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.

摘要 屡获殊荣的巴西视觉艺术家、诗人安德烈·瓦利亚斯（André Vallias）以电子文学与数字艺术创作享誉国际，他常借助赛博空间（cyberspace）的潜能打造多符号（multisemiotic）作品。除跨艺术对话中常见的图像、色彩、体量、动态与声音等元素外，瓦利亚斯还常在创作中加入一种艺术作品中罕见的符号：三维绘图（3D plots）。这类绘图是依托AutoCAD软件（常用于工程与建筑项目）构建的代数函数的三维视觉呈现，却需在计算机屏幕、智能手机屏幕等二维载体上展示；瓦利亚斯将其与抒情文体的传统元素——如格律与节奏——相结合，赋予其艺术价值。在其作品中，这类绘图可引发多重美学效应：比如对现实世界几何形态的具象化呈现、对还原论式二律背反的解构（如主观性/客观性，由此引申出诗性思维与数学思维的对立），或是对抒情文本中非实体元素的象征性暗喻，尤其聚焦于语音层与视觉层的相关现象。在此背景下，本文将分析安德烈·瓦利亚斯的三部作品——《Nous n’avons pas compris Descartes》(1997)、《De verso》(无创作年份)与《Oratorio》(2004)，旨在梳理他以数学三维绘图（3D plots）作为艺术资源所产生的美学效果，这类资源能够消解我们对文学的固有认知，并揭示文学与非常规符号系统之间的关联。