Beschrijving
In February 1964, the Antwerp poet Gerd Segers (1938) experimented with distorted signals on his television set and photographed some of the tuned results.
Two details of these early screenshots were reproduced full page in issue 25 of the experimental poetry magazine Het Kahier X (February 1966), edited by Ben Klein and Gerd Segers.
Segers and Klein were pioneers in exploring and visualising the boundaries of poetry. In the sixties, both poets collaborated in surprising performances and the realisation of poetry in new forms.
The six surviving original photographs of Segers’ TV screen experiment, reproduced for this edition, were first shown in the exhibition De nieuwe pohesie is! at Demian Books in 2022.
In the spring of 1963, inspired by the space race, Gerd Segers assembled and photographed the concrete poem Eerste gedicht op de maan (First Poem on the Moon). Segers’ poetic artwork makes an imaginary moon landing, years before the first physical artwork arrives there. The small sculpture Fallen Astronaut by Antwerp artist Paul Van Hoeydonck was left on the moon during the Apollo 15 mission in 1971.
Some ideas travel faster than light, and poetry proves to be no exception.
