Word, Image, Sound

A Festschrift is an accordion-like collection of articles written in honor of an iconic academic. The term gives interested colleagues and friends the opportunity to put the honoree central stage—even if reading the whole collection of essays can turn into a heterogeneous jumble. This Festschrift for Claus Clüver has become a rather voluminous book (556 pages), but the articles create the impression that they belong together in harmony. Recruiting new voices to celebrate Clüver's work, the personal resonance intensifies the enthusiasm for interart and intermedia studies. The symbiotic essays of Media inter Media come from, particularly, Germany (Clüver's origin), the US (Indiana University), and Brazil (São Paulo University), where he taught and worked on his subject, ekphrasis.

Ekphrasis brings together a fascinating "laboratory" of all kinds of hybrid varieties of interart, assembling and taking apart poems, image, photography, film, video, architecture, music, and opera. Constructed by hand and deconstructed by computer, ekphrasis mediate new "Bildgedichte" (visual poetry), in which the material of a poem is "transcreated," that is transferred into different arrangements. Mediating on description and imagery, involving verbal, paraverbal, and nonverbal adaptations, ekphrasis makes a "translation" to another image. Clüver's art translated poems into a variety of different poems. This experimental poetry has strong, even dramatic, effects, following the popular Brazilian experimental and concrete poetry of Haroldo and Augusto de Campos and Décio Pignatari. Regarding the image of the poem "memos" (presented on the cover of Media inter Media), Augusto de Campos wrote about Clüver's translation, digitally typeset by himself:

The original poem was composed with transferable letters. I used different fantasy typescripts to make the reading more difficult and to create erroneous labyrinthine paths and casual associations with fragmentary words—a tentative way of iconizing the meanderings, stresses, and lapses of memory—the transience of the moments our recollections try in vain to catch. In the publications, though presented face to face with the original, the translation was printed in common typography, thus leveling the suggested interchanging readings of its labyrinthine patterns and making the poem lose much of its visual impact, in spite of the translation.

The computer mechanism of hyperrealism lets the viewer construct different readings simultaneously, but superimposed in a different "voice, matter, space, and form," and controlled (or better, half-controlled) in a hyperconsciousness of meanings. Developed by the computer mechanism, Pedro Reis writes that

Software makes it possible not only to choose the lettering, to select colors, to copy, modify, or paste images, but also to integrate shapes, sound components, perspective, and animation. Especially with the new tools of virtual reality, it is possible to create dynamic audiovisual poems, so that the two-dimensional and static page gives way to the (virtually) three-dimensional and dynamic screen. It is thus possible to go from the suggested movement of the illustrated words (the typogram) to the real movement of the computerized words (the videogram).

The "verbivocovisual" performances of the visual poem and its interchanging readings in typographical art can be seen and heard, and even touched or smelled in the mixed narratives of opera/oratorio/musical, dance, and film. Media inter Media highlights the effects of sound, word, lights, movements, gestures, choreography, body movement, costume, make-up, scenery, and other theatrical effects. The total performance tends to puzzle and intrigue the viewer, who must navigate among different possible significations. He or she must be committed to multitasking without any troubles, switching from seeing to hearing and vice versa. Distancing from the predominance of language and, at the same time, taking in the totality of other theatrical effects, the viewer hopes to find a common ground in the totality of interarts studies.

Hence the problems to find a collective meaning on the aesthetic and critical value of the intermedial transfer of, for example, Walter Steffens's "musical" images following the drawing lines of Pablo Picasso's La Femme-fleur (now for flute and piano) and Guernica (for viola and...