F \…ut \…ur \…e F \…or \…WO \…RD
		      
 What is 'Future For WORD'?…Future For WORD is a multi-media, all-electronic exhibition featuring visual, experimental, interactive, and new media poetry…Future For WORD is 'poetry by other means' to the extreme….

The poet is no longer facing a white page. He or she faces a
complex set of electronic apparatus and their multiple possibilities
to generate text and image in color and in movement.
—E.M. de Melo e Castro, "Videopoetry"

CURRENT EXHIBITION CONTENT:

<> A Selected History of Visual Poetry A computer slide-show of 'vispo' through the ages--from medieval times through the 20th Century, compiled by Nico Vassilakis.	

<>A Video Poetry Viewing Station/Library A collection of film/video/computer-originated works [video-poetry = "the marriage of image + language"] featuring over 100 moving-image works from Canada, the U.S., and Australia.

<>The Cyber Poetry Portal An on-line index of web/computer-based poetic work [concrete*, code, sound, kinetic, inter-grammatic, and ergodic poems] by over 50 cyber-poets/artists worldwide, viewable through two internet stations. 

<>'Poetic Context' An interactive [touch screen based], text-to-voice, poem-making work by program designer/artist: Phillip Reay http://www.metacosm.com/labs/phillipreay.shtml, in association with Metacosm Design Labs.

<>'Digital Canvas' An interactive, LCD/DVD 'canvas' featuring the electronic cine-poetry of award-winning digital artist George Aguilar. Click HERE [http://www.george.aguilar.com/canvas.htm] to learn more about the Digital Canvas.

<> The {Dynamic} Visual Poetry Landscape System, the exhibition's keystone feature: a prototype multi-user, inter-active installation/creative tool based upon an original integration of Speech Recognition, Virtual Environment, and 3-D Computer Graphics….this one-of-a-kind installation was developed as a  collaboration between Peter Oppenheimer [at the Human Interface Technology Lab, UW <http://www.hitl.washington.edu/people/peter/>] and Michael Ricciardi ….the landscape system will permit users to "see speech become text become visual poetry"…users of the system will be able to create dynamic visual poetry in real time ….to see DVPLS in action, check out the ten minute promo-doc on this website.
 
EXHIBITION CURATOR: Michael Anthony Ricciardi

TO VIEW THE TEN MINUTE VIDEO,
visit
www.futureforword.org

* VISUAL/CONCRETE POETRY: Claus Bremer wrote, "Concrete poetry gives no results. It yields a process of discovery. It is motion. Its motion ends in different readers in different ways. Concrete poetry says formally what it means to say, or means to say what its form says. Its form is its meaning, its meaning, its form." (1964)

A Very Brief History of Vispo
One can neither simply read concrete poetry nor view it as a work of visual art because is an amalgamation of both verbal and visual representation. As such, the fusion of form and meaning depends on not only the use of language, but also the visual arrangement and manipulation of letters and words.
In Japanese concrete poetry, artists have used the inherently pictographic nature of the
language to achieve expression of meaning directly through the form of the poem. The language is intrinsically suited for concrete poetry, and Mary Ellen Solt called the ancient eastern character an "ancestor" of the concrete poem. Artists using Western, phonetic languages must contend with linguistic recognition, a semantic hurdle bridging form and meaning.    The long tradition of visual poetry stretches back to include such artists as Ezra Pound, Theo Van Doesburg, Guillaume Apollinaire, Stephane Mallarmé, Charles L. Dodgson (Lewis Carrol), George Herbert, and further back to the beginnings of writing itself.