Abstract

A theoretical investigation on digital textual creation necessarily implies a reflection on language and thought, on the combinatory basis of verbal and written discourses.

The history of “ars combinatoria” reveals the extension of this instrument: the I Ching, the Art of Memory, the Kabbalists methods, the movable concentric wheels of Ramon Lull, the strategies of surrealists and dadaists, the works of Mallarmé, the potential literature of the Oulipo, Brazilian concrete poetry, the fictions of Roussel and Borges, the cut-ups of William Burroughs, the wordplays of Marcel Duchamp, the diagram-based semiologies of Pierce and Greimas.
Those textual procedures have been reconceived as elements of a evolutive process since the emergence of the computer, considered as a semiotic machine able to mathematically recombine signs.

This new writing methodology proposes a creative dialogue between the manifested linguistic structures and modifications induced by computational systems. The electroscript is writing a new chapter in the history of language.

• ARTUR MATUCK, Brazil