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On Árbol veloZ

Hypertext has been defined as nonsequential writing whose connections are "primarily associative rather than syllogistic" that is, based on deductive reasoning (Slatin, 160). Hypertext works with analogy, discontinuity, and fragmentation. Unlike some more straightforward prose, hypertext is analogous to poetry in that both of these modes depend on more than the communicational function of language, take advantage of language in space, and exploit possibilities for nonlinear configurations. In a hypertext, nonsequential electronic links join texts in a network or tree (theorists use a variety of connective metaphors), permeating the boundaries of the "primary" text and making the linked materials explicit (these documents, images, or other materials are called "nodes").  A hypertextual format also offers the opportunity for collaboration between various composers, since it "destroys physical isolation and attitudes created by that isolation" through the customs and conventions of the book structure (Delany and Landow, I3).  Hypertexts allow more revision and less closure than a printed book and offer an array of possibilities for reader participation in the construction of the text (this can range from fairly straightforward ordering decisions in our reading to adding to the text itself in significant ways). Hypermedia expands these possibilities beyond text to link graphic images, sound, and video to verbal signs.

Although they do not use hypertexts as such, Uruguayan author Luis Bravo and twenty Uruguayan artists take advantage of certain aspects of an electronic environment in their CD-ROM Árbol veloZ (1998). The CD ROM comes with a book, but it is not a repetition of the book in image or format or even in terms of the poems included. There are additional poems in the written text, and some of those on the CD are not written (Bravo notes that he did not include those that would not survive "fuera de la imagorealidad que ofrece el soporte cibernético" [7] [outside the image-reality that cyberspace offers]). The CD opens to a title with a door, a guitar, and a voice reciting part of a poem ("Pájaro de piedra" [Bird of Stone]). This segues into a view of a forest with chirping birds, the sound of running water, and a bridge (unrealistic, the scene recalls a video game).  Choosing the left path to what appears to be a waterfall, we click to move closer, and find it is a tree trunk with a series of doors marked with letters; choosing one, we enter. Employing bridges, doors, trees—all metaphors for hypertextual linkings—we arrive at poems that are not texts but aural performances with visual accompaniment:  photos, drawings, and animation that may mutate. Rhythm is created, then, not only through the meter of the lines but through the performance of them: the pauses, acceleration, aggression or tranquility of the voice; through the music or sound accompanying or punctuating the performance; and also through the pace of the visual images. There is variety in the poems: some are surrealistic with hallucinatory images; some are jazzy, improvisational; in some, mundane images become horrible and menacing; and some are punctuated by the appearance of written words. Analyzing one poem, "Cacería", in more detail demonstrates how these diverse elements are synchronized in a particular instance.

Black-and-white photos of desert plants, rocks, and natural images are accompanied by guitar and percussion, an overture to the mellifluous voice that begins the poem: "Volvía cada mañana / al mismo lugar" (33) [He/she/you returned each morning / to the same place]. The idea of a return echoes throughout the poem, through the repetition of this line and certain visual images. The relation between images and text reinforces this concept, for it is most often one of echo or shadow. This is the written text:

The video clip draws out associations between natural images and those of the body: "rostro" and "piedra," the shot of a landscape-like chest. Writing also becomes part of nature: "tallar" the image in rock or shadow is less sculpting than stenciling, and the images that accompany "la tinta se desparrama" or “una humedad delineada" link writing to roots, shadow, algae, natural "writing," or, conversely, the colored lines drawn on photographic images—a dot to suggest an eye and make us find a face. The photos evoke cave art as Bravo technologically suggests a tie to the primitive.  "Cacería" is the title, and "de la imagen” is the adjective phrase that reveals the object pursued near the poem’s close. Image and language intertwine self-referentially, creating a visual and linguistic metatext to the poem.

The images are heavily connoted by the text. The photos are not descriptive but form visual metaphors whose meaning is tangled with that of the words. The series of images form a sequence, a multimedia syntax, for the shots are loaded with meaning relative to each other and to the spoken word. In "The Photographic Message," Roland Barthes observed a movement from the tradition of images illustrating words to one in which words are parasitic on images, giving them a message, a "culture, a moral, an imagination" (204-205). What we have in the Bravo CD takes Barthes’ ideas one step further, creating a dialogue between different languages photographic and poetic—to craft a conversation that is not translated but orchestrated by creators who comprehend both idioms. The fairly steady rhythm of images in this poem paces us and unites the poem. Working in conjunction with sound and the long pauses between stanzas, the images add continuity and extension. Pacing is also moderated by the instruments, which work as connective tissue, and by electronic elements such as the reverb on the last repetition of “veneración inmóvil," which creates a literal echo. The speaker's performance also controls our intake, for he inserts pauses in places besides the written line breaks: "Siervo (pause) del dios (pause) del lugar." All of these elements work together to form a composition with a particular sound and texture, a multidimensionality that moves poetry away from the written word.¹

The CD-ROM enables us to travel from the page/hoja to the larger tree, or set of linked media on the screen. If we had chosen the other bridge to what looks from a distance like a hut but reveals itself to be a bookshelf, we would find "books" that include credits, an explanatory essay, and the written texts of these poems (with the aural component again). In the essay, Bravo introduces their work and explains the intended links to the oral tradition, the payada [improvised poem associated with the gaucho], and their desire to make Árbol veloZ an "espectaculo poético integral" [an integrated poetic spectacle]. Bravo and his coauthors use the computer as a new writing and reading space and take advantage of some of the event-like qualities possible in the electronic form (unlike poesia.com, which, though providing another means of access to poetry, simply transposes written texts to the Internet).

The bookshelf is a kind of macrotext, for the addition of essay, written texts, and their translations provide clues or a possible guide to our understanding of the poems. In some senses, this section could be seen as introductory material dislocated from its traditional place. The desire to include this material says something about the artists' anticipated audience and what we are expected to know—as with many electronic literary sites, the authors here do not assume an understanding of this new mode of transmission or of the implications of different technological mediation (for, like the printing press, the computer is another means to transmit a message). It may imply a new audience, one accustomed to reading in either the technological environment or the poetic/artistic one, but probably not both. The poems include links that make other hypertextual references clear: the inspiration for "Cacería" in the cave paintings of Santander, Spain, for example, or the intertextual reference to José Angel Valente's Al dios del lugar (it also provides us with a quote from this collection). The electronic formatting shifts the conventional hierarchy given to these different elements, and what we look at and in which order produces different reading experiences: aural, visual, textual, and intertextual. The text is not overdetermined by any one of these registers, but differently determined, depending on what is read, when it is read, and our expectations about what we are reading (what we think poetry is, what reading is, what the relationships between visual, aural, and textual realms are, for example). The authority of the text and textuality in general is in some senses “rewritten" by the audiovisual performance, which does not exactly follow the book version or the written version on the CD-ROM.

In the CD-ROM Árbol veloZ, the reader can make some decisions about how the text is presented, about his or her point of entry and order of reading. The work integrates textual and perceptual elements, moving from a Bakhtinian multivocality to an interdisciplinary “multirepresentationality." The CD was composed by a team—the multimedia components were organized by Silvina Rusinek and the music by Alvaro Pasquet—and it includes a variety of artists and media, such as the photographers Marcelo Cascuberta, Susy Viera, and Álvaro Percovich; drawings by Gustavo Hernández; designs by Pablo Cascuberta, Alcides Martinez Portillo, and Gabriel Claramunt. Luis Echeveste designed the entry portal, and Eduardo Lamas filmed the performance of "Fragmenta cabalgata" and still others participated in a variety of technical capacities and as translators and musicians.² The accompanying book lists Luis Bravo as its author, but the CD has "20 artistas uruguayos," an alteration that questions the idea of authorship. The combination of individual authorship and collaboration reminds us of Michel Foucault’s description of the author as a cultural function that controls the proliferation of meanings (“What Is an Author," 221-222). The multiple voices/hands and resulting sounds and representations also interrogate notions of originality and the concept of a closed text (is there a definitive version here?). For these reasons, Árbol veloZ proves to be a transitional work, straddling the divisions between book and electronic formats, between conventional and more dispersed authorship, and as such, it conditions its audience for changes to come. Though interactive to a degree, it does not allow the reader the more radical opportunity to compose poems or to select within texts, as some hypertextualfiction sites do.³ Publishing a book and tape as well as a CD, Bravo and company seem to want to cover all their bases. Unlike poetry that appears on the Internet, this is still a product to be sold; in this way, too, it maintains its connection to the book format’s dependency on exchange and marketing and is not available to all who have Internet access.⁴

Notes

¹ In fact, the reader does not follow the written text here; lines change places and ther is more repetition than the lineal development on the page expresses, lending more flexibility and emphasizing the idea of performance over text/script.

² Electronic correspondence to the author from Luis Bravo, October 27, 2001.

³ For example, there have been several versions of Borges' "El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan" [The garden of Forking Paths] that allow readers to choose different paths through the story that can alter the outcome.  This strategy may be more easily applied to fiction, or to poetry that tells a story, as emplotment may present more possibilities for reader participation.

⁴According to Katherine Hayles, one of the major shifts in the distribution of information in the electronic age is from possesion of ownership to access.  She says: "Whereas possession implies the existence of private life based on physical exclusion or inclusion, access implies the existence of credentialing practices that use patterns rather than presences to distinguish between those who do and do not have the right to enter".

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