,excritura,

  This Concrete Poem was ex-written in an attempt to represent a shift, or maybe a transformation of the written (both spoken and artistic) languages torwards a saturated information era. A way of analysing this poem is by dividing it in 3 layers: The visual structure; The words “escrita”, “excrita”, “escritura”, “excritura” and their possible meanings; The way this poem was actually written (or maybe “discovered”) using the Library of Babel and its mithology.
 
  Visual Structure: The yellow-ish background might resemble an old paper, but digital. The font could also remind a typewritter. This could lead to an image of a person typewritting on a screen, in a sense of two incompatible technologies, but also in the sense of typewriting descending to keyboard writing, in the same way that itself was ascended by handwriting. The words of this poem were very carefully written and positioned. The difference betwen the word length, the line length, the distance between word and the word repetition create this kind of aliasing effect that resulted in these backward and forward movements that are seen. There is a whispered suggestion here of being out of phase, and the aliasing interpretation can also bring us a notion of speed, of being slightly slower, or slightly faster than the “line velocity”.
 
  The words and their meanings: The words take some advantage from the portuguese laguage. For example, the word “escrita” can mean “written” as something that was written in a piece of paper, or in a sentence like “written language”. It is also a synonym of “escritura”, for example in the context: the act of writing. Then, of course, the artistic exchange from s to x to indicate the action of ex-writing, post-writing, maybe indicating the end of a way of writing. Writing posthumously to the end of written language. In addition to that, there is a very interesting use of the word “escritura” in the music academy: escritura musical (musical writing). This definition is not about the act of writing musical notes on the score, but rather the process before writitng, before conceptualizing the notes and specific instruments. The raw compositional idea devoid of musical language and notation. That is the main interpretation and inspiration for the word “excritura” - The raw idea that culminates into ex-written language. Concluding: You have the end of writing as soon as the idea of excritura appears, and then a shift occurs in the way we transform our ideas into readable information.
 
  Writing, Discovering and the Library of Babel: To season everything, we add the “meta” layer, which was the act of (ex)writing the actual poem. The Library of Babel is a fictional tale/written image made by Jorge Luis Borges. It imagines an infinite library, consited of an infinite number of connected hexagonal rooms, each one, with 4 walls, 5 shelfs per wall, 32 books per shelf, 410 pages per book, each page containing the same amount of characters. This library stores all of the possible combinations of characters of the english alphabet, including spaces, commas and dots. You can argue that all of the books ever written in english, or book translations from other languages, can be found whith their pages scattered throughout the library; The immediate result of this proposition means that All of the books and knowledge that will ever be written in english by humanity, at any given time, can be found inside this library, before it was even written by someone with a process of “escritura”. (all of the wrong and misleading versions of these books are there as well).
 
  This synthesizes an idea that with access to that much information, we don’t need to actually transform our “escritura” into “escrita” anymore if we can find it - hence excritura, a process of searching through infinite random information and finding what has already been abstractly written. But how is all this nonsense related to the actual process of producing this poem? The thing is: The whole library of babel exists today, and is accessible on the web.
 
  The libraryofbabel.info website was implemented by Jonathan Basile, and it produces all of the possible combinations that can be written on a 3200 characteer page with english letters, spaces, commas and dots. It is generated using a clever hashing algorithm, in a way that you can index all of the pages, and search for specific content that a page may contain. I wrote the ,excritura, poem, character by character, inside this search mechaninsm, until I found the right addres, where this poem is indexed inside the digital library. The index size to the page is as large as the content of the poem itself, but it was, arguably, already there, waiting to be found, waiting to be ex-written.