Concrete poetry's historical move from the poetic line to the visual linguistic constellation, predicted parallel moves in computing from command line interface to graphical user interfaces. With concrete poetry's implied dynamism and hyperspace, the concrete poets seemed to be begging for multimedia to enter into their practice. Since the technology was not yet available, they stuck with the page. With the advent of the web, we've seen the fulfillment of this tendency.

UbuWeb's Contemporary section focuses on the rich tradition bestowed by the 1950s pioneers in electronic form. As more artists flock to the web, many become unknowing practitioners of concrete poetry as streaming and morphing of language moves to the forefront of graphical web-based practices, be it fine or commercial art. As such, we hope to present a selection of artworks that historically fulfill or extend the practices of the original practitioners of concrete poetry in the cyber medium.

Works included in this section, on the whole, must not be able to be reproduced on the page in static form. They must be medium specific, employing text, image, or text + image in dynamic ways. Java, Flash, back-end programming or simple animated .gifs are the common parlance. As web technologies continue to develop, UbuWeb's Contemporary section will showcase them as they relate to the historical development of concrete poetry.

This section has undergone several changes recently, as noted above. We have maintained an archive of older works that do not fit UbuWeb's Contemporary technical requirements but are nevertheless excellent, and in many cases, important static works of concrete poetry. That archive can be found here.

For submissions information, please see here.