Jacques Donguy: EXPANDED LANGUAGE / ERWEITERTE SPRACHE

In this performance accompanying the exhibition »Open Codes. Living in Digital Worlds«, Jacques Donguy performs with typography, images, sound and loops to create digital poetry and expand our understanding of language, writing, visual and auditory perception.

Jacques Donguy has been the French pioneer of »Digital Poetry« since 1983, when the first PCs (Personal Computers) appeared. He is also a specialist of experimental poetry and the translator of Augusto de Campos, the recent laureate of the Janus Pannonius prize for poetry. In 2017, Jacques Donguy published a book about his works at Presses du Réel, »Pd-extended 1, poésie numérique en Pure Data« [Digital Poetry with Pure Data], with screenshots and all his theoretical texts from 1984 to 2015.

In his performances, he uses random processes: beginning with typography only (Atari 520ST), continuing with aleatory typography, 2D and 3D images, short videos, looping sounds to create a verbi voco visual expanded writing.

After the nineteenth century was dominated by print technology, thus by the visual sense (McLuhan), we can work with the two main senses in the time of computer technology: the visual and the auditory. An adult uses 3000 words in his everyday life. With computer technology, the aim is to go towards a generalized semantics.

Video documentary:

ZKM | Videostudio

Camera: Benedict Meyer, Andy Koch
Editing: Bastian Buchgraber