This entry was written in collaboration with the PO.EX. Digital Archive of Portuguese Experimental Literature.
Between Clarice Lispector’s “Amor” (1960), described by Rui Torres as a Genettian hypotext (Torres, 2011), and Amor de Clarice [Clarice’s love] (2005), the reader may find a process of metamorphosis initiated, not only by Nuno M. Cardoso (voice), Ana Carvalho (video), Carlos Morgado (sound), Luis Aly (sound) and Rui Torres (programming), but also by the machine. Distributed authorship and the appropriation of Clarice Lispector’s work produce a plagiotropic and devouring text (Torres, 2003: 2) which brings into question deep-rooted notions of originality. Even though referring to Húmus Poema Contínuo (2008), another Torres’ work, Manuel Portela claims that generated texts “seem to have been released from any definite authorial origin” (Portela, 2012: 50). Viewed as a database (Portela) and as the result of programming, of machine processing and reader’s intervention, Amor de Clarice is able to keep a constant shape-shifting which subverts the concept of an original or intended meaning.
The short story “Amor” (1960) was re-written or re-interpreted (Torres, 2003: 3) in Flash and used as the matrix of a multimodal and self-referential work. Video sequences, images and sound files have been added to the seminal text transforming its linear and finite appearance into a striated, chaotic and dynamic surface, or into the superimposed and vanishing verses of a poem which is being read out loud. The text is gradually overruled by hybridity and fragmentation, “diluting the rigid and inflexible borders of classification”, as claimed by Torres (Torres, 2003: 2). This shapeless and mutant text is being contaminated by oral speech (each verse corresponds to a sound file) becoming a reverberation of its own syncopated reading. The disrupted and evanescent sentences can be configured by the reader but they frequently overlap. The voice of Nuno M. Cardoso is subjected to a process of replication which is sometimes activated by the reader. Voices humming indiscernible words create an unbreakable loop. Sound and written text are interconnected as if echoing the appropriation of Lispector’s short story. This process of permutation (Portela, 2013: 202) is mirrored by the text’s auto-generation which is being fed, as stated in the title, by Clarice’s Love.
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Amor de Clarice is an animated poem in Portuguese published by Rui Torres with the collaboration of Nuno F. Ferreira. It is based on the short-story "Amor," by Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector, about a common woman life and her passions. This recreation plays with re-reading and hypertextual dislocation of tradition with animations, sounds and images. The reader can choose all the virtual combinations by clicking any word of the poem and listening to the connected videos. It is performed and recorded by Nuno Cardoso (with the collaboration of Carlos Morgado and Luis Aly, sound and Ana Carvalho, video) and later transcribed with Flash and the integration of sound, animation and interactivity. In this way the poem combines hypermediality (integration and multimedia convergence) and networking (interaction, collaboration). By doing so, Rui Torres substantiates the dynamic nature of text and language; in this process of remediation, the texts, originally conceived by Clarice Lispector, are submitted to processes of re-codification. The results are two series of 26 tests, 52 animated poems that form a net around the hypotext “Amor”. In each video-poem a menu, with four keyboard shortcuts, has been defined for an easy access to different options: to come back to the main poem, back to the previous video o directly to the next video. The hypertext breaks the linear narrative order, so the reader can choose any of the different 26 verses and go inside it listening to a voice that reproduces the verses and watching the videos created for each of them. So the computer makes concrete the act of reading and challenge the reader to explore in his own way and create a new structure.
References
PORTELA, Manuel (2012). “Autoauthor, Autotext, Autoreader: The Poem as Self-assembled Database”, in Writing Technologies, vol. 4, available at: http://www.ntu.ac.uk/writing_technologies/back_issues/vol_4/index.html.
PORTELA, Manuel (2013). Scripting Reading Motions: The Codex and the Computer as Self-Reflexive Machines. Massachusetts: MIT Press.
TORRES, Rui (2003). "Ler Clarice Lispector, re-escrevendo Amor", available at: http://www.telepoesis.net/papers/clamor.pdf.
TORRES, Rui (2011). “Amor de Clarice” (entry), in Electronic Literature Collection, vol.2, available at: http://collection.eliterature.org/2/works/torres_amordeclarice.html.
