FACEBOOK VS VISUAL POETRY

Facebook VS Visual Poetry by Filipe Matos

Let me text you something interesting about myself: I’m a lazy artist.

As lazy as my poems.

But i allways start with the best intentions.

Determined to make this book, the most difficult way i can conceive, totally handmade and in the most perfect opposition towards the process by which the poems were created, i soon realized that it would be a desperately arduous job.

Not for me, thanks!

I built the first two pages with letterpress movable type and the following use a polymer plate, thus saving energy for the manually printing and binding work.

I’m convinced the final object results as hybrid as the translation of a new media creative process, into a manual and ancient technique can be.

This is a trans-media project which feeds itself of innumerous translations and results in an object composed by a book and a CD. It started with Visual Poetry, a Facebook page created by visual artist Filipe Matos. It relies on an artistic exploration of this social network, with the appropriation of the platform’s text box characteristics to create a visual game, exploring the substantial advantage of publishing and sharing opportunities provided by it.

From visual poetry, the project appropriates the experimental dimension and the confrontation with the medium – “Facebook VS Visual Poetry”. Chance – a dadaist strategy – plays a fundamental role in the creative process: the limitations imposed by the text box characteristics, automatic writing suggestions, text error correction, all that transforms itself in plastic resources.

The outcome is simple and direct.

The poem is there.

The Facebook page redirects visitors to the website, which leads the project beyond that, through animation, performing the idea of movement already present in the poems.

The purpose of transforming this work into a book presents another challenge, and a new game, playing with analogical resources, with typographic techniques, and with the materiality of the paper page.

Playing with translation, from one media to another, and so on, the work reflects about the immateriality/materiality of art, about the artistic process itself.

Thus, the concept of hybridation embraces the entire project, to materialize in the final work: book/CD. www.facebook.com/visual.poetry.page

Texts: Filipe Matos: “ P “ Natale Cuciniello: “ test [ D ] [ U ] [ C ] [ H ] [ A ] [ M ] [ P ] exit “ Heuristically Programmed ALgorithmic: “ I’m completely operational, and all my circuits are functioning perfectly. “ Bernardo Villar: “ I’m a robot “ Ellen Ripley : “ I’m breathing “ Thomas McRoberts : “ I can’t hear you Gesticulate ” Leote Flp: “ and you? will know us? by the trail of breath? “ Maria Anastasia Druckenthaner: “ it is true, Silence is a sound on my lips “ Annie Abrahams: “ YOU HAVE TO LEARN (a few times) NEW LANGUAGE “ Ellen Ripley: “ I can hardly wait “ Ellen Ripley: “ Working harder for the man “ Heuristically Programmed ALgorithmic: “ Somebody shoot me. “ Walt Thisney: “ I´m transtextual ! “ Lucille Calmel: “ TEXT ME SOMETHING INTERESTING ABOUT YOURSELF “ Text me back: filip.matos@gmail.com

A Facebook event – “Text me something interesting about yourself” – was created with the purpose of collecting material for an audio piece using text to audio conversion software, and will be recorded in a CD to join the book. The collected texts posted on Facebook were edited and manipulated trough the text-to-voice software – a robotic voice, with no inflections.

Printed at O Homem do Saco - 2016