Avant-gardes and the Aleph System: An Artistic Interface for Digital Arts

Abstract

This paper presents an interface for poetry that has been developed at the Laboratory of Front Poetics (http://labfront.tk). LabFront is a research group registered at CNPq (Brazil) and certified by the State University of Minas Gerais. As one of our activities at LabFront, the development of the poetic system called “Aleph” is a reminder of the homonymous tale by Jorge Luiz Borges, which presents the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet as its protagonist. Aleph would be the point where everything would be contained. Based on this idea, one of the LabFront teams started to make a code for deconstructing poems and to generate a sound expression different from linear reading. In this work I will start by presenting the relationship of this system with the avant-gardes of the twentieth century, and later I will explain how it works in its current implementation.

Keywords

• digital arts
• Aleph system
• immersive virtual reality
• poetry reading
• artistic installation