The beginnings of Signalism1
are connected with the year 1959 and with the
attempts to introduce into our poetry, where
up to that time the principles of Neoromantism
and late Syimbolism reigned, some new tones
adequate to electronic and technological civilisation.
Those beginnings were connected with the language
and the attempts to revolutionise the poetry
by introducing some fresh, still literary unworn
language amalgams of the exact sciences: physics,
biology, chemistry, astrophysics and mathematics.
Therefore the original name of these movements
was - Scientism.
Already in the next year the scientistic poetry
steps out from the language and gives the first
visual fruits inspired by Apollinair's calligrams.
In the years 1962 and 1963 it insists ever more
on the exact. Science is defined as a means
of poetry and it is pointed to "how artificial
and absurd was separating poetry from science".
Einstein's theory of relativity is proclaimed
to be the greatest poem of our age, sung to
the glory of man, and the basic mathematical
formula of that theory E=mc2 is marked as a
supreme metaphor. Structural analogies between
poetry and the above mentioned branches of exact
sciences are being found, thereat a sign of
equity is being put between the words of a poem
and electrons in a physical sense, and a protoplasm
in biological and planets in an astrophysical
sense. A poem is equalled to an atom, cell and
Solar system. To the rhythm of a song correspond
the forces which hold the electrons, they being
life and gravitation. Mathematical and other
formulas are being introduced into poetry and
a geometrical-algebraic analysis of the poetry,
life and death as of basic and given magnitudes
is done. A poem, thus, becomes a magic formula
of life and Universe and its meanings at this
moment exceed far the narrow literary frames.
It wants to return finally the lost unity with
science, the unity of singing and thinking of
antiquity and of the great poems of Empedocles,
Hesiod and Lucretius. It strives for a comprehensive
picture of the world in whose basis it will
be itself as an analogue to an atom, life and
Universe.
That original course of Signalism (under the
name Scientism) lasts lonely and in an ocean
of revived Symbolism and Traditionalism of those
years, almost unnoticedly in our literature.
The years 1968 and 1969 are crucial for Signalism.
MANIFESTO OF POETICAL SCIENCE was published
("Polja" no 117-118, 1968) which summarises
in itself all experiences of the previous period.
In the same year the text MANIFEST OF SIGNALISM
(REGULAE POESIS) was written, and in the next
one it was published, giving a basis for forming
a militant avant-garde movement aiming to reach
and revolutionise all branches of art (especially
literature and fine arts), having opened new
processes in culture by radical experiments
in a permanent creative revolution influenced
especially by the new technological civilisation.
Those premises were elaborated even more in
detail and made more precise in the third manifesto
SIGNALISM ("Delo", no. 3, 1970), where
a first broader definition of Signalism, as
well as a detailed classification of new poetical
forms are given.
Signalism widens its basis which thus far relied
only upon several already mentioned branches
of exact sciences and includes: cybernetics,
theory of information, phenomenology, theory
of games, structural linguistic etc. While in
the first phases evident is an endeavour to
introduce particular parts of scientific languages
into poetry, the second is characterised by
breaking, by means of certain mathematical models
taken from statistics, theory of games, combinatorics
and cybernetic methods (machines), the clichés
of the colloquial and current poetical languages
and by opening new, still unforeseeable possibilities
of experimenting in the verbal, visual and phonic.
Language becomes in a true sense of the word
a material used by a poet who sometimes in a
programmed poetical fervour uses it to produce
his works. This phases is also characterised
by an abrupt development of visual poetry, which
thus far existed only rudimentary in the movement.
In those years Signalism goes out finally from
anonymity imposed on it by our literary situation.
Cultural public began to get interested in the
movement. Signalist groups were being formed,
and there were ever more young people: poets,
painters, designers, art historians who created
applying Signalist ideas in revolutionising
the art.Signalists got linked with the avant-garde
artists from all over the world and participated
in numerous exhibitions of visual and concrete
poetry. They published in magazines, and were
represented in international anthologies.
In the year 1970 an international review SIGNAL
was started as a newspaper of the movement.
The journal already in the first issue published
a choice of foreign concrete and visual poets
and Yugoslavian signalists. The program of the
journal was based on an active struggle for
an affirmation of new ideas in literature and
art. The appearance of SIGNAL was greeted in
the world as a doubtless contribution to avant-garde
movements2.
The first Signalist anthology appeared in 1971.
in edition of Hungarian magazine "Uj Symposion"
of Novi Sad in Hungarian and Serbian languages,
and presents works, visual poems, by twenty
authors.
Already in this anthology visible are efforts,
and also achieved results, in one of the branches
of Signalism, in Signalist visual poetry. The
most of the authors found themselves in a new
art and literary discipline and operated very
self-confidently with its material elements,
letter, graphic sign and space, as with one
of constituent parts.Visual poetry destroys
language and traditionalist understanding of
literature and art. It goes, it could be said,
from a meaning to a sign, destroying the semantic
fortresses of script and Gutenbergian civilisation.
The linear syntactic and grammatical chains
of texts are shattered, "textual surfaces"
are being created, where their multidimensionality
is expressed. Thus sign has been discovered
as a basic model not only of new poetry, but
also of the entire civilisation it can account
with. Semiotics has replaced semantics. Semiotic
analysis has became a key for solving specific
poetical messages.
Presenting that choice of our poets, Chilean
avant-garde poet Guillermo Deisler says: "An
absolute distance is, in main features, assessed
in relation to the possible problems of our
society, as are war, sex, terrible contradictions
between the developed and undeveloped, between
mass consumption and manipulations with masses.
Almost with the most of the artists there is
a deep striving for getting out from the system
of a linear, exclusively literary communication,
for a realisation of advantages of a more open
communication. That preoccupation is more evident
in a system of signs as of media for destruction
of idioms where the established is being ascertained.
A great usage of letter as of a visual element,
not of an audible one is present (Andric, Jevtic,
Djordjevic, Paripovic, Jankovic, Jovanovic,
Stojiljkovic, Matkovic), nor of a literary one,
although we meet it also offering sounds, as
if in concrete poetry (Todorovic, Roshulj).
Calligram poems (Reshin, Todorovic), poems in
a process (Magyar, Vukanovic, Matkovic, Todorovic,
Poznanovic) always move, more than anything
else and in a very intelligent, intellectual
line, an alternative of poetical language...
"That alternative of Yugoslav poets",
this author concludes, "would show itself
to be, definitely, an intelligent chance of
escape from the linear manipulations of writing
and a chance of securing different possibilities,
in a best case as a defender of reading for
today's and future readers."During the
following years Signalism developed and achieved
a respectful affirmation, but exclusively on
an international level3. Domestic cultural public
is still sceptical, and in part resists strongly
and attack severely all marked as a Symbolism.
In the movement itself, a kind of differentiation
takes place. Some artists are more and more
approaching land art and conceptual art. That
differentiation, however, is, more or less,
of a formal nature, for those artists too in
fact just elaborate in their further engagement
some of the basic premises of Signalism. For
some of them (Zoran Popovic, Marina Abramovic)
is characteristic that not before this phases
they insist on technological and exact moments
in their actions, that having not been the case
in their original poetical-visual phases.
One of very interesting works in the frames
of Signalism was realised by Vlada Stojiljkovic.
Using the elements of collage, design, graphic
and drawing ingeniously, he, freed from taboos
and conventions, creates a quite new and exciting
sign script. In his text Signalism as an Avant-garde
Movement (1971) Stojiljkovic emphasises that
a Signalist "does not write about certain
theme but presents it, or shows its essence
by means of different arrangements of letters
and symbols. A purpose of such a work is first
of all that the author break the frames imposed
on him by poetical, semantic, syntactic and
even grammatical rules, and use a non-verbal
material to be able to express himself totally.
The syntax of Stojiljkovic's script, especially
in the visual poems: Horoscope; A Sketch for
a Mechanical Bird; Transplantation I, II and
in the anthology work Upper case/Lower case
has been raised to a metalinguistic level. Its
elements are in a semiological field. His basic
communication channels and bearers of aesthetic
messages are sign and image with a readible
and concrete result.
For the poetry of Zharko Roshulj a visual understanding
is also very important, since in certain moments
in a poem the fragile connection with the verbal
is completely broken and an absolute domination
of the sign is established. Its visual syntax,
by which the poet determines the courses of
his thoughts and associations in the space -
that determining becoming also a part of an
all-including and unrestrained typosignalist
plays with signs, letters, parts of words and
words - requires a synthetical-ideographic understanding
instead of the analytical-discursive one.
In his first signalist poems Zharko Roshulj
was very close to some realisations of the baroque
and manirist European and Serbian poetry of
XVIII and XIX century (carmina figurata, the
poems in the form of things and animals, especially:
peacock, horse, bird and others). Here this
poet found inspirative roots obviously in graphic
experiments of one, in our literature still
neglected and insufficiently examined current
of Serbian baroque poets: Orfelin, Trojichanin
and Venclovic.
In the next phases Roshulj ever more accepts
modern researching experiences, those of Brasilian
school of concrete poetry as well as, to a most
extent, those specific experiences and features
of signalist poetry that enabled Signalism that,
as a special creative movement, which developed
in Yugoslavia in somewhat different theoretical
premises, takes a high and significant place
in the world's avant-garde movements.The appearance
of the "White Book by Milivoje Pavlovic,
a young poet, signalist researcher and publicist,
rose a doubtless attention of our cultural public.
Published in just 50 copies, as a signalist
edition, with the volume of 300 pages of the
finest print paper, in which not a word was
printed (except brief prefaces and conclusions,
that book provoked different and often very
emotional reactions of those who had a chance
to see and "read" it.
Imagined in the beginning as a provocative
gest and an effort to indicate the critical
condition of book and literary critics in our
country, this book-sign, a play of white rectangulars
of an open world, exceeded son its original
and culturological intents and frames. By it,
to use Macluanian vocabulary, the doors to abolition
of linearity and consecutivity of human consciousness
and of finding a non-linear logic has been opened
even more, as freely as non-Euclidian geometry
had been built. "For consciousness is not
a verbal process, and the phonetical literacy
in the previous development of human culture
was giving an exclusive advantage to "a
chain of inferring as to a mark of logic and
reason."
Attributing to the invisible and mute sounds
the dark crevice between being and language,
"White Book" by Milivoje Pavlovic
records at the same time its disbelief in communicativeness
of the closed language systems of the Gutenbergian
galaxy at its close. It is a book-frontierstone
there, on the border of two civilisations, that
of script and that of image. Instead of the
removed language there is a language of the
very being of book, an explosion of whiteness,
of the space not burdened with script, a script
of the immediate and visible, of the nonabstract
world of facts and things.The challenge is in
its mute readability. The irony is in an interpretation
of a rewritten world. For it is at the same
time a book-world that multiplies its ironical
entity in thousands opened eyes.
Where do the metaphysic horror and reality
of the historical and mythical cease? Where
do the irony and play of the ludic man of the
technological era begin?
The "White Book" vanishes as a product
composed of paper and of lead impressions, and
returns to us as a complete art form, a work
whose only outside, surface veil is woven from
silence. Its experience is an experience of
a vanishing script. Its pages ere unrepeatible
like still unwritten pages of Universe. There,
where is not a trace of script and writing,
where we are being defeated but an apparently
innocent cleanness of the intact paper, an exciting
juncture of signs and meanings is being born
on the screen of a new universe.
The researches by Bogdanka Poznanovic move
in a wide spectre, from those, for me, poetical-visual
in her booklet "Stellata", up to the
land art and conceptual interventions ("Feedback
Mailbox", "Breath-breathing"
and others). In the action "Cubes-Rivers"
signs and words are still visible and still
have an important role. In the basis of the
"Feedback Mailbox" project is a communication,
actually an informing (the mode is left to the
choice of participants) about one perhaps not
crucial, but also mot so unimportant part (means)
of an informative system). Very important is
also the work "Computortapebody" where,
using a computer tape, diaprojector as a special
medium and the bodies of the participants in
the action with visible scenic effects an unique
informative-sensible and gestual-poetical total
has been realised.
Zoran Popovic began his researching work on
the Signalist plane with typewriter poems in
1969. During 1971 in Zagreb he, working on one
short film, draws out a series of suggestive
literal-visual structures with a project of
so-called "Signalist Clock". In the
following years, the work of that author, especially
in the "Axioms" project, penetrates
into the realms of the spatial, corporal (Body
art) and conceptual.
Marina Abramovic likewise begins with Signalist
visual poetry (Smoke and A from 1970), and with
a series of projected letters Entering a Square,
Going out from a Square, B Projection and others).
Especially important are her Sound Ambients
where she tries to realise a synthesis of the
spatial-visual and sonoric, and recently also
of the action of gestual poetry.
In the work of Nesha Paripovic there were not
spectacular slew’s and breaks as with previous
artists. From the very beginnings he investigates,
calmly and thoroughly, the sign and functions
of the sign in its most diverse forms.
The first researches of Slavko Matkovic are
in the domain of visual poetry. Later on, his
interests have been widening substantially.
Significant is also Matkovic's work on signalist
comics, they being also especially explained
theoretically by him.The literary critic Ostoja
Kisic has been following the signalist movement
already for years. In recent years he announces
his voluminous study on Signalism under the
title GREAT DISCUSSION. In that book (in several
hundreds of pages) especially the beginnings
of Signalism are studied, as well as the relationships
of this our avant-garde movement with Traditionalism
which had seized the Serbian culture in the
beginning of the sixties. Especially interesting
are Kisic's visual works under the title "Themes
from History of Literature" where he presents
in a humorist way particular problems, themes
and myths from our more recent and remote literary
history.
Ljubisha Jocic, a poet of older generation
(formerly a follower of the nadrealistic movement),
joins Signalism in 1975 with this book MOONLIGHT
IN TETRA-PACK, where some of the premises of
the Signalist technological poetry were almost
completely realised. Critic Aleksandar Petrov,
presenting that book, says that "Ljubisha
Jocic Writes in a language of tetra-pack".
And that is "a language of the modern consumer
society and of media of mass communications",
in a word a technological language.
Discussing Signalism in his text "The
Signs Bound to the Reality Itself" ("Politika",
7 August 1975) Jocic starts from the fact that
"Signalism, as well many other "isms"
already confirmed by history, has a significant
place in the development of human creation,
theory and practice".
In his opinion this our avant-garde movement
was born "In the fires of electronics and
thundery powers of atom, in a double nature
of electron (material and spiritual one), in
the curved spaces of the four-dimensional world.
Signalism explores a way for moving the human
brain, whose capability is being used just ten
per cent, to use those its uninvestigated areas,
those other ninety per cent for the movements
in those new areas foreshadowed by the technological
society."
Interesting is also the case of Spasoje Vlajic,
who started in Signalism as early as 1969 with
a still insufficiently ripe and unwhetted scientific
poetry, undertaking thereafter, as he says himself,
inspired by the discoveries from the primordial
phases of Signalism, especially those in the
book "PLANET", a studious investigation
of language from exact standpoints.
Examining the intensity of voice meaning in
our language, and in some others too, Vlaic
learned "that the relationship of a language
and a phenomenon described by it is based on
a mutual imbuing of the energy whereby that
phenomenon acts on senses and places of the
phenomenon in a mental and physical picture
of the world". In fact, Vlaic succeeded
to come to some laws, correlative equations,
on the basis of which one can determine frequency
i.e. energy of a colour (e.g. red) on the basis
of the very name of the colour. Thus, according
to him, one of the basic premises of the second
Signalism manifest REGULAE POESIS: 1.8.1 also
has been proved: "Signalist poetry will
mark a complete liberation of the language energy".
For "the energy of a designation is partly
in a functional dependence on the energy of
the state described by it. The cited facts point
to real possibilities of a more complete liberation
of the language energy."Dobrivoje Jevtic,
Milorad Grujic, Rade Obrenovic, Boda Markovic,
Zvonimir Kostic Palanski, Miroljub Kesheljevic,
Jaroslav Supek and Branislav Prelevic work intensively
on Signalist visual poetry. Young poets Slavko
M. Pavicevic and Miodrag Shuvakovic explore
the language as well as other opened and scattered
areas of Signalist art.Slobodan Pavicevic ("Silicates
of Flower" 1973) and Slobodan Vukanovic
("Star Leathers" 1975) are opened
with their books to planetary and cosmic experiences
of Signalism. Especially Slobodan Pavicevic
heads in this, who in his poems - junctions
of the exact language of physics, chemistry,
mathematics and an archaic colloquial idiom
- establishes, builds and examines fantastic,
non-earthly worlds. That is a poetry of a new
era of explorers and conquerors of the universe,
where, beside fancy and scattered imagination,
the most recent scientific and technological
cognitions and discoveries of sciences are used.
Predrag Shidjanin, Lásló Szalma and Nikola
Stojanovic are interested in conceptual searches.
The results of Signalism and Signalist ideas,
as we could see from this brief chronological
survey, are most visible in fine arts and literature.Art
and artistic act are demystified. The art has
been marked as ludism, a play of man in cosmos
under a permanent threat of an entropy avalanche,
chaos and formlessness. Metaphysically, a theological
order has been disintegrated, new multidimensional
spaces have been established: freedoms, plays,
researches. Art is a play and imagining, a human
power to exceeds his own alienation and start
on a way of "total expansion" into
cosmos, into the world.
A reality of the technological civilisation
and a special role of man in the electronical-planetary
space of existence has been accepted. Technology
has offered new means to arts; to man, to an
artist, it has offered new possibilities of
conquering, of an intuitive superstructure over
the things, the objects of his own production.
Machines are, for Signalism, means whereby man
liberates his fancy, his imagination even more.
Processes of communication will be more and
more intensive, the number of information, storehouses
of knowledge, arts, greater and greater for
advancing that achieved freedom, play, uncertainty
of research. Information will flow without a
mediator. They will not be lost in the channels
of processors and in noises of resistors. They
will be full and sudden in their radiation.
Signalist art will become universal, with a
complex, determinable but not a closed script.
It will point to an "essential thinking"
as to a necessity in a cosmos of fight and conquering.
Conquering a sense, a beauty of an organised
disorder. There where the tension at any point
of a body, text and work is huge and threatens
always to explode and throw all again to the
deadness of dehumanised entropy. It will be
a play with things, universe, one's own death.
In Signalism the most of former (traditional)
ways of expression is being abolished; changed
are languages, systems, communication means
according to the newly-marked functions of art.
The art is being desubjectivized. In parallel
with taking off the mythical and mistificatory
aureole its massmediality and spendability is
emphasised. But it does not mean also its banalization,
its sinking in the daily, its end. Its present
offering of "numberless possibilities of
realisations", its not being unique and
sublime, sacralized, "its not giving final
answers any more", its experimentation,
correcting, a continual searching for the new,
its offering a mosaic, discontinued and not
total structure and picture of the universe
and the world, does not mean that it is not
an art any more, that it is an anti-art. On
the contrary, refusing to move in the circle:
"Absolute - Transcendental - Myth; refusing
to be "consecrated", the art of Signalism
takes off a mask from the face of the mummied
traditional art and destroys its "holy"
impotence by a creative subversion and building
action. In that way the Signalist art becomes
much closer to the life. It is a part of that
life, of reality, one of its forms, much more
condensed, with clearly outlined contours, more
organised but also more agonising, reflecting
and critical than other forms; charged with
a multitude of information, it is substantially
more non-genotropic than the reality itself.
As far as experimentation is concerned, in
Signalism one has gone furthest in poetry. There
the results are also very diverse.
The first scientistic phases, as we could see,
has conditioned a synthesis of exact languages
with the language of poetry. Science is defined
as a language of the core and structure of matter
and universe; the former poetry as a language
of the relationship between a man and an outer
wrapping, shell of the universe. The new scientistic
poetry would represent a language of man, core,
structure of the universe, matter and their
mutual imbuing. The language of that poetry
is an amalgam substance where we can already
see the contours of a different structure of
the world. That is a world of the planetary
and cosmic, of the wonderful laws of a restored
life, of inexhaustible energies on the dying
stars.
Matter, energy, play are basic elements of
this poetics and of the worlds just established
by it. Covetous games of celestial bodies in
which a beginning of any birth is. Love plays
of planets attracted by universal (cosmic) law
of love, gravitation. They can not resist that
call, the spasm reinforcing in them a thirst
for conquering some new spaces. Their language
is a language of energy that is just to lead
up to the disastrous, destructive, in order
that a liberation of powerful building methaenergies
take place in that newly originated chaos.
The destructive, chaos, wandering. The language
is all now, for a word has four dimensions in
the Signalist universe. Even life can originate
from it, just as it originates from proteins.
The amalgamated, synthesised language of poetry
and science is a basic food for that universe.
But not a fetish either. It must not be sacralized,
it is itself liable to destruction, subversion,
an apparent chaos of its enthropical being.
The love energy in words, voices, monems and
phonemes of that poetry became an explosive
one, and it, "disarming the logic"
disintegrated into lonely, suspending, wandering
words, signs, graphics, lines that curve the
space. In that disintegration, destruction of
the just born stellar language, one should look
also for real rudiments of Signalist visual
poetry, that having been by no means introduced
from outside, but originated in the very tissue
(body) of Signalism.
Destruction of language and reducing of poetry
to a sign itself will become a basic feature
of Signalist visual poetry. That disintegration
of language, the reducing of its semantic values,
can be followed from the first attempts in scientistic
period, all the time to the great visual cycles
in the second period, when visual poetry comes
to the fore of Signalist experimentation.
Firstly a connection and meaning between words
and syntagmic parts of sentence and verse is
being broken. The words isolate themselves,
they search for a sense in space, the latter
becoming an inseparable and readable part of
text now. The verbal and visual are interweaving
in unexpected plays of blanks and lingual meanings.
A liberated lingual energy inundates a poem.
To the fore are put material properties of language.
One insists on turnovers, varying, amassing
of particular elements. Words are separated
freely from broken wholes, often becoming just
signs arranged in space, and not real bearer
of contents. They are objects of a intuitive
and ludic process advanced sometimes by a previous
use of mathematical models and methods of creation.
Individual words disintegrate into their final,
atomised structures of letters and interweave
by thin invisible treads with all surrounding
elements filling the space of a visual poem:
with signs, remaining words, exact symbols,
collages. Text flows divergently, in all directions,
it is scattered, linearity and one-wayness of
script is destroyed. We note its polyvalency
and multidimensionality. Syntax is abolished.
Semantics is muffled, it takes on different
forms, or is abolished too. However, communicative
functions of this poetry get new sources. Translinguistic
and metalinguistic systems of relationships
are established. Text can be still followed
(read) in some poems, but with breaks and stops.
The tissue of the text is examined freely. Its
broadness is emphasised. Reading is related
immediately with observing, separating and crossing
of particular constellations into visual and
verbal totalities. They provoke, further on,
whole a net of associations. Visible are new
dimensions of the meaning acquired by the language
liberated in space. It is where the self-creative
energy, insisted on in Signalism several times,
achieves a full expression. Words in texts are
much more independent now, and therefore more
replaceable. They are not petrified in sintagms
or verses and sentential sequences any more.
Freedom, space and observer's (reader's) invention
make possible a continuous, kaleidoscopic play
of constituting, transforming and disintegration
of meaning.
Beside visual poetry, as a significant novelty
whereby Signalism enri ched our literature,
a computer poetry also appears.
Researches in art by means of computer are
of a relatively recent date. They began about
the middle and at the end of fifties, firstly
in music and somewhat later in painting too.
The results achieved in painting are rather
well known. However, in literature one did not
researched much in this way, and a few texts
made by computer did not penetrate the public
so aloud as machine experiments in other art
branches did.
Machines, as creative instruments inspiring,
among other things, an artist for work, and
often realising an artist's idea too, were introduced
by Signalism during 1969, producing computer
texts by means of certain programs. In those
first programs, and also in all later realisations
of Signalist computer poetry, a generator of
random numbers is used, said by particular scientists
and theorists to be very similar to human intuition.
All such researches were done in language and
by means of language. Certain number of words,
groups of words, syntagms, was programmed and
left to machine for realisation. Most often
the words and syntagms were not chosen randomly,
which can be, after all, seen also from the
achieved and published results. In the working
process of the machine that aleatory elements
were expressed.
The obtained results could be presented without
interventions, with greater or lesser interventions
or, that being the case most frequently, they
served as an inspiring matter for poetical work.
That work proceeded in two directions. Firstly:
the computer material was undergone to a further
processing by means of spatial tables of random
numbers or, otherwise, of sequences of numbers
being connected according to a mathematical
scheme initiated by chance, but made with certain
regular interventions. Mathematical combinatorics
was of help in such cases.
In another case, different from the previous
one where the freedom of poetical creation was
limited, to an extent, by schematised mathematical
tables and sequences of numbers, and where groups
of words were being joined into totalities (lines,
verses) according to all phenomena of mathematical
chance - with subsequent understandable and
necessary interventions - computer material
served quite freely for perhaps more complicated,
"mathematical" plays of poetical consciousness
and imagination. A fact is, yet, that those
consciousness and imagination were conditioned
not only by the computer lingual material (products
of machine) but also by all those "methods"
of machine creation, by all that disrespecting
a language, linguistic norms, common human and
current poetical logic, shown by machine in
its work, and which became gradually, during
the work, to a greater or lesser degree, a constituent
part of poet's efforts in liberating and restoration
of language.
Visual and computer poetry are not only poetical
forms Signalism manifested through, although
thanks right to them it perhaps reached the
consciousness of a certain number of readers
and followers of our modern literature. Those
are the most prominent, visible and, as it were,
loudest forms of Signalism. Because of their
novelty they acted in a shocking manner, and
by that itself they attracted a greatest attention
of public and critics. But Signalism as a whole
can not be related exclusively to visual and
computer poetry, and it is especially impossible
to identify it just with visual poetry, that
having become common with some critics.
Signalism is a complex and scattered creative
movement where whole a fan of researching methods
and steps manifested and several new literatural
and artistic disciplines have formed. One of
them is permutational poetry. It is, in a way,
similar to the computer one, although in the
work on permutational poems computers are not
used, but one operates according to certain
mathematical model with just a couple of words
and syntagms. Lingual elements can be varied
until a complete exhaustion of the numerical
combinations of the model. If we take four elements,
that possibility is exhausted with sixteen variants
each of them containing four verses. It means
that out of four words we can, by their permutation,
changing their positions and relationships,
make sixty four verses. It is clear that in
a permutational poem the words lose many of
their functions and properties they otherwise
have in a standard speech and current version.
It seems to us that by varying it is possible
to exhaust almost all nuances of meanings of
some words and of notions they can take on in
different contexts and bracing with other words
and notions. Of course, that proceeds in the
frames of a given (little) number of words and
a determined mathematical model whose number
of variation is not unlimited. By such step
the language is being denuded completely, one
by one of its shells of meaning, or sense, are
stripped off, all possibilities are examined
in order to achieve finally the very core of
a language.
A poet need not adhere to an exclusively mathematical
model. The number of variations can be lessened
or increased. Often by lessening of variations
one increases an aesthetic efficaceousness of
the originated verses, for too great repetitions
can cover completely a high informative value
of individual lingual bracings. Sometimes just
an opposite happens, that an amassment and rather
long combinations of that small number of lingual
elements not before the end of the permutational
chain leads to a sudden liberation of the all
thus far carefully kept lingual energy.
In phenomenological poetry something is expressed
mostly which was insisted on by Signalism, at
least in its main course, by its very beginnings
- a desubjectivisation of a poem and of a poetical
picture. The language in phenomenological poems
is metaphoric one, any subjectivity is neglected,
one tends to a description of phenomena, beings,
things, without any burdening with the universal
and transcendental.In audible poetry a voice
substance of particular words is stressed, with
an attempt to express by it the meaning of all
a poem. That meaning is formed on a phonic level,
but at the same time it is in an immediate connection
with its morphological mark. Voice units are
separated and multiplied:
I loveeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
and they begin to function as a transferring
sense mechanism of one, by voice grouping formed,
source of associations, not only of audible
, bur also of verbal and visual ones. Voice
becomes there a bearer of meaning, of sense.
Its acoustic, intonational, visual properties,
emphasis, place in words, possibility of collaboration
with and influence on other parts of a poem
(word), are used for creation of quite new poetical
forms.With slang poetry Signalism shows a deeper
interest in eccentric variants of our speech.
From that inseparable are also a humorist and
protest note observable before too, especially
in computer and stochastic poems.
Gestual poetry is marked as a most radical
discipline of Signalist poetry. There a poet
writes by its body through a gest and action.
Body becomes a "means of expressing",
a language of total being. Together with surrounding
elements it creates a space of a poem. Body
is "our general means for possessing the
world" (M.Merleaux-Ponty). All sets forth
starts and returns to it.
A gestual poem is created, most commonly, by
combining of different elements. It is a dynamic
action of body, speech, sound, visual, kinetic
and other means of semiotic expression. Sometimes
even the audience itself influences the course
of a gestual poem by its immediate participation.
Thus a tighter symbiosis between the performer
of the action and its consumers is realised.
Object-poems have also abandoned a printed
page of a book. By the usage of "things
as signs" we are directed toward a non-lingual
(in a narrower sense) communication and experiencing
of poetical message and contents. Words are
objects of poems, as well as, after all, in
cynetic and, partly, in visual and gestual poetry,
are not elements whereby one communicates any
more. Basic bearers of ideas and messages are
now objects, things most often taken over from
a technological fund of used and discarded items.
Emptied great boxes of washing powder, rings
of perforated computer tapes, plastic bags with
impressed advertising texts, drug bottles, boxes
of used creams, baby powder and lotions, fragranted
shampoo bottles, packs of computer cards, various
package, plastic glasses and dishes for yoghurt,
milk, meat, fruits etc. become here a material
for a poet. He intervenes in them, processes
them, changes their objectness, establishes
an interactive core, although most frequently
not abolishing semiotic manifestation of the
item from the previous advertising and consumer
discourse.
Object of a song are material facts that stimulate,
irritate, inspire us with their visual, tactile,
spatial and temporal and sometimes also their
use values. Their function, however, is not
a symbolic but a syntagmatic one.
In recent years a new work began, on a creation
of Signalist child poetry. (Stoiljkovic, Palanski,
Roshulj, Obrenovic). Further experimental and
researching effort of Signalists is more and
more directed toward a revolutionising of two
significant branches of literature. Those are
the attempts to create new assayistic and prosaic
forms. Less liable to radical interventions
than poetry, these two disciplines resist Signalism
strongly, and thus the results are less visible
so far. Yet, some results appeared, especially
by a penetration of the visual into traditional
scopes of novel and assay and by its successful
connection with the verbal.
From the previous discussion we could notice
that Signalism is an utmostly open and very
complex art system. Its living tissue is made
of a sequence of events, actions, works, in
a synthesis of programmed and intuitive ludism.
The sources of informative energy arrive to
this system in the most various forms, transforming
themselves, through a producing ludic process,
into an aesthetic energy (information).
Signalist art sees its basic function in an
"introducing of the new into the word",
in creating the forms and revealing the contents
that will change human consciousness. "Success
of an idea", as Jacques Moneau says it,
"will depend first of all on its power
to invade, that being doubtlessly related to
its own structure, to its ability to master
other ideas or to assimilate them, but is without
an immediate relation with the selective value
the idea has for a man or a group accepting
it".
Crucial tasks of Signalism we see in overcoming
the boundaries of the real, in moving the existing
borders and searching for new languages of art.
Although confronted to all tradition and traditionalism,
Signalism has never been on positions of anti-art,
and still lesser on the positions of an anarchist,
non-building negation of art. The motto of Signalism
was always a permanent revolutionising of the
art being, for, as it has been already said
several times: Art without an experiment is
dead", and without radical restorations
its spirit becomes barren.
Our civilisation has offered to artists new
means of communication and expression as well
as vast spaces where one can experiment with
those means. Accepting those new means and entering
new spaces, Signalism tends to express itself,
first of all, as a planetary art. It bases its
aesthetic attitudes on some results of exact
sciences, information theory and sign (signal)
as an important mark of the planetary epoch.
Accordingly this our movement is turned to the
future where it see an ever bigger increase
of non-genothropicity, informativness and a
creation of massmedial forms of synthetic and
hybrid art and sensibility adapted to a different
more scattered consciousness and sensibility.
The communication chains in such conditions
of the system, regulating themselves under the
pressures of total informativeness can not be
broken nor closed. In the mechanism of communication
there is a return-bracing that makes impossible
a creative passivity. The consciousness and
all the being of an artist is permanently irritated
by the flows of inspirative information. The
circle of "a being in a play" is opened.
A man, an artist, is in an immediate contact
with all the universe. That universe of information
is now in a function of creation, of a continuous
research.
At this moment the information theory appears
as an important factor for a further viewing
of Signalist art. In a broadest sense, that
theory analyses processes of emitting and receiving
information, as well as the reactions following
its courses. The information itself has become
a physical value and taken over an universal
mark similar to the notions of mass, energy
and matter.
A measure unit of information is a bit. It
is a "communication atom", i.e. a
least quantity of elements in one information
that is to come to a receptor (receiver) in
order to be transformed into a perception. The
principle of the information transfer is the
same with living beings and machines. Right
that analogy has made possible and opened some
of new spaces for action of Signalism. That
reflected and gave results especially through
a combination (symbiosis) of intuitive and programmed
ludism.
An information is an universal phenomenon.
Beginning from genetics, whose basic postulates
"are based on the process of a information
transmission", through elementary and highest
life forms, all living beings can, as "phenomena
of self-organising and self-regulation",
be observed through the complex notion of information.
French theorist Abraham Moles has been one
of the first who applies the mechanisms of information
theory also in aesthetics. Seen from such a
standpoint an artistic work radiates certain
information. That is a special kind of aesthetic
information. The originality of an aesthetic
information depends on its unpredictability
and grows with unlikelihood. The more predictable
an information is, the more trivial is it .
A complete "originality" of an artistic
work, however, would make completely impossible
"understanding of its aesthetic information".
Sign is the next element the Signalist art
is based on. According to Max Bense, a theory
of signs has been already elaborated as a basis
for a new aesthetics. That theory starts from
a general semiotics, and its conclusion is that
"realisation, communication and codification"
constitute a triple function "of something
that is expressed as a sign. The sign itself
is "in a function of communicativeness,
and as such it is founded in every human activity,
especially in arts.
Famous Russian theorist L.S.Vigotsky starts
from an idea that a sign is a cause provoking
a psychological development, a basis ensuring
a thinking process. All mechanisms of learning,
action, interaction, would function through
a sign. What makes distinction between a man
and an animal would be actually an ability of
producing and using the signs, called by Vigotsky
signification, and defined by him as a creation
and use of signs i.e. artificial signals.
Thus sign appears to us now as a crucial tool
of a man and an artist against the destructive
forces of entropy. The world and the universe
are shined by the sign as an act of manifesting
of an unique researching being and of giving
a sense to it. The experience of a sign is an
experience of that being itself, liberated from
gods, existential uncertainty in front of the
threatening silence of nothingness. By a sign
we are opening the locked cells of consciousness,
sub-consciousness, we are searching for our
own ontic mysteries, the hidden potential energies
of the spirit. It is one of the main instruments
of Signalism for conquering new languages, regions
and forms of art in overreachable and still
unfoerseeable spatial and temporal relations
of the planetary and cosmic.
1974-76.
Notes:
1) I came to the designation "Signalism"
in 1968 working on the second manifesto: MANIFESTO
OF SIGNALISM (REGULAE POESIS). I derived it
from Latin word signum - znak. Previous designations
scientism i poetry - science (the second having
been used in the first manifesto) seemed to
me too narrow and inadequate for marking a complex
set of ideas, crystallised out in about ten
last years first of all in my own work and creative
experience, those ideas being ready for a global
revolutionising of arts, especially literature.
Of course, this derivative, already in the moment
of its origin, broke through and far exceeded
the boundaries and frames imposed to it by its
etymological determination.
2) Here we will cite just some shorter excerpts
from those reviews."SIGNAL" is a Yugoslavian
journal published in Belgrade. Its purpose is
to adapt poetical experience to technical possibilities
of our time, to cybernetics and computer technics.""El
popular", 11 April 1979, Montevideo
"An excellent newly established review
devoted to visual, concrete, cybernetic and
signalist poetry. This issue contains also the
texts by international visual poets, including:
Hausmann, Perfetti, Clavin, Blaine, Bory, Gerz,
Carrega and others: a manifesto of Signalism
(in Serbo-Croatian and English) and a choice
of Signalist poetry of Yugoslavian authors...""Kontexts"
no.3, Exeter,Devon, England
"Literatural avant-garde of Belgrade, Zagreb
and other Yugoslav towns is composed of groups
calling themselves Signalist ones, has now its
newspaper, the review "SIGNAL". Stuck
to the orientation illustrated by the new review,
Signalist movement is reflected especially in
visual poetry whence traditional means of expression
have disappeared, instead of which certain linguistic
and visual rearrangements or a fruitful synthesis
of poetry and fine art appears."La fiera
letteraria", no. 22, 11 July 1971
"The experiences of this poetry have destroyed
completely the poetical "system" codified
by tradition. That destruction has been achieved
on all levels. In any case, a word as a bearer
of communication (in a traditional sense) is
not sufficient any more. It often transforms
into a signal, while a poet resorts to all means
in order to return it in a form of sign..."Michele
Perfetti: SIGNALIST POETRY,"Corriere del
giorno", Taranto, 27 September 1970
"A new and very valuable contribution to
the international scene of concrete poetry.
Yugoslavs call it Signalism instead of concrete
poetry and emphasise the differences regarding
the use of machine technique (especially computers)..."
"Second Aeon", No. 14, 1971, Cardiff
"A very interesting publication containing
various critical discussions about Signalist
experiences and experiences of other poetical
and visual currents. In one part international
poetical texts are compiled, while the second
is devoted to Yugoslav researches... The third
part of the journal is a bibliography of the
most famous publications in that area...""Le
Arti" No. 6 1971 Milano.
3) Signalism is written about by: (Clemente
Padin): LA NUEVA POESIA (SIGNALISMO), "El
popular", 16 October 1970, Montevideo;
Godehard Schramm: SIGNAL INTERNATIONAL REVIEW
FOR SIGNALIST RESEARCH, "Literatur und
Kritik", Heft 61/72, Wien; Danuta Straszinska:
SIGNALIZM NA CENZUROWANYM, "Literatura
na swiecie", No.3, 1972, Varszaw. The famous
Polish poet Zbigniev Bienkowsky also writes
in the Warszaw magazin "Poezija",
presenting his views on avant-garde, with a
special review of our movement.Likewise, in
foreign publications, my following texts regarding
Signalism were published:
1. POESIA-SIGNALISTA, "Ovum 10",
No.4, 1970, Montevideo (in Spanish, with a voice
of visual poems).
2. SIGNALISM (RECENT YUGOSLAV ACTIVITY), "Second
Aeon", No. 14, 1971, Cardiff. With the
text there are supplements by: Zharko Roshulj,
Vlada Stoiljkovic, László Szalma and Bogdanka
Poznanovic.
3. POESIA SIGNALISTA, an exhibition catalogue,
"Tool" gallery, Milan 1971.
4. O POEZIJI SYGNALISTYCZNEI, "Litery",
No. 5, Gdánsk (with several visual poems by
Yugoslav and foreign poets).
5. COMMUNICATION - BEING - APPREHENSION, in
"A conceptographic reading of our World
thermometer" anthology, Calgary, Canada
1973. (With Signalist supplements).
6. COMMUNICATION - BEING - THOUGHT, in "Kontrapunkt"
anthology (Wroclaw 1973, with Signalist supplements).
7. VISUELE POEZIE IN JOEGOSLAVIE (VERSCHIJNING
EN ONTWIKKELING) in the book by G. J. de Rook:
"Historiche anthologie visuele poëzie,
Brussels 1976.
Interesting is also the fact that Signalists
had their first exhibition abroad, in TOOL gallery
in Milan. Titled POESIA SIGNALISTA YUGOSLAVA
from 17 to 31 July, the works were presented
by: Vlada Stojiljkovic, Tamara Jankovic, Zoran
Popovic, Miroljub Todorovic and Marina Abramovic.
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