From vegetal to digital in Árvore, by Rui Torres

Abstract

Oppositely to the invisibility plants are usually relegated to in daily and literary discourses, Árvore, an electronic work of generative poetry, devised by Rui Torres (2008), gives prominence to endemic vegetal species from the north of Portugal. By rearranging excerpts from canonic twentieth-century Portuguese poems that talk about plants, this piece of software enacts an intertextual reticular structure to compose new verses where different poems and vegetal species are hybridized, approximating the semantic fields of Botany and writing. To analyze such piece of digital art, this paper addresses the rationale underneath how Árvore works and some of its possible poetic products; we herein adopt as analytical lenses some conceptual metaphors from the sphere of vegetality, such as ecosystem, vegetal memory, rhizome, grafting and plagiotropism. This investigation evidences the complex intertextual weaving inherent to the poetic generation processes of Árvore, which, in turn, posit reading procedures that must be rhizomatic too, somewhere between the botanic and the digital.