The plugged poet

the use of technique and technology in the versions of tvgrama

Abstract

The series of poems called tvgrama, created by the poet Augusto de Campos, indicates a creative horizon in critical friction with the digital universe, interpreted by us through the notion of hybridization (CANCLINI, 2001). In this study, we reflect on Campos’ performative stance in the versions of the poems that make up the series – including the video adaptations of the works, carried out by the artist himself and documentary filmmaker Cristina Fonseca – under a broad theoretical framework, ranging from anthropology, Peircean semiotics, literary criticism, philosophy, and communication theory, with the aim of dynamizing the antithetical games of forces proposed by modern conceptions, resulting in an earthbound analysis (LATOUR, 2014) of the author’s foray into the domains of technoculture (VIRILIO, 1999). We conclude, then, that Campos’ body adheres to the cyborg paradigm in an experimental posture: it is the appropriation of the techniques of technological tools precisely to weave a conflict about language, in a continuous condition of contradiction regarding a single and universal code. In this sense, we will use Lucia Santaella’s categorization (2003) to critically support the creator’s insertion into the cyber context: Augusto de Campos’ plugged body, in the wake of the discomfort imposed by the Anthropocene’s limit era (HARAWAY, 2009), seems to establish a relationship between art and technology in which ethics and aesthetics are molded, reshaping the constructivist objectivity opposed to the subjective and hedonistic expression promoted by concrete poetry orthodoxy, guided by the Plano-Piloto para Poesia Concreta, and brazilian modernism itself. In this research perspective, Campos becomes deconcretized.