Computer mimetics in visible performance: the late work of the Portuguese experimental poet Ernesto Melo e Castro
Authors: Dos Reis Jorge 
Published: October 2023

Ernesto Melo e Castro, Covilhã 1932–202, is a textile engineer and Portuguese artist, trained in Bradford. He dedicated is life to textile design and to the technical direction of textile engineering companies. At the same time, he developed research in the field of Brazilian concrete poetry and Portuguese experimental poetry; being a fundamental and very innovative author that used the computer in the last phase of its journey as an artist.His work is based on an ideographic structure where the visual composition, which uses exclusively typography, is based on the principle of the ideogram, where the general graphics of the piece provide the idea for the visual piece. Melo e Castro makes use of lyrics, lines, arrows and various symbols that depart from the conventional music agenda, approaching the notation practices of the authors of American experimental music.His later works, particularly ‘Interactive Sound Poetry’ makes use of a typeface not printed but drawn. Melo e Castro elaborates a capital letter register that mimics the homogeneity of typography. The gestural character of the lyrics shows a phonetic intensity that can be inferred from the writing itself, fixed in the score, where the rapidity of the gesture and the erasure are dominant characteristics. This score is based on a computer interactive creation around phonetics and sound, making use of a computer, keyboard and synthesizer with words amplified and where the user performs poetic sequences randomly as he presses the keys. The observer is faced with a set of words: 'freedom', 'love', 'action', 'chance' and 'peace', within a circle, functioning as reading pivots, providing combinations of graphically noted words.The user makes associations and sequences, learns as a musician learns a piece of computer music, producing conceptual chains of words and the associations will not necessarily be logical or grammatical, and can be casual and therefore produce new and unexpected meanings in the sound and conceptual plane. This piece, being neither singing nor speaking, fits within a mediation between singing and speaking, a technique systematized by Arnold Schoenberg, which constitutes one of the most important criteria in the sound character of the work, starting from a study of the basic phonetics of Portuguese.To confirm this research we are now carrying out an observation around the work ‘Negative Music’ that is not developed as in the works of John Cage in an appreciation of musical silence, although this fact seems at first sight evident. It is a piece for the eyes and not for the ears. The computer game of silence represents first of all a response to the paternal authority of Melo e Castro and a metaphor against the Salazar dictatorship in Portugal. With this in mind, it is first of all a semiotic poem of conceptual visuality; In a second analysis this poem becomes a performative interpretation. In addition to its functional aspect, Melo e Castro’s notation presents a strong graphic and typographic bent, with a notorious concern to produce an object of visual characteristics where there is a balance between its constituents.