Reabracadabra AI-researched
Eduardo Kac, 1985
Videotex/Minitel telematic poetry
Pioneering telematic poetry created for Brazil's Videotexto system, exploiting the medium's low-resolution character graphics and real-time interactivity to create animated visual poems transmitted over telephone lines.
“Reabracadabra” (1985) is a work of telematic poetry by Eduardo Kac, created for Brazil’s Videotexto system — the Brazilian equivalent of France’s Minitel. The work used the Videotex terminal’s low-resolution character graphics to create animated visual poems that were transmitted in real-time over telephone lines.
Kac’s Videotexto works are among the earliest examples of art created for networked digital systems, predating the World Wide Web by nearly a decade. When the Brazilian Videotexto service went dark in the mid-1990s, the works became inaccessible. Kac spent 15 years working with the PAMAL research unit to reconstruct them using legacy Minitel hardware.