Visual poetry as a game

The article analyzes XX century visual poetry as a game phenomenon. The relevance of this research is explained by an attempt to expand the boundaries of binary perception of visual poetry as a synthesis of verbal and visual media. Visual poetry is a subject of cultural analysis and is seen as a complex multilevel semiotic structure, which is a comprehensive multisensory cultural text that combines the nature of verbal, visual, auditory, kinetic, synesthetic, spatial and other media. Visual poetry is considered in terms of intermediality, which is a special type of intertextual relations of different media in the system of a single cultural text. This article uses intermedial analysis to examine one of the many media of visual poetry: the game medium. Visual poetry incorporates game at several levels at once: at the stage of the idea and the origin of the idea, at the stage of implementing this idea, as well as at the stage of interpreting the resulting work. The study examines visual poetry patterns that use game aspects at the stage of creating or interpreting a work. In particular, the article considers the game in the poetry of blackout, Dadaism, mixed visual forms (calligraphemes and drawings), stutters and other forms of visual poetry. The results of the research confirm that the phenomenon of the game finds its expression in various forms of the XX century visual poetry. In addition to this, the analysis shows the importance of the game medium as part of the complex intermediate structure which finds its expression in the visual poetry of the XX century.