Friedrich Block is a German curator, researcher and sporadic artist. He focuses on history of digital poetry and electronic literature in German-speaking countries. As curator he works in the gallery Stiftung Brückner-Kühner in Kassel, where one of the main projects of the gallery is digital poetry festival p0es1s. We did an interview with Friedrich Block before his speech on Krakatoa talk club in Goethe-Institut Bratislava on 19.march (Thursday) at 20:00. In the interview he introduced digital poetry, a couple of current remarkable artists and his work.
What should we imagine under the notion of “digital poetry”?
I quote the definition we have used in the p0es1s project: Digital poetry refers to creative, experimental, playful, and also critical language art involving programming, multimedia, animation, interactivity, and net communications.
Do mostly poets themselves transform pieces into digital form or do they collaborate with programmers? What is the typical background of digital poets?
The poets or language artists I appreciate are programming their works by themselves – or they are working in collaborative groups. I think to achieve an interesting result of a project it is most important that each of its aspects is conceptually reflected and realized with the best skills necessary for this concept.
Which artists would you recommend as good digital poets?
Those ones who are continuously presenting unique, innovative, touching works. With some of them I have been cooperating for years, like André Vallias, Johannes Auer, Jörg Piringer, Simon Biggs, John Cayley, Aya Karpinska, Romy Achituv or Eduardo Kac, to name a few, others like Eugenio Tisseli, Tobias Leingruber or – from the post-digital field – Aram Bartholl came into my perspective more recently. Jörg Piringer’s art for instance is so fascinating because he combines a lot of skills – programming, visual and sound aspects of language, video, performance and fuses them in quite concise ways, and while doing so, he is quite aware of the poetic traditions his work is related to.
Eduardo Kac – Genesis project
You organise the festival p0es1s, could you shortly introduce the festival? What are your near future plans with the event?
p0es1s is not a festival – like the biennial E-Poetry-Festivals – but a series of international exhibitions of media poetry in combination with theoretical discourse. The project started with the first international exhibition of digital poetry in 1992 organized by André Vallias and myself. We came from the tradition of concrete and visual poetry. More recent projects have again opened the field of digital poetry to a broader perspective on all media of language art. A future exhibition (we are just trying to find the needed resources) would reflect crucial aspects of digital language culture in this fascinating broad and diverse field of the verbivocovisual.
How do you see the future of text? Will it be become mostly digital or do you believe that paper will survive?
Let me answer in this way: Scientists have considered which medium would be appropriate to store written information about the danger of our nuclear waste for the generations in a far future – and they have argued that papyrus would fit best.
This event is supported by Goethe-Institut Bratislava.
