The Digital Avant-garde - Digital Culture - page 72

relation to the COBRA and Situationist groups it preceded, the
Romanian emigré Isidore Isou's Lettriste movement presented a
fascinating attempt to think about information in its most basic
form. Isou's project was to deconstruct words to their constituent
parts and to synthesize poetry and music, in order to produce 'a
single art' with no trace of 'any original difference'. Despite Isou's
megalomania, his ideas attracted, briefly, a number of adherents,
including Gil Wolman and Guy Debord. As a movement Lettrisme
was short-lived, but it nevertheless showed some interesting charac-
teristics in relation to the emerging information paradigm. Isou's
central theory was that the evolution of any art was characterized by
alternate 'amplic' and 'chiselling' phases. The former is a period of
expansion and the latter of refinement. Isou dated the amplic phase
in poetry to , at which point Baudelaire initiated the chiselling

phase by reducing narrative to anecdote, Rimbaud reduced anecdote
to lines and words, Mallarmé reduced words to space and sound
and Dada destroyed words completely. 12 Lettrisme was intended to
create visual works using the letter as the basic form, thus to initiate
a new amplic phase. Lettriste productions consisted of paintings
using graphic elements such as alphabets, Morse code and so on,
to substantiate Isou's claims to have resystemized all the sciences
of language and signification into a new discipline named 'hyper-
graphology'. 13 Whatever the merits of Isou's theories and claims and
of the work produced in their name, Lettrisme reflected the emerg-
ing dominance of signs and information in the post-war period. It
is unlikely that Isou would have seen the potential of computers
for his practice at the time. Nevertheless his concern with codes
and systems of signification, as well as his attempt to dismantle the
distinction between visual and literary production, and his concern
with scientific systemization, anticipate many of the concerns and
methods of those now working with digital media. Given the obscu-
rity in which his work has languished it is hard to claim that Isou
has had much direct influence on such work. The most that can be

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