motian. Realized with Ken Knowlton.
Copyright Stan VanDerBeek Archive.
186 ELECTRONIC LITERATURE AS DIGITAL HUMANITIES

“study in computer graphics” produced with an IBM 7094 and BEFLIX.

The film makes use of vibrant magenta and strong colors, which are woven
in a textile-like dot matrix with jazz music and blinking text. This kinetic
artwork impresses psychedelic and synesthetic feelings on the viewer’s retina
and ear with its vivid color transitions and Paul Motian’s soundtrack.
Due to their multimodality, Poemfield and Paul Sharits’s Word-Movie
(Fluxfilm #29) (1966)—a fifty-word fast pace letter replacement in
16 mm—have been emphasized as examples that complicate the boundaries
between experimental film, computer-generated animation, visual arts, and
electronic literature (Gerrits 2014; Wingate 2016). It is in this prism that
Wingate further refers to John Whitney’s Permutations (1966–8), which
was developed with an IBM research grant and computer coding by Jack
Citron. Like many early animators, John and James Whitney created their
own animation tools. John Whitney also assembled a real-time studio with
a mechanical analog computer that produced Catalog (1961).
Arthur Layzer’s Morning Elevator (1971), a kinetic film poem
programmed in FORTRAN, further signals the entanglement of film poetry
with programming languages already being used as creative platforms.
Other electronic technologies were also being completely repurposed via
artistic implementations. If we consider the kinetic text installations made
with LEDs by Kriwet or Jenny Holzer, we have yet another avenue of
exploration within media and moving text.

Videopoetry
Videopoetry is a form of kinetic poetry that directly derived from experimental
film and film poetry as being time-based. However, its creation and recording
relied on aspects specific to the medium of analog video. It was neither
cinema nor television, even if it related to both in a critical way with regard
to the use of text, the construction and representation of time, and memory.
It employed not celluloid film, but magnetic videotape (VT), and it used
electronic tools such as computational generators, synthesizers, and editors.
Inasmuch as in film poetry, the possibility of animating letters, words, signs,
and images became an exciting perspective for poets such as Melo e Castro
(2007: 176), who had the chance not just to suggest movement in time and
space, but rather to let letters and signs “gain actual movement of their own
[and] at last be free, creating their own space.”
Melo e Castro’s videopoem Roda Lume (1968) draws on the poet’s
earlier experiments in film poetry, such as Lírica do Objecto (1958), a
self-reflexive black and white 8 mm film. Roda Lume is also displayed in
black and white, but it was already developed in the video studio of RTP.
After being broadcast in a 1969 literary program, the Portuguese public
 KINETIC POETRY 187

broadcasting company—which at the time was under fascist ruling—

deplorably destroyed the recorded reel. Following the 1974 Carnation
Revolution, Melo e Castro re-enacted the piece in U-matic format as Roda
Lume Fogo (1986), with a new soundtrack, given that he had preserved the
original storyboard. Shapes, signs, syllables, and vowels, combined with a
sound poem, construct multiple semiotic dimensions that stress the power
of art to unlock alternative worlds as paths to freedom. Its multimodality,
and the juxtaposition of sound, moving image, and kinetic text create a
particular reading experience, closer to Spatola’s notion of “total poetry,” in
that temporal, spatial and mnemonic dimensions are activated and evoked
in complex ways. As Kac (2004: 332) notes:

O ponto central da criação videopoética é o tempo e suas múltiplas formas

de manipulação, como a retenção da memória, a duração, a permanência
breve, o corte abrupto, a compressão, a aceleração, a interrupção,
a passagem lenta, e muitas outras formas que, conjugadas às cores
sintéticas, ao som electrônico, aos osciladores e a outros equipamentos,
estabelecem novos parâmetros para a arte poética.12

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, many artists engaged with the medium
of video and its electronic tools to foster a dialog with other genres. Peter
Weibel’s multiple “videospecific poems” from 1973 to 1975 (qtd. in Dencker
2011: 145), such as Augentexte (1975), or Tom Konyves’s Sympathies of War
(1978) show how video poetry could depart from video art, concrete poetry,
or documentary film traditions. Poets collaborated as well with national
broadcasting stations and dedicated TV art hubs to produce strikingly
singular videopoems. While working at several Italian RAI studios, Gianni
Toti forged the notion of “poetronica” in often feature-length improv videos
such as Per Una Videopoesia (1980). Toti’s sociopolitical works throughout
the 1980s and 1990s were technically activated by synthesized kinetic
lettering superimposed on an amalgam of video art, virtual worlds, and
popular TV aesthetics. At the Experimental Television Center in New York,
Richard Kostelanetz compiled several series of videofiction and videopoetry
that explore typologies of word movement and letter replacement, as well
as the electronic effects made possible by the video-editing studio and the
Amiga 500 computational lettering.13 Kostelanetz’s short videos constitute

12
“The central point of videopoetic creation is time and its multiple forms of manipulation,
such as memory retention, duration, brief permanence, abrupt cutting, compression,
acceleration, interruption, slow passage, and many other forms that combined with synthetic
colors, electronic sound, oscillators and other equipment set new parameters for poetic art”
(free translation mine).
13
The series Video Poems (1985–9), Partitions (1986), Kinetic Writings (1988), and Videostrings
(1989).
188 ELECTRONIC LITERATURE AS DIGITAL HUMANITIES

a visual encyclopedia of kinetic forms, frequently via wordplay, which

parodies capitalism, bureaucracy, and sexuality.
Videopoetry is a form that has greatly evolved with digital video and
still captivates contemporary poets, who do not need professional studios
to work with electronic editing tools anymore. With the migration of video
into digital platforms and the higher portability of cameras and editing
hardware, the very conception and presentation modes have suffered a
stylistic and aesthetic transformation tied to the role of video processing
and editing software as creative processes.

Holopoetry
While nondocumentary videopoetry and digital poetry might render 3D
spaces as 3D objects in a 2D screen, holopoetry creates a clear rupture in
visual perception, as it introduces third and fourth dimensions in letters
and shapes. In the late 1970s and 1980s, Richard Kostelanetz and Eduardo
Kac combined visual poetry and holographic technology, thus expanding
the realm of experimental poetics.14 Kostelanetz’s On Holography (1978)—
a stereo 360-degree multiplex holographic film poem—is a spinning
cylindrical sculpture that does not use laser, but rather film, by animating
a self-reflexive text, frame by frame, that can be horizontally and vertically
read (Kostelanetz 2017).
Kac went on to deeply explore the medium with Holo/Olho (1983),
the first in a series of holopoems that engage with light as a medium,
tridimensionality, and two important characteristics of holography: the
possibility for the viewer-reader to see multiple volumes in the same spatial
point, and the fact that, in a hologram, the part contains the whole and
the whole contains the part. As such, Holo/Olho is physically, semantically,
and syntactically structured with that purpose, whereas the “olho” (eye) is
contained within the “hol(o)-” (hólos, the whole) and vice-versa, thus creating
both a material and content synecdoche. In Kac’s (2004: 287) words, the
“holokinetics” and “lumisigns” arising from the poems establish a peculiar
relation between verbal and visual signs, as well as re-envisioning kinetic
forms in space.15 In addition, Wordsl (1986a) is created in a curved space,
using integral holography, while Chaos (1986b) and Quando? (1987–8) are
computer-generated.
Holopoetry takes advantage of vertical and horizontal parallax, and the
dematerialization of words in space. Kac’s poems impress due to the interplay

For further information on holography and poetry, see Funkhouser (2007: 265–70).
14

Holopoems Abracadabra (1984–5), Zyx (1985a), and Oco (1985b).

15
 KINETIC POETRY 189

between “virtual” (hologram) and “real image” (in front of the hologram),
and the gradation of colors produced by the visible light spectrum. They
experiment with discontinued space and the movement of letters in order to
produce a new reading experience. The very movement of the viewer around
the hologram transforms the text, thus implying a physical and embodied
reading process. Due to its technical apparatus, the hologram does not allow
for an extensive output of words. Language needs then to be worked in a
compressed manner akin to concrete and visual poetry.

Digital Poetry
As we move from one medium to another, again and again we see two
concurrent streams: the reimplementation of old notions in new media,
but also an emphasis on how old and new differ from each other—either
to specify its singularities or to claim new territory. Moreover, older and
newer media tend to coexist during transition periods and that produces
interesting feedback loops of artistic practice. As Philippe Bootz (2006) has
stressed, digital poetry is not videopoetry. Kinetic poetry specifically written
with the computer—and meant to be read and presented via a computer—
is comprised of textual, visual, and aural elements. Yet it strictly depends
on its underlying code to run and function. In this sense, kinetic digital
poetry is algorithmically programmed animation. Furthermore, it often
requires interaction or participation from the reader-user, while scheduled
events can be determined by random and generative algorithms. The earliest
works of kinetic digital poetry sprang from the usability offered by personal
computers, though we find static poems being composed with institutional
mainframe computers at least since the 1950s in Europe. In the context of
Latin America, artists like Eduardo Darino and Erthos Albino de Souza, who
worked in the oil industry, had access to mainframes. By 1965–6, the young
film animator Eduardo Darino combined GE mainframes, BASIC, teletype
printer, and a recording camera to create Correcaminos, “an animated
visual poem” (Darino 2020; Kozak 2020). Thus, this shows how complex
it was for an artist to animate an encoded sequence and how important
it was for computational kineticism the digital personal computer and the
popularization of simpler programming languages.
The bulk of early kinetic digital poems occurs during the 1980s. It is
relevant to understand that most of the following poets were affiliated
with the experimental movements of the 1960s. In 1981, Silvestre Pestana
coded the first two poems of the Computer Poetry suite in BASIC, for a
Sinclair ZX81, with white words waving on black background. The final
poem (1983) was programmed in a Sinclair ZX Spectrum with more
features and symbolic dimensions: color and circular movement suggested
190 ELECTRONIC LITERATURE AS DIGITAL HUMANITIES

tridimensionality, and the word-shape dor (pain) replaced all the potential of
the new people, Pestana’s view of social reform and political freedom. Using
the statement PAPER and BORDER for blue background and frame, and
INK for white, yellow, green, and red squares and font, the artist represents
the Portuguese and EEC flags in a critical stance to the aftermath of the
Carnation Revolution and the prospect of joining the EEC.
Marco Fraticelli’s Déjà Vu: Poetry for the Computer Screen (1983)
compiles previous hand-written haikai as visual poems to be read on-screen,
while Jacques Donguy and Guillaume Loizillon’s Poème Ordinateur (1983)
outputs an “endless stream of consciousness” (Donguy 2007: 331). Like
Pestana, bpNichol’s First Screening: Computer Poems (1983–4) draws
from previous work with concrete poetry and novel graphic exploration of
words in motion. The series of twelve poems written in AppleSoft BASIC
for an Apple IIe operates with varied kinetic behavior: blinking, vertical
and horizontal dislocation, letter replacement, and TV script-like scrolling
transitions. Still, the greatest surprise is the fact that bpNichol annotated
the source code and inserted an “Easter egg” in the last poem—that is, it
contains material that is hiding in the source code. The most interesting
codework appears between lines 3900 and 3935. In line 3900, the self-
reflexive creative comment announces “REM ARK,” whereas in line 3910 it
reads: “REM AIN.” (REM introduces a comment in BASIC.)
Kinetic digital poetry at this point was in many ways a re-enactment of
the experimental practices of the 1960s, when poets were working in the
realm of concrete poetry. bpNichol writes about “filmic effects that I hadn’t
the patience or skill to animate at that time” (qtd. in Huth 2008: n.p.). As
Geof Huth asserts, “Earlier kinetic digital poetry tended to use the computer
to illustrate the poems; Nichol used it to animate them, to make them live.”
This first wave can be further exemplified by Tibor Papp’s Les Très Riches
Heures de l’Ordinateur n° 1 (1985), a live performance at the Polyphonix
9 festival in Paris, in which Papp, coding with an Amstrad, projected the
“visual dynamic poem” onto ten screens (Donguy 2007: 314; Bootz 2014:
11). It is relevant that all these works contain the word “computer” in their
titles, attesting the need to disclaim the specificity and novelty of creating
poems with, and for the computer medium, but also extending the notion
that all these authors perceived the computer program as a poem in itself, or
as a fundamental part of the process.
The second half of the 1980s sees an intensification of authoring programs
and collective gatherings.16 In terms of publishing and distribution, the
French review alire is launched as the first electronic journal dedicated to
digital poetry. The journal, initially stored and distributed in floppy disks,

João Coelho’s Universo (1985), Paul Zelevansky’s SWALLOWS (1985–6), and Huth’s
16

Endemic Battle Collage (1986–7) further explore poetry’s kineticism in BASIC.

 KINETIC POETRY 191

was published by the L.A.I.R.E. collective and included poèmes animés.17

Jean-Marie Dutey’s Le Mange-Texte (1989 [1986]) and Bootz’s Amour
(1989) demonstrate the DOS-based pixelated and flat aesthetics of the
1980s, which was rather different from the 3D virtual textual modeling
investigated by artists like Jeffrey Shaw.
Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, very fast developments in technology
greatly contributed for diversifying the aesthetic approaches, which are
difficult to isolate in clusters. Yet the popularization of the Graphical User
Interface and the World Wide Web network gave rise to ubiquitous models
of presentation and dissemination that artists sought to transgress. During
this period, Caterina Davinio created net poetry that addressed the noise and
glitch of communication networks, while earlier experimental poets started
reimplementing their concrete poems as animations—Ana María Uribe’s
Tipoemas y Anipoemas (1997) being a case in point. HTML facilitated a
poetics of links, which is explored by Annie Abrahams in the multilingual
and GIF-animated understanding / comprendre (1997–8), as well as DHTML
applications such as Jim Andrews’s visual poetry. But other types of time-
based and trans-linguistic poetics, like “transliteral morphing,” were being
enacted by John Cayley’s windsound (1999), developed for HyperCard, or
translation (2004).
Animation software such as Flash, Director, and After Effects dictated
a mainstream shift in vocabulary from kinetic to animation techniques.
Unlike before, the end user was offered a software interface that did not
involve coding and had a practical cinematic timeline. Flash became the
2000s most popular animation suite, being intensely used not only in
industry and commercials but also by visual artists and writers with not-for-
profit goals. The platform enabled works such as Brian Kim Stefans’s The
Dreamlife of Letters (2000), a self-referential and vivid catalog of moving
letters and words; Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries’ prolific narrative
puns with black and white graphics; David Jhave Johnston’s Sooth (2005),
an interactive and generative superimposition of text on video; or Stephanie
Strickland, Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo, and Paul Ryan’s slippingglimpse
(2007), an artwork that departs from the rhythm and patterns of waves
(chreods) to display the font’s “text fields” according to the waterscape’s
encoded motion-capture. Collaborative endeavors also show how Flash
was fit for grand-scale projects, such as David Clark’s 88 Constellations
for Wittgenstein (2009). Authoring platforms became influential in terms of
fostering novel ways of integrating media formats with interactive functions,
but they also created homogenization. This meant that authors felt a need to
understand its inner workings in order to expand the platform’s possibilities

Founded by Bootz, Frédéric Develay, Jean-Marie Dutey, Claude Maillard, and Papp in 1988.
17

The early issues of the journal published these authors, as well as Jean-Pierre Balpe, Christophe
Petchanatz, Donguy, and Philippe Castellin.
192 ELECTRONIC LITERATURE AS DIGITAL HUMANITIES

or to transgress them. Poets and artist-programmers such as Bootz, Eugenio

Tisselli, and Jörg Piringer went as far as developing their own software
for live audiovisual performances. Piringer’s soundpoems (2002–8) and
subsequent pieces clearly rework in digital kinetic systems the traditions of
typographic, sound and concrete poetry, especially those by Rühm, Hansjörg
Mayer, and others working with the alphabet’s units.
Meanwhile, the dissemination of dynamic browser-based scripting
languages, such as JavaScript, and open-source software for the arts, such
as Processing, generated richer possibilities for animation, social coding,
and the collaborative development of interfaces. Networked collaborations
between writers and programmers, such as those initiated by María Mencía
and Zuzana Husárová, have resulted in a synergy of skills. The two decades
of the twenty-first century show a striking variety of artworks and styles that
continue to redefine poetic interface, space, flow, and kineticism. Two works
that explore these features, with extremely fast textual movement, are Ian
Hatcher’s ⌰ (Total Runout) (2015) and Montfort’s “Alphabet Expanding”
(2011)—to run the Perl program copy this single line into your terminal and
press enter:

perl-e ‘{print$,=$”x($.+=.01),a..z;redo}’

Finally, María Mencía’s El Winnipeg: El Poema que Cruzó el Atlántico

(2017, Figure 3) emphasizes the importance of collective authoring and
participation. This collaborative work repurposes the JavaScript library
[Link] with programming by Alexandre Dupuis-Belin, while expanding
the application of motion to documentary poetry. The artwork departs from
testimonies of the 1939 Winnipeg boat’s passengers—who were Spanish
Civil War refugees helped to exile by Pablo Neruda—while it allows users
to contribute with new stories and create poems out of the letters of these
fragments in a zoomable planispheric ocean.

Future Movement
Kinetic poetry emerges with the historical avant-garde and it is clearly
recycled with the experimental arts. The experimental poets and artists
of the 1960s were galvanized by a multitude of new tendencies whose
practices involved the critique of media and early computational systems.
Moreover, these artists updated each other with letters and magazines,
while exchanging works for publication and showcase. This network of
contacts and collaboration, shaped at a global scale, pre-dates today’s
emailing lists and digital forums.
Kinetic poetry gained from one of the essential legacies of experimental
poetics—its interdisciplinarity—by creating disruption in commonly
 KINETIC POETRY 193

FIGURE 3 María Mencía, El Winnipeg: El Poema que Cruzó el Atlántico, 2017

(Screenshot). JavaScript, jQuery, HTML. Programming by Alexandre Dupuis-Belin.
[Link]/. Courtesy of the artist.

accepted boundaries of what constitutes literature, cinema, music, live and

(as in “live arts”) visual arts. What is transversal to all forms of kinetic
poetry is a fascination with motion, visuality, temporal modification, and
how the animation of language can impact the aesthetic experience. What
unfolded from the artistic experimentation with motorized mechanical
sculpture, film, video, and digital media influenced current forms of site-
specific mixed-media installations. In recognizing its cross-artistic form and
its techno-cultural context, this narrative on how kinetic poetry has evolved
and branched out in the twentieth century becomes necessarily broader and
richer: not only in relation to its media but also to its artistic antecedents
and other forms of kinetic writing. This transmedia approach does not
locate, nor equate kinetic poetry with the beginning of the World Wide
Web and animation software packages. This is why kinetic poetry is not a
computational media-specific form, but rather a transmedia form. In each
period, poets have, and will continue to engage with media while reacting
to artistic and sociopolitical contexts, whereas embodying continuation or
rupture, dialog, or radical creation.
If this broader perspective can be expanded and thoroughly researched, it
is important to delineate future ways to address the relation between poetry
and motion techniques. Along with the specific impact of each medium in
the types of kinetic works they make possible, there is uncharted research
in trying to understand how authors transgress the way each medium is
supposed to be used, or what types of text behavior and meaning-making
are enacted through motion. Perhaps then we can reach a satisfactory
194 ELECTRONIC LITERATURE AS DIGITAL HUMANITIES

grammar or taxonomy of movement. Though practitioners and scholars in

digital literature have sketched out types, it is important to understand how
dialoging with film and social semiotics, animation and kinetic typography,
and with non-Western and non-Roman typography may open more complex
modes of moving forward.18

References and Further Reading

Abrahams, Annie (1997–8), Understanding / comprendre, accessed October 8,
2015, [Link]/beinghuman/converfr/[Link].
Adrian, Marc (1958), WO-VOR-DA-BEI, 35/16 mm film, 1'10", b/w, sound.
Adrian, Marc (1959–60), Schriftfilm, 35/16 mm film, 5'28", b/w, silent.
Adrian, Marc (1963), Random, 35 mm film, 4'45", b/w, sound.
Adrian, Marc (1964a), Text I, 35 mm film, 2'34", b/w, sound.
Adrian, Marc (1964b), Text II, 35 mm film, 3'40", b/w, sound.
Apollinaire, Guillaume (1918), Calligrammes: Poèmes de la Paix et de la Guerre
(1913–1916), Paris: Mercure de France.
Aragaki, Sayako (2007), Agam: Beyond the Visible, Jerusalem: Gefen.
Bäckström, Per (2012), “Words as Things: Concrete Poetry in Scandinavia,” in
Harri Veivo (ed.), Transferts, Appropriations et Fonctions de l’Avant-Garde
dans l’Europe Intermédiaire et du Nord, 1909–1989, 1–16, Paris: L’Harmattan.
Balla, Giacomo, Remo Chiti, Bruno Corra, Arnaldo Ginna, F. T. Marinetti, and
Emilio Settimelli (2009), “The Futurist Cinema [Sep. 11, 1916],” in Lawrence
Rainey, Christine Poggi, and Laura Wittman (eds.), Futurism: An Anthology,
229–33, New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
Bann, Stephen (1966a), “Kinetic Art and Poetry,” Image (winter/spring): 4–9.
Bann, Stephen (1966b), “Unity and Diversity in Kinetic Art,” in Stephen Bann, Reg
Gadney, Frank Popper, and Philip Steadman (eds.), Four Essays on Kinetic Art,
49–67, London: Motion Books.
Bann, Stephen (ed.) (1967), Concrete Poetry: An International Anthology, London:
London Magazine Editions.
Bann, Stephen (ed.) (1974), The Tradition of Constructivism, New York, NY: The
Viking Press.
Bann, Stephen (2020), “Pierre Garnier Poster Poem and Kinetic Poetry,” email to
Álvaro Seiça (February 12).
Bann, Stephen, and Gustavo Grandal Montero (2015), “From Cambridge to
Brighton: Concrete Poetry in Britain. An Interview with Stephen Bann,” in Sarah
Bodman (ed.), Artist’s Book Yearbook 2016–2017, 70–93, Bristol: Impact Press.

In digital literature, see Ikonen 2003, Bootz 2006, Funkhouser 2007, Saemmer 2010, Piringer
18

2015, and Johnston 2016. In film and social semiotics, see Kress 2009, Leão 2013, van Leeuwen
and Djonov 2015. In animation and kinetic typography, see Brownie 2015. In non-Western and
non-Roman typography, see Khajavi 2019.
 KINETIC POETRY 195

Barok, Dušan (2018), “Women in Concrete Poetry,” Monoskop (December 14),

accessed January 21, 2020, [Link]/Women_in_concrete_poetry.
Beaulieu, Derek (2013), “Concrete Poetry,” Flaunt (April 1), accessed October 25,
2015, [Link]/content/art/concrete-poetry.
Beaulieu, Derek (2014), Transcend Transcribe Transfigure Transform Transgress,
Ottawa: above/ground press.
Belloli, Carlo (1943), Parole per la Guerra, Milan: Edizioni di Futuristi in Armi.
Belloli, Carlo (1944), Testi-Poemi Murali, Milan: Edizioni Erre.
Belloli, Carlo (1948), Tavole Visuali, Rome: Edizioni di Gala.
Bense, Max, and Elisabeth Walther (eds.) (1965), Rot 21: Konkrete Poesie
International, Stuttgart: Hansjörg Mayer.
Benthien, Claudia, Jordis Lau, and Maraike M. Marxsen (2019), The Literariness
of Media Art, New York, NY: Routledge, doi:10.25592/literariness.
Bootz, Philippe (1989), Amour. alire 1, 3.5 floppy disk.
Bootz, Philippe (2006), “Les Basiques: La Littérature Numérique,” Leonardo/
OLATS, accessed October 8, 2015, [Link]/livresetudes/basiques/
litteraturenumerique/12_basiquesLN.php.
Bootz, Philippe (2014), “Animated Poetry,” in Marie-Laure Ryan, Lori Emerson,
and Benjamin J. Robertson (eds.), The Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media,
11–13, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
bpNichol (1984), First Screening: Computer Poems, Toronto: Underwhich Editions;
Stephanie Boluk, Leonardo Flores, Jacob Garbe, and Anastasia Salter (eds.)
(2016), Electronic Literature Collection, Vol. 3, Cambridge: ELO, accessed
December 29, 2016, [Link]/3/[Link]?work=first-
screening.
Brownie, Barbara (2015), Transforming Type: New Directions in Kinetic
Typography, London: Bloomsbury.
“Catalogue of the First International Exhibition of Concrete, Phonetic and Kinetic
Poetry,” Granta, supplement 1964, 69 (1240): i–iv.
Cayley, John (1999), Windsound; Katherine N. Hayles, Nick Montfort, Scott
Rettberg, and Stephanie Strickland (eds.) (2006), Electronic Literature
Collection, Vol. 1, College Park: ELO, accessed October 8, 2015. collection.
[Link]/1/works/cayley__windsound/[Link].
Cayley, John (2004), Translation; Katherine N. Hayles, Nick Montfort, Scott
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