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My intent in this paper is to elaborate on the general concept of 'experimental poetry', its potential application in interpreting poetry as an experimental artistic practice, and to highlight some specific situations in postmedia and flexible work in art, subverting the boundaries between poetry and the visual arts, that is, between society and culture.
Keywords: avant-garde / avant-garde art / poetry and visual arts / experimental poetry / neo-avantgarde / post-avantgarde / postmodernity / art and society / intermediality
The Experiment and the New: Contexts
The concept of research emerged in modern art when it seemed as if the poetic platforms of creativity as a technical craft had been exhausted. In art, research is viewed as an open activity that characterises working in art:
The important difference between research and non-research art therefore seems predicated on the fact that non-research art sets out from established values, whereas research art seeks to establish those values and its own self as a value. Indeed, the first aesthetics that dealt with the very problem of art and its place among the activities of the spirit were born when art was first posited as research and when it first undertook to explore itself. (Argan 154)
Artists act, the bounds of their activities are consciously marked, although not every step in their activities, i.e. research, can be envisioned and they face discovering and choosing new domains of action. Research in art is often posited as a heuristic procedure. Heuristic is a self-motivated type of research that, in the absence of a precise programme or algorithm of research, proceeds from one instance to another, using the method of trial and error. Therefore it denotes the principle of researching/exploring, in the sense of a creative programme. Heuristic research/exploration treats the totality of reflecting and the procedures of seeking and finding new, i.e. authentic realisations or possibilities of producing a work of art. Heuristic research accepts in advance the possibilities of failure, error, fallacy, illusion, and mistake. Its procedure does not rest on a system of rules, but on discovering, confirming, and rejecting what has been accomplished. Art is thereby reoriented, away from 'creating works of art' (Heidegger's Ge-Stell) into the world and toward an uncertain quest or research leading toward the...