The project “Po-ex.net (Digital Archive of Portuguese Experimental Literature) results from two projects funded by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, Portugal, and the European Union (programs POCI2010/FEDER): “PO.EX’70-80 – Digital Archive of Portuguese Experimental Literature” (reference PTDC/CLE-LLI/098270/2008), and “Portuguese Experimental Poetry – a CD-ROM of Dossiers and Catalogs,” which studied Portuguese literary experimentalism of the 1960s and created a digital archive with the most relevant magazines, catalogs, and publications of that group of poets (http://www.po-ex.net/evaluation). Requests by several agents and recommendations from our consultants have led us to identify the need to extend the reproduction of Portuguese Experimental Poetry into the 1970s and 1980s. This new timeline allowed us to develop the studies and the collections already begun, now including visual and sound poetry, video-poetry, happenings, and cybernetic literature – all of which can be seen as extensions and renovations of literary experimentalism of the previously analyzed period. Our goal was, and will be, to continue considering a connection between concrete poetics and digital poetics. Characterized by its openness and free access to resources, these projects intend to preserve an important literary legacy.

Within the scope of this project, we have also created a Laboratory of Digital Writing, coordinated and supervised by team members. In this Laboratory we expect to offer adequate technical conditions for the development of artistic residences of poets and writers with an interest in multimedia and hypermedia digital platforms. In this way, we hope to foster the development of internal networks of production and digital literary creativity, documenting and later extending the process and its results, namely by means of an online publication platform.

In the past the Po-ex.net has concentrated on creating:

•     leituras da POEX (POEX readings): http://po-ex.net/leituras/
•     conferences: http://po-ex.net/missoes/
•     PO.EX CD-ROM: http://www.po-ex.net/evaluation/index.html

Currently the project is working on the Digital Archive with 4500 items (concrete, visual, digital and sound poems; articles).

In the future the Po-ex.net will focus on:

•     improving the database, its structure and contents, adding more collections and new items
•     participating in CELL’s activities related with interoperability
•     applying to new funding for exhibiting the database; artists’ books collections

The Po-ex.net plans within in the CELL project to “establish cooperative communication among databases devoted to electronic literature worldwide; creating methods for cross-referencing each other in terms of content, citation structure, bibliographic information, and other forms of metadata; interoperability.”