Cyberspace, digital processing, telepresence, multimedia, Internet, virtual reality, computer animation, artificial intelligence, robotics, expert systems, nanotechnology, electronic photography, fiber optics, three-dimensional sound, fractal geometry, non-linear dynamics, chaos and complexity, artificial life, fuzzy logic, neural networks, genetic programming, ... and ... what about poetry?

VIRTUAL POETRY ! ... an absolute necessity to impel a kind of creation linked to facts whose emergence –for their morphological and/or structural characteristics– would be improbable in the natural sphere or rather requires by force a rational and constructive human performance, as well as the surpassing of redundant events that detain poetic production in already totally assumed instances and away from an aesthetic function.

Behind the indispensable conjunction between human creative work and the use of electronic media that has enormously widened all fields of work, providing extremely valuable tools for the development of ideas, the entire creative process must progress in the virtual space offered by the machine. In it and with the aid of adequate software, signs acquire multiple proportions through the application of functions which go as far as to intrinsically modify their habitual properties, permitting the generation even of unexpected systems due to their radical configuration and behavior.

The application of computers has not only made possible the access to a custom-definable logical or virtual space (which ignores the coordinates defined in a gravitational space, having no privileged directions or immovable constraints) or to a large series of algorithmic operations, and so on, but also it has fundamentally inaugurated an essentially different field, for which it is necessary to produce new languages which will give birth to a new aesthetics. Moreover, with regard to virtual reality, and its extraordinary scope, this proposal will have to avoid the simple transposition of already stale situations sustained by totally assimilated codes of other non-electronic environments.

The digital (computerized, therefore synthetic) world that deeply differs from any physical, real or analogical realization, exceeding the limitations of these and the usual categories of experience, bases its preeminence on the mathematical or numerical character of the elements that it admits and on the possibility of openly fixing correlations between virtual space, objects and subjects, as no other medium has yet allowed.

Faced with such a state of affairs and beginning with the innovations pushed by the last constructive avant-gardes and from a philosophical and epistemological viewpoint consistent with the current state of the sciences, there is still a pressing need to project the brand-new theoretical profiles of this frankly revolutionary technology and the events technically compatible with a n-dimensional virtual space –that is, in conditions of being included and treated in this space.

Towards such effects, VIRTUAL POEMS or VPOEMS are interactive digital entities capable of (i) integrating themselves in –or rather being generated within– a virtual world (here called "Virtual Poetry Domain" or VPD) through software or routines (for the development of virtual reality applications and real time explorations) that confer on it diverse modes of manipulation, navigation, behavior and alternative properties (in the presence of environmental constraints and modes of interactions), evolution, sound emission, animated morphing, and so on; (ii) being experienced by means of partially or fully immersive interface devices (vpoems support "walkthroughs" and "flybys"); (iii) assuming an aesthetic dimension (in accordance with the semiotic and entropic concept of information), not reduced to a simple phenomenon of communication (as mere flow of data); and (iv) staying defined around a hypertextual structure (open and multiple circulation of digital information) but above all involving hyperdiscourses (characterized by a strong semantic non-linearity).

As far as its condition of support goes, the VPD is a field that substitutes for the traditional printed one, which only establishes a superficial and static contact hardly even operative respecting the exigencies of very broad versatility and of a global artificiality that are fully imposed even for contemporary poetic production, not to mention that of the future. But also it surpasses all those more or less established techniques of canalization of poetic messages, because it breaks in a definitive way with the first support that engenders and sustains them: real physical space. Vpoems and VPD possess logical existence, and, as such, they have no parallel whatever, becoming themselves in entities with an "actuational" power (or power to perform, relative to the resources put into action) as has never been seen or experienced until now.

The opening of the Virtual Poetry Domains to the telematic computer network will quickly facilitate the execution of virtual teleportations of subjects ("explorers") toward "VP based computers" (anywhere on the planet or in physical space), achieving a remote, simulated and exploratory experience of "reading". This is completely unprecedented and even today is difficult to evaluate in its most extraordinary dimension and possibilities.

Virtual Poetry, such as has here been expounded, does not imply already the surmounting of a certain linguistic code, the aggregate of a topic, some formal conquest, another segmentation of a continuum, the use of a barely disseminated support ... as very important as these may be. VP imposes the initiation of a new era in the general poetic creation, freeing the human imagination from the least real restriction, delivering to it a vast and virgin field in which everything conceivable (as construct) will find its channel into reality and for which the same human experience associated with the machine (as mixed or cybernetic system) will elevate its character to levels superior to everything known.

Criteria for a Virtual Poetry - Ladislao Pablo Györi - Buenos Aires - May 1995.