AIC's 52nd Annual Meeting

Chance Words, by poet, translator and literary critic Augusto de Campos was conceived in 2006 by the poet himself, using the technology of the software Flash. Thus, Augusto de Campos, who had just acquired his first computer, was able to further his research on color and form as poetic elements, while adding effects made possible by the computer, such as movement and sound. It has been 26 years since De Campos' clipoems first appeared, and during that time, the works have become increasingly endangered, not only due to the end of Flash, the software with which he created his works, but also due to the obsolescence of hardware such as the CD player, which has become an increasingly rare device.

Chance Words brings to light the interesting journey leading up to the encounter between Concrete Poetry and the digital environment. Chance Words takes on new aspects with the discovery of the virtual medium, which lends itself perfectly to the experiments of the Concretist vanguard: the interactivity between reader and object was transferred to the click. The typographical experiment is stimulated by chromatic options that suggest, with varying degrees of emphasis, the gradual transformation of Chance Words into its final form, Change Worlds. Chance Words was originally built with Flash technology, which announced the end of its activities in December 2020. This particular work by Augusto de Campos, like many other significant artworks which are part of the history of digital art, was at risk of disappearing.

aarea (www.aarea.co), an online platform founded in 2017 to showcase artworks created specifically for the internet, got in touch with Augusto de Campos to remake some of his digital works that were made in the Flash program. One must take into account that the restoration of digital artworks is subject to the transformations of society and consequently find itself in a permanent state of evolution. In the version presented by aarea, the piece was reprogrammed by Adriano Ferrari, aarea’s technology consultant, in order to ensure its continued existence. But what we discovered in this process of reworking the work is that the poem Chance Words was also present in the code of Flash, since the color used in the work was guided by a special nomenclature of the code.

The presentation we propose here takes into account the "lost" poem, since the original code is no longer present in the new version of the project.