On a cartesian poetics: 3D plots in André Vallias's digital creations

Abstract

The award-winning Brazilian visual artist and poet André Vallias, internationally renowned for his creations in electronic literature and digital arts, frequently uses cyberspace potentialities to engender his multisemiotic works. Besides the more common elements within interartistic dialogues, such as images, colors, volumes, movement and sounds, Vallias often adds to his creations a kind of sign that is unusual in works of art: 3D plots. These are tridimensional visual representations (but expressed on bidimensional surfaces, such as computer screens and smartphone screens) of algebraic functions built with AutoCad software - often used in Engineering and Architecture projects -, to which Vallias adds artistic value by combining them with traditional elements of the lyrical genre, such as versification and rhythm. In his works, these plots trigger one or more aesthetic effects, such as the iconic representation of geometric shapes from the referential world; the deconstruction of reductionist antinomies, like subjectivity/objectivity (hence, poetic thought/mathematical thought); or the symbolic allusion to intangible elements of lyrical texts, especially phenomena from the phonological and the visual strata. In this context, we herein analyze three works by André Vallias - Nous n'avons pas compris Descartes (1997), De verso (s.d.) and Oratorio (2004) - in order to map out the aesthetical outcomes of his use of mathematical 3D plots as artistic resources that denaturalize our perception of the literary and its connections with unexpected semiotic systems.