Open Ditches

Authors

  • Álvaro Seiça University of Bergen

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.14195/2182-8830_5-1_12

Abstract

as valas abertas ++ des fossés ouverts ++ open ditches is a poem constrained by 40 lines with a maximum of 80 characters per line. The poem draws from constraints and themes addressed by Jorge Luis Borges’s short story "The Library of Babel" (1941). It has been created for Langlibabex (2014), a multilingual and simultaneous poetry piece developed in collaboration with Claire Donato and Luc Dall’Armellina.

In as valas abertas ++ des fossés ouverts ++ open ditches different levels and functions of reading co-exist, given that when the browser and human voice reproduce the reading of its source code the visual and sound outputs differ. The human voice provides a literal reading of the HTML code, whereas the browser’s output omits certain sections that are contained within invented”non-standardized”HTML tags relating to the human body, inside the tag <body>. The various bodies highlight frictions and tensions among human and non-human agents in relation to language and code: the so-called "natural" languages and programming languages.

At the time of the writing process, alive bodies were digging uncountable open ditches in Ukraine for soon-to-be, yet unknown, dead bodies. The poem weaves this fact with Borges’s fictional facts. It was composed and recorded in Paris in November 2014, in Portuguese, English, French, and HTML. The poem and the source mp3 file can be downloaded at http://alvaroseica.net/works/as-valas-abertas.html

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

Author Biography

Álvaro Seiça, University of Bergen

Ãlvaro Seiça is a writer, editor and researcher. He published four poetry books, the most recent being Ö (2014) and permafrost: 20+1 zeptopoemas sms (2012). He holds a MA in Contemporary American Literature, with the thesis "Transduction: Transfer Processes in Digital Literature and Art" (University of Évora, 2011), winner of the Moser Prize 2013. Seiça has published several poems and essays in different journals. In 2007, he co-founded Bypass, a nomadic editorial and curatorial project. He currently lives in Bergen, Norway, where he is a PhD fellow in Digital Culture at the University of Bergen, Humanities Faculty, Department of Linguistic, Literary and Aesthetic Studies. Seiça is a researcher on electronic literature and digital art at the Bergen Electronic Literature Research Group and editor of the ELMCIP KB (http://elmcip.net). His PhD project focus on digital poetry and how time and space shape digital kinetic poetics. @AlvaroSeica

Downloads

Additional Files

Published

2017-12-27

How to Cite

Seiça, Álvaro. 2017. “Open Ditches”. MATLIT: Materialities of Literature 5 (1):81-82. https://doi.org/10.14195/2182-8830_5-1_12.

Issue

Vol. 5 No. 1 (2017): Vox Media: Sound in Literature

Section

Mediarama | Mediascape

License

MATLIT embraces full open access to all issues. Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:

  1. Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution- 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
  2. Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
  3. Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).
  4. A CC licensing information in a machine-readable format is embedded in all articles published by MATLIT.
  1. Attribution ” You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.
  2. No additional restrictions ” You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.

Notices:

  1. You do not have to comply with the license for elements of the material in the public domain or where your use is permitted by an applicable exception or limitation.
  2. No warranties are given. The license may not give you all of the permissions necessary for your intended use. For example, other rights such as publicity, privacy, or moral rights may limit how you use the material.