"Paradigm Shift" Participants

ABSTRACT
Poetry is/or Art: Multimedia Based Poetry vs. Language Based Media Art in the History of Art and Poetry in Latvia „[..]the artist or poet uses a particular medium not because it is „better”than others, but because it seems most relevant at his or her moment”. [Perloff, 2006: 160] Contemporary cultural situation can be described by the expansion of multimodal forms of expression. Even in everyday life, we have multiple media available for communication in every moment. A characteristic phenomenon of the convergence culture are so called differential texts [Perloff, 2006: 146] – texts that use different media and communication modes / codes and exist in different physical forms. Those texts when using natural human language as one of the codes can be made by poets as well as artists. Must we consider it as (and include in the history of) art or literature? Is the division of both needed? Is there any important differences of aesthetic perception between media art using linguistic elements and multimedial poetry? What institutional consequences the development of the art forms on the border between poetry and media art can bring? In our paper we will develop a discussion around those questions using examples from the recent history of art and poetry in Latvia. Perlofff, M. Screening the Page/ Paging the Screen: Digital Poetics and the Differental Text. In: Morris, A., Swiss, T. (eds.) New Media Poetics. Contexts. Technotexts, and Theories. – Cambridge, London, MIT Press, 2006. Pp. 160