In this essay, São Paulo-based poet Augusto de Campos describes the diverse graphic elements—from the movable types and artisanal resources of conventional typography he used in 1953 to the Intergraph, a high-resolution graphic computer he used in 1985—wielded in what is called “Concrete poetry.” These elements demonstrate the shift from the virtual movement of the printed word (the typogram) to the actual kinetics of the word via computer (the videogram, or the typography of the electronic era). Augusto de Campos describes the experience of having translated his poem “Pulsar” into computer images in order to make a video-clip poem synchronized with a musical reading by Caetano Veloso. He reflects on the impact of this change in his creative process, pointing out that the kinetic articulation of the high-definition procedures of graphic supercomputers (where the sound resources of a recording studio such as multi-channel recording, phonic decomposition, montage, and layering are computerized as well) have brought about a radical change. He mentions the more complete materialization of structures called “verbivocovisual” embraced by Concrete poetry. Augusto de Campos imagines that the automatization so feared by humanists is in the process of becoming humanized by means of poetry, and argues that that process will enrich automatization on a conceptual level until it has a dignity that he considers goes beyond “the mere Luddism of electronic games.”

The term “verbivocovisual”—the “word-montage” or “word-ideogram” that sums up the semantic, sound, and visual dimensions of a poem—is one of the central pursuits of the Grupo Noigrandes and its production. This word-case was taken from James Joyce’s most radical text, Finnegans Wake (it appears on page 341 in a 628 page edition). Augusto de Campos and his brother Haroldo are the authors of sixteen brief fragments of text in their admirable “transcreation” of Joyce’s work into Portuguese (1962): cf. Panaroma do Finnegans Wake (São Paulo: Signos–Editôra Perspectiva, 1971), p. 21.

What was known as the “Grupo Noigrandes” was formed by Augusto de Campos (b. 1931), his brother Haroldo de Campos (1929–2003), and Décio Pignatari (1927–2012). The innovative poetry group that emerged in São Paulo in the fifties made use of a wide range of supports and techniques before and after the appearance of the digital image and computer editing, among them typographic printing, sound recording in LP and CD-ROM format, videotext, holography, video, and web-art, all of which they used in their radical works. In this essay, Augusto de Campos contextualizes the São Paulo art scene and the major players in the passage from the typogram to the videogram, among them Julio Plaza (1938–2003), a Spanish artist based in Brazil with whom Augusto de Campos worked on the design of a number of visual poems. He mentions the pioneering work of Moysés Baumstein (1931?91) in holography and of the Olhar Eletrônico team (José Wagner Garcia and Mário Ramiro) who contributed to rendering his poems in electronic media.

Concretism in Brazil included work in a wide range of fields, including literature, experimental music, visual art, and industrial design. This text by poet Augusto de Campos was published in a 1956 issue of the magazine A&D (Arquitetura e Decoração) featuring works by participants in the Iª Exposição Nacional de Arte Concreta. The document evidences the programmatic nature of the texts written by poets and theorists—in particular Haroldo de Campos and Décio Pignatari—associated with literary Concretism. It also explains their artistic points of reference and the conceptual premises underlying the movement that emerged in São Paulo in 1952. Other relevant texts by the same author include “Plano-pilôto para poesia concreta” [doc. no. 1090135] and the text presenting the aims of “Concrete poetry” [doc. no. 1090169].

For additional information, Professor Walter Zanini presented the exhibition Poéticas Visuais,organized in conjunction with Julio Plaza in 1977, in “As novas possibilidades = The new possibilities” [doc. no. 1110585].