I am flattered with an invitation that are both pleasure and challenge: to make an introduction to Spams Trashes, a cd-rom by experimental poet Clement Padin, from Uruguay.

It was grateful to count on visual creation visual diagramation by Regina Célia Pinto2 , from Rio de Janeiro, with whom I have had the honor and pleasure of making many collaborative works.

What we are doing represents, undoubtedly, an art. An art also of making friend through emails.

The history is interesting: while I accessed Jim Andrews's site (Canada) and sent an email commenting my impressions on Vispo.com, I was invited to make part of egroup Webartery. Later, Jim asked me to present some comments on Brazilian Digital Ar and Poetry, and, then, I have been preparing Brazilian Digital Art and Poetry on the Web since November, 2000. It was how I knew Padin's work which is also hosted in Jim Andrews's guest web pages. As as member of Webartery, I received an email from Reiner Strasser (Germany), asking me to read the Portuguese translation of his interview which was being published in Arte on Line, an electronic magazine edited by Regina Célia Pinto, Marcelo Frazão and Paulo Vilela. And I "met" Regina. During the same year in a semester course at Unicamp, I started reading La poesia experimental latinoamericana: 1950-2000 (The Latin-American experimental poetry: 1950-2000), an essay by Uruguayan poet.

It is not by chance that terms like web and net are largely used in electronic and digital media as Internet and WWW. Besides being the art of making friends, even virtual ones for some time, this Internet contact leads us to create collaborative works: we write articles in group, we create art only existing because we have had the opportunity of exchanging emails.

From the surprise and the surprise of invitation, while navigating in Spams Trashes, an intriguing question came from the title. Spam is an English word that means a publication of the same news in several egroups, what generally results in a waste of space in disk and of bandwidth in transmission media. It is generally marketing email, always volumous, with nothing of interest, which always ends without being read. It is like to receive panphlets through snail mail. Spamming is the act of saturating Usenet listservs, email boxes or other on line foruns, by presenting indesirable information, while trash is worthless material or writing.

I was in charge of revising the English translation of spams trashes, as Regina Célia Pinto translated them from Spanish to Portuguese. The information exchanges and questions were so rich that the whole exchanged emails should be part of the work, in the same way that Jim Andrews collects all emails from Webartery, giving them the characteristic of collective work, under the title of Webartery Email Correspondence (1999-present).

This cd-rom has more than sixty web pages: twenty spams trashes in Spanish, Portuguese and English, author's biographical notes, introductory note and credits.

Spams Trashes characterizes by the circunstantial, by the changing of referential and conative function of language into poetic function, by using the resource of the art of the word and image in order to provoke strangeness. And by this way we can notice what is the most interesting: the comic side that is revelead in an unespected way. Padin uses alternativelly either the word, or the image, or even both of them, for saying that our Internet world is also composed by repetition, but we equally can make it a happy moment, a moment of joke, of thinking, and so on.

It is seen even in the moment that the poet creates Padin Producciones Inc. and gives to his enterprise a slogan: "for a better like, with no virus and attachments". It also appears in the way he "justifies" the creation of his most recent work: "Tired of receiving many undesirable Spams, I decided to do something with them".

One needs to be a great poet to look at the quotidian aspects of these emails and change them into poetic messages. One should use the most different verbal and visual resources to disconditionate and break the frontiers between the referential and the poetic. Another aptitude remains in the questions of the skillness of creating a seducing language for the reader-navigator.

In fact the strangeness already appears in the title. Spams Trashes. Is it poetry? Is it art?

It is in this clime of creation, thinking, irony and wanting for a better world, that we can appreciate, in the order we want to start reading (the digital poetry cd-rom allows us many entries and several readings) "The New Millenium Virus", "Creating a Better World", "The New Martyrs", among others.

The work treats about the thinking of our present time, and it is a manifestation against the repetition to prove that we need it in order to establish the new, the unused, the unspeakable.

Itu, September, 2002.

1. From Brazil, poet, writer, researcher, professor at Universidade São Judas Tadeu, in São Paulo, is currently studying digital poetry for getting his PhD degree in Communication and Semiotics Program at the Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo; wrote Almeida Júnior através dos tempos (Almeida Junior throughout the time) (1983) and Cores, forma, luz, movimento: a poesia de Cesário Verde (Colours, form, light, movement: the Cesario Verde's poetry) (coming soon), besides many articles in printed and electronic magazines. Some of his researches are in the page Brazilian Digital Art and Poetry on the Web (http://www.vispo.com/misc/BrazilianDigitalPoetry.htm) and he made some digital poetries with Fatima Lasay, from Philippines (Imaginero in: http://www.geocities.com/imaginero/poetry and E-m[ag]inero in: http://www.digitalmedia.upd.edu.ph/digiteer/gegenort/), and with Regina Célia Pinto, from Brazil (Lago Mar Algo Barco Chuva in http://lagoalgo.cjb.net).

2. From Brazil, researcher, visual artist and teacher, she was born and lives in Rio de Janeiro. Earned a teaching certificate in Drawing and Art at the Escola de Belas Artes of the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, 1974 - 1977. Has a Master's degree in Art History, specializing in the Anthropology of Art / EBA, UFRJ, 1994. She has written a variety of academic works. Nowadays, she has been devoting herself to finding a specific artistic language for computers and holding one-woman and joint exhibitions that ally the real and the virtual. She edited (with Marcelo Frazão and Paulo Villela) Arte on Line, an e-magazine about Art and Technology. Her net.art works are Amazing Library (http://bibliothecadasmaravilhas.cjb.net) and the International Museum of the Essential and Beyond That ( http://www.arteonline.arq.br)

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