Signalism

Signalism (Serbian Cyrillic: Сигнализам / Signalizam; from: lat. Signum – sign, signal) represents an international neo-avant-garde literal and art movement. It gathered wider support base both in former Yugoslavia and the world in the late 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s.

The beginning of Signalism dates back to 1959 when its founder and main theoretician Miroljub Todorović started with his linguistic experiments. His main belief was that there can be no significant leap forward in poetry without revolutionizing its main medium – the language.

The birth of Signalism in Serbian literature and culture, with its tendency to revolutionize other arts as well (visual, theater, comics, music and movies), came from the need to eliminate the spent models carried on by poetic and cultural traditions, as well as from the necessity to take on the challenges and spirit of the modern technological and electronic civilization. In its program ("Manifesto" and other guiding texts) as well as in its art pieces, Signalism made a clean break from the principles of neoromantism and late symbolism still governing Serbian literature. Its goal was set to radically change poetry both through content and form, and make it compatible with the contemporary times.

Revolutionizing of the poetic language started with the introduction of the symbols, formulas and linguistic forms of the "hard" sciences (physics, biology, chemistry, mathematics, biochemistry and astronomy). Furthermore, the language was made visual by dispersing words and sentences into syllables and letters forming visually recognizable patterns, as well as by introducing non-verbal symbols into the text (drawings, photographs, graphs…) for the purpose of creating a collage of verbal and visual elements. This first phase of Signalism is often referred to as Scientism, with the most prominent examples including the books "Planeta" (Planet, 1965) and "Putovanje u Zvezdaliju" (A trip to Starland, 1971) as well as poetry cycles "Belančevina" (Protein), "Kiseonik" (Oxygen), "Ožilište" (Nursery) and others in which the topics are Space, Time and Matter.

In their for decade long research and creative pursuit that followed, Signalists significantly expanded cognitive boundaries and genre profile of modern Serbian poetry. Signalist poetry can be divided into two main forms: verbal and non-verbal. Verbal poetry consists of scientist, aleatoric (random), stochastic, technological, phenomenological, slang and apeironistic poetry. Non-verbal poetry subtypes include visual, object, sound and gestual poetry.

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