Augusto de Campos

Augusto de Campos (born 14 February 1931, São Paulo) is a Brazilian writer who (with his brother Haroldo de Campos) was a founder of the Concrete poetry movement in Brazil. He is also a translator, music critic and visual artist.

Augusto de Campos (2015)

In 1952, he founded the literary magazine Noigandres with his brother. Then in 1956 he and his associates declared the beginning of a movement. Since then he has had a number of collections and honors. From the 1950s to 1970s his main works were directed to visual poetry but from 1980 on, he intensified his experiments with the new media, presenting his poems on electric billboard, videotext, neon, hologram and laser, computer graphics, and multimedia events, involving sound and music, as the plurivocal reading of CIDADECITYCITÉ (with Cid Campos), 1987/1991. Four of his holographic poems (in cooperation with the holographer Moysés Baumstein ) were included in the exhibitions TRILUZ (1986) and IDEHOLOGIA (1987). A videoclippoem, PULSAR, with music by Caetano Veloso, was produced in 1984 in an Intergraph high resolution computer station. BOMB POEM and SOS, with music by his son, Cid Campos, were animated in a Silicon Graphic Computer Station of the University of São Paulo, 1992-3. His cooperation with Cid, begun in 1987 resulted in POESIA É RISCO (Poetry is Risk), a CD launched by PolyGram in 1995 and developed in a multimedia performance with the same title, a "verbivocovisual" show of poetry/music/image, which gained video-editing by Walter Silveira, and has been presented in several cities in Brazil and abroad. An installation assembling his digital poetic animations. In 2017 he was honoured by the Janus Pannonius Grand Prize for Poetry (award of the Hungarian PEN Club).