Perhaps the most important aspect of combinatorial and chance-determined works is the surprise moment: the results of chance productions are unpredictable, they display features which astound even the artists themselves. Chance is effectively deployed as a tool to transgress the subjective powers of imagination, to go beyond the producer’s limits of comprehension in an attempt to arrive at results which transcend both cultural, psychological and intellectual boundaries.
This hybrid between poem and game forces the recipient into activity, and evokes the oft-cited game state that Eugen Gomringer has defined as another important feature of concrete poetry. The constellation, Gomringer writes, is an offer of a fixed set of parameters, within which the reader is asked to take up the ball that the poet threw and to playfully create meaning by combining and relating the given elements in a creative fashion.
This hybrid between poem and game forces the recipient into activity, and evokes the oft-cited game state that Eugen Gomringer has defined as another important feature of concrete poetry. The constellation, Gomringer writes, is an offer of a fixed set of parameters, within which the reader is asked to take up the ball that the poet threw and to playfully create meaning by combining and relating the given elements in a creative fashion.
