Writing is technology, perhaps man’s first invention. From the clay tablets produced by the shores of the Tigris many millennia ago to the luminous screens of our laptops, writing has been in constant development.

Öyvind Fahlström understood this aspect of language at a very young age. He wrote his concrete poetry at a time when great technological inventions such as the typewriter and the tape recorder were becoming available to the masses. His greatest achievement was to recognize quickly the impact that the new media would have on the future of writing. Fahlström’s concrete poetry thus follows the tradition of visionary writers such as Edgar Allan Poe to whom “Poetry has no goal...other than itself.”

Many of Fahlström’s concrete poems reflect the syntactical possibilities of the insurgent technology. In Morgon, for instance, the final text is achieved by the repetition of a few sentences cut at different lengths and spliced together in different arrangements. The playfulness of this poem’s syntax is inspired by the possibilities of the tape recorder as demonstrated by Pierre Schaeffer in his musique concrete.

Last year, during two very hot weeks in New York, Mattias Nilsson and I met to discuss the possibility of ”translating” some of Fahlström’s poems to the new digital technology that allows for animation and interaction. Our goal was to illuminate the artifice in Fahlström’s texts without interfering with their simplicity. After all, compared to the work of other concrete poets, Fahlström’s texts seem less preoccupied with graphic acrobatics.

We also hoped that through animation his texts would become more accessible to those who might find experimental writing dry or impenetrable. Hence, we selected two texts from Bord that we believe are fundamental to understanding Fahlström’s practice as a writer. Morgon reflects the influence that the new media — the typewriter and the tape recorder — exerted in his writing. Bobb is a suite of variations on a theme, addressing the issue of permutation, an aspect that became increasingly important in his work.

A. S. Bessa