Formerly known as UbuWeb's Found + Insane section, we've redesigned and renamed it Outsiders, reflecting broader cultural trends toward the legitimization of Outsider work, be it in the visual, musical, or literary arts.

UbuWeb's Historical section primarily documents the trajectory of visual and concrete poetry, beginning with Simias Rhodius's "Wings of Eros in Theocritus", dating from 1516, and continuing all the way into the late 1970s.

The visual poem is a word design in a designed world. It can't be mere coincidence that the founders of the concrete poetry movement in both Europe and Brazil were involved not only with the world of contemporary avant-garde poetry, painting …

Ideogram: appeal to nonverbal communication. Concrete poem communicates its own structure: structure-content. Concrete poem is an object in and by itself, not an interpreter of exterior objects and/ or more or less subjective feelings. Its material word (sound, visual form, semantical charge).

For the visual component of the work (patched together from four separate performances at the Anthology Film Archives in New York), Jacobs utilizes a modified version of the 19th century Magic Lantern, a device used to project still images like the modern slide projector.

Many fine works are being done in mixed media: paintings which incorporate poems within their visual fields, for instance. But one knows which is which. In intermedia, on the other hand, the visual element (painting) is fused conceptually with the words.

The increasingly prolific American alternative film scene took strength from the new prestige of the visual arts, especially in New York.

[The following are excerpts of texts embedded in a 1941 sketchbook, as transcribed by Jacqueline Porret-Forel. They can be read here as small poems or as markers of the range of interests in the larger works. The visual images presented on ubuweb are, however, from distinctively different pieces.] The living Lantern of Ouchy Opera

Concrete texts are often closely related to poster texts due to their reliance upon typography and visual effect; that is, their aesthetic communication scheme often corresponds to that of advertisements.

The visual aspect. Concrete language structures either do not follow the traditional verse and line order or they follow it in such a limited way that one is not reminded of traditional forms (this refers only, to poetry).