Toward an Embodied Reading Experience: Augusto de Campos's Kinetic Poetry and Its Digital Afterlives

Abstract: As technology evolves, Augusto de Campos has adapted early concrete poems to media formats beyond the page. His works, spanning the verbivocovisual range, include concrete, visual, kinetic, video and digital poetry, poetic sculpture, painting, experimental music, and performance, and elicit kinesthetic practices of embodied reading . Reinventing poems from one medium to another, de Campos's works become material, three dimensional, sonorous, and kinetic, encouraging a multi-sensorial reading experience. His poems move and acquire a corporeal existence, actualizing a kineticism that was always present in a virtual or potential state. For de Campos, kinetic poetry is a type of concrete poetry in which motion becomes a primary way to signify, endowing words with expressive force and transmuting them into animated word-objects. As words drift, appear, and disappear, whether viewed on a computer screen, a virtual reality headset, or projected against surfaces, the poem becomes an assemblage that the reader can relate to in an embodied way. Readers experience de Campos's poetry as an "interactive ensemble" (Shellhorse). Through multiple transcreations poems accrue affective and semantic charge, and increased physicality. By returning to the same poems, de Campos generates multilayered poetic assemblages, materializing William Carlos Williams's definition of the poem as a machine: a mechanism that the embodied reader can experience through multiple senses.