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Explorations of Multimedia
Poetics in Arnaldo Antunes’ Nome Project
Marco Alexandre de
Oliveira
INTRO:
Arnaldo Antunes is a prominent contemporary figure in Brazilian art
and culture, particularly in the areas of poetry and popular music.
As a popular artist, Arnaldo is famous first and foremost because of
his integral participation in the rock-group Titãs during the
1980s. The group was quite successful in Brazil, and their albums have
sold over a million copies. After finally leaving the Titãs to
embark on a solo career as a singer-songwriter, he has continued to
make a relatively significant impact on Brazilian popular music, especially
through his collaborations with other artists such as Marisa Monte and
Carlinhos Brown. Throughout this period, however, he has also published
several exceptional collections of poetry that include visual or graphic
poems, engaged in experimental multimedia projects, and participated
in exhibits and performances that have attracted media attention as
well as critical acclaim.
Arnaldo Antunes has, as such, successfully emerged as a performance
and multi-media artist extraordinaire, achieving wide recognition both
within Brazil and abroad. For over twenty years, he has consistently
and effectively blurred the increasingly problematic distinctions between
genres such as poetry, music, and the visual arts. By drawing inspiration
and techniques from a variety of sources, both traditional and contemporary,
his overall artistic production demonstrates how hybrid aesthetic forms
have developed concurrently with global advances in technology. Furthermore,
the intersemiotic and multimedia poetry exhibited in works such as the
unique video project Nome may also be said to illustrate the
evolution of a primeval poetics through contemporary media. The purpose
of this talk will be first to situate Arnaldo Antunes’ artistic
production on the historical map by locating its cultural origins, and
then to explore certain features of the multimedia poetics present in
his landmark Nome project. At the conclusion of this (ad)venture,
I hope to arrive at a few of the implications that such innovative experiments
promise when viewed as a global phenomenon that extends beyond the borders
of time and place – i.e. Latin America – into an uncharted
territory without boundaries or limits.
ORIENTATION (BACKGROUND):
The diversity of works by Arnaldo Antunes
include popular and experimental projects involving music, poetry, visual
art, multimedia, film, photography, calligraphy, and dance. His artistic
production generally points to a poetics of convergence that succeeds
in reuniting seemingly distinct aesthetic phenomena into inclusive wholes.
His efforts display clear affinities with both Concrete Poetry and Tropicalismo,
two interconnected and influential vanguard movements that significantly
transformed and reshaped art and culture in Brazil by creating original
and imaginative possibilities for poetic expression through language,
music, and other media.
Arnaldo readily admits influences from Concrete Poetry – once
dubbed “The Rock and Roll of Poetry” – for its expressed
intent to modernize the communicative potential of poetic language and
revolutionize aesthetic theory and practice. Indeed, many visual or
graphic poems by Arnaldo Antunes may be classified as concrete poems,
despite his unique style and individual technique. Nevertheless, he
also equally considers the diverse lyrical tradition of Música
Popular Brasileira to be instrumental in his artistic formation. An
especially striking feature of much of Arnaldo’s intersemiotic
multi-works is, in fact, the fusion of music and poetry that frequently
occurs throughout his various projects. Notwithstanding the artist’s
own affirmations that poetry and song constitute distinct codes of discourse,
there is an evident cross-pollinating of artistic forms (i.e. music
and poetry) in many of his works.
It may be said, then, that Arnaldo Antunes’ artistic endeavors
illustrate a creative synthesis of concrete elements of Concrete
Poetry and of the lyrical qualities of Brazilian song, particularly
those evident in Tropicalismo. Both movements exemplified a tendency
to transgress the boundaries and limits of traditional artistic genres
through constructive dialogue and interaction. The resulting
developments have inspired a newer generation of artists in Brazil (like
Arnaldo Antunes) to proceed in a variety of directions that often overlap
or converge. Many of these works demonstrate how both technology and
ingenuity conspire in the evolution of hybrid aesthetic forms. Despite
apparent correlations with Concrete Poetry and Tropicalismo, however,
the manifest diversity of Arnaldo Antunes’ works also shows that
his production is irreducible to conventional systems of classification.
In a sense, by formally and systematically breaking traditional aesthetic
barriers and prescribed limitations, the artist assumes the relative
autonomy to transit freely across critically or “officially”
established borders.
EXPLORATION (THE NOME PROJECT):
In Arnaldo Antunes’ works, the convergence
of specific vanguard techniques of Concrete Poetry and certain lyrical
elements of Música Popular Brasileira has led the artist to be
characterized by contemporary critics (such as Claudio Daniel) as “a
poet that explores the intersemiotic relations using different supports,
such as the book, the compact disc, the videocassette and the computer.
His poetry combines sound, image, and movement, the notion of architectural
space and the resources of electronic media.” Daniel adds that
his best work is probably the video-project Nome, which constitutes
a “synthesis of the aesthetic research that reexamines the initial
aim of the concrete movement, the creation of a verbivocovisual art.”
Nome therefore “mixes the influence of vanguard poetry
with the language of billboards, pop music, comics, and icons of mass
culture from urban centers.”
Nome is the name of an innovative, experimental multimedia
project that included collaboration by Arnaldo Antunes, Zaba Moreau,
Celia Catunda, and Kiko Mistorigo. Several famous and / or influential
artists participated in the project, such as Marisa Monte, João
Donato, Péricles Cavalcanti, Arto Lindsay, and others. In the Nome project, poetry, song, and visual art interact and intersect
to communicate a multiplicity of meaning through multiple means. As
such, Nome is quite an original project, and its appearance
indicates a significant development in contemporary poetry and poetics.
After its exhibition critics (such as Celso Fonseca) observed that no
similar conceptual project of video-art capable of generating discussions
about linguistics, metalanguage and semiotics had as yet occurred in
Brazil. For his part, Charles A. Perrone describes Nome as
a “wholly unique multimedia work presented as videotext, sound
recording, and book.” Furthermore, “the video takes the
poetic experience a step further with shifting colors, moving script,
letter animation, objectified contrasts, and myriad computer affects
done, unlike nearly all commercial music videos, with the poetic function
of language in mind.”
In addition to previously unreleased material, several of the audio-visual
experiments in Nome originate as poems in published collections
of poetry. From Arnaldo’s first edited volume PSIA, the
graphic poems “luz” and “H2O mem” appear in
“new and improved” versions. The former becomes a video
with flickering light effects while the latter is incorporated into
a digital animation exhibiting virtual water. From the collection Tudos,
the poems “imagem,” “ABC,” “sol ouço,”
“Nome não,” and “dentro” are also radically
transformed by their alteration, or rather recreation, in multimedia.
Finally, from the collection of prose-poems As coisas, “campo,”
“o tempo,” “se (não se),” and “a
cultura” all reappear in technologically enhanced versions. Of
these poems, “a cultura” is a wonderful example of the immense
possibilities for intersemiotic fusion that are inherent in multimedia
art. In the video version, the prose poem is sung aloud with backup
vocals by Marisa Monte. Meanwhile, animated images of animals and humans
traverse the screen as, in the background, various multicultural icons,
ancient and sacred scripts, drawings, and popular comics are represented.
A NEW OLD WAVE (MULTIMEDIA POETICS &
GLOBALIZATION):
As a multimedia project that combines poetry,
music, video, and digital technology, Nome is emblematic of
an exciting and innovative intersemiotic future for experimental verbal
arts that challenge established borders and surpass conventional boundaries.
It also reflects an evolving trend that consolidates vanguard principles
of invention while allowing for pluralistic, individual solutions to
recurrent aesthetic and theoretical problems. Such problems include
the interrelations between words and objects – or the interaction
between a name and a thing – as well as the
points of intersection and disjunction between the communicative and
poetic functions of language. The emergence of a multimedia poetics
furthermore raises new and fundamental questions about the role and
nature of media and the very processes of mediation itself.
As Arnaldo Antunes himself has commented, words merely conceived as
referents necessarily interfere with the direct perception and sensory
experience of a vast world and its myriad objects or things. The problem
of reference refers only to the communicative function of language,
however, whereas poetic language essentially strives to represent word-objects
as the very things that they have come to either be or re-present.
As such, the critic Nelson Brissac Peixoto aptly states that Nome constructs systems of denomination, or tautological attempts to link
things to their respective names. Although the exploration of the interactions
between “things-words in space-time” immediately recalls
the aesthetic principles and technical “plan” of Concrete
Poetry, it seems evident in the Nome project that Arnaldo Antunes
also perceives a basic link between infantile reasoning, primitive logic,
and the poetic origins of language. The verbivocovisual performative
dimension that combines poetry, music, and the visual arts therefore
represents the recovery of a primeval aesthetic, or a re-discovery of
an original poetics that constitutes the foundation for essentially
contemporary experiments in technology and multimedia. In this manner
the multimedia project Nome is both a conscious step forward
and a mindful leap backward for poetry and poetics at the turn of the
millennium.
Critics (such as Antonio Risério) have observed that, in the Nome project, Arnaldo Antunes effectively creates a hybrid
form of primitive art in a cybernetic context. As such, the artist appears
to adhere to the anthropophagic tradition of “cultural cannibalism”
that is indeed particular to Brazilian cultural and artistic production.
The assimilation of foreign or international elements with local or
national features is complemented by another Oswaldian attitude, namely
that of “poetry for export.” MADE IN BRAZIL, the
fruits of the reinvented product – whether it be Bossa Nova, Concrete
Poetry, or Tropicalismo – are then shipped either across the Americas
or overseas for worldwide consumption in the global marketplace. In
a similar vein, the Nome project incorporates recent developments
in technology and communication as it digests global mass media and
popular culture.
There is one last example from the Nome project which perhaps
best situates it within the sphere of globalization while similarly
orienting it within the scope of our multimedia discussion. As you will
see, the clip “wherever” frankly adopts the English language
as the lingua franca for its poetic commerce. As I exhibit
the video, observe the thematic interaction between animated image and
recorded sound text. In the video-clip “wherever,” the opening
“once upon a time” should immediately recall the idea of
a mythological or “fairy land-ish” origin or place. For
now, we might wish to name it Brazil, the paradisiacal island jungle
of samba, futebol, and mulatas. This place,
this origin that is “now here” is also divided or isolated
from some there, or rather, “everywhere” else. As “here”
and “now” converge in the present moment, both “now”
and “here” appear absent as “nowhere” disappears
as if lost in a time and place of the past. In the meantime, whoever
“they” are live “together, forever and ever,”
in a communal utopian paradise which is simultaneously “wherever”
and “everywhere” at once. This is truly the ultimate hope
for a New World, just as the Americas were at one time the promised
land of the Old World.
In conclusion, if we recall that the Greek origins of the word utopia
already point to some ideal place (topos) that in
reality, really, is not, we might as well – in the end
– consider the word medium in the sense of being a means
from some origin to some end, or alternatively, as the means of interaction
between the two. When seen from this angle, the multimedia video-clip
“wherever,” along with the Nome project as a whole,
presents a poetic glimpse of an aesthetic utopia where time and place,
borders and boundaries, cease to limit creative explorations into free
and uncharted territory. A multimedia poetics therefore presents multiple
means, or rather many ways, of arriving there – wherever and everywhere there may be.
*Originally presented at the 53rd Annual
meeting of the Southeastern Council of Latin American Studies: Latin
America in the Age of Globalization (April 6-8, 2006)
Bibliography:
Cláudio Daniel, “Arnaldo Antunes.”
Arnaldo Antunes Site Oficial. 22 June 2005
<http://www.arnaldoantunes.com.br/sec_livros_view.php?id=4&texto=32>
Celso Fonseca, “Sobre Nome.”
Arnaldo Antunes Site Oficial. 22 June 2005
<http://www.arnaldoantunes.com.br/sec_livros_view.php?id=4&texto=5>
Charles A. Perrone, Seven Faces: Brazilian Poetry Since Modernism.
Durham: Duke University Press, 1996. (p. 114)
Nelson Brissac Peixoto, Nome (Paisagens
Urbanas).” Arnaldo Antunes Site Oficial.
22 June 2005 <http://www.arnaldoantunes.com.br/sec_livros_view.php?id=4&texto=34>
Antonio Risério, “De quem
é a decadencia.” Arnaldo Antunes Site Oficial. 22 June
2005
<http://www.arnaldoantunes.com.br/sec_livros_view.php?id=4&texto=35>
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