To avoid Arias-Misson's conscription into the army, the couple moved to Barcelona and built an international and cross-generational network of poets and artists that included, among others, Joan Brossa,[3] Herminio Molero and Ignacio Gomez de Liano .
He also briefly collaborated with the legendary Spanish avant-garde group Zaj and its members Walter Marchetti, Juan Hidalgo and Esther Ferrer.
His artistic contacts also extended to other European countries, with the friendships with the British experimental poet Dom Sylvester Houédard and with Carlfriedrich Claus, who lived in the former GDR, being particularly significant.
His work has also been featured in many other important experimental literature magazines: De Tafelronde (by Paul de Vree, also co-published by Arias-Misson) and Phantomas in Belgium, in Henri Chopin's legendary revue OU, Luna Park, Ne coupez pas, Approches and L'Humidité in France, Logomotives in Italy, ASA and Geijutsu Seikatsu in Japan, Ovum in Uruguay, El Urogallo in Spain and Tlaloc in the UK.
In terms of literary theory and philosophy, Arias-Misson was inspired by the writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein, to whom he explicitly refers in some of his works, but also by Ferdinand de Saussure, Henri Lefebvre, Roland Barthes, Noam Chomsky and Ernst Bloch .
The expansion of a traditional understanding of poetry and literature that Arias-Misson practiced since the 1960s can be understood against the background of literary experiments over the course of the 20th century and particularly in the context of concepts of intermedia arts - a term used by Fluxus artist Dick Higgins in the mid-1960s.
With this mixture of artistic happening and political demonstration, he created a poetic form that enabled him to inscribe texts into the social context of a city.
The Object Poems consist of Plexiglas boxes with integrated transparent plastic elements on which words or sentences made from Letraset letters are distributed.
In 2021, the Galeria Estampa in Madrid dedicated an extensive exhibition to this cycle of works and published the portfolio El autor.... casi / The author... almost (30 copies), which includes reproductions of the Photo Poems Merde (1973), Raincoat day ( 1973), Punctuation (1973/74), Uncovering... it (1973/74), I'm in, inner, into!
Arias-Misson sees the fact that the ephemeral text inscribed in the city can provoke unpredictable reactions and set incalculable processes in motion as a poetic challenge.
These often black boxes with a transparent front are reminiscent of dioramas or display cases in ethnographic museums, in which landscapes or urban scenes from the past are depicted with model figures against a painted background.
This technique enabled him to arrange free-floating letters inside the solid material without having to integrate transparent plastic forms as supports for texts in the interiors of boxes, as was the case with the Object Poems of the 1960s and 1970s.
Arias-Misson uses both figurative arrangements and mathematically complex shapes, such as Archimedean spirals or torus knots, which he develops using the virtual 3D design software Blender and Maya.
Accompanied by soundtracks consisting of spoken words, sounds or musical elements, the three-dimensionally rendered text animations are projected as films onto upright panes of glass so that the poems appear to move through the air.
[35] In 2018, Arias-Misson received the Prix international de littérature Bernard Heidsieck Mention spéciale Fondazione Bonotto awarded by Centre Pompidou.
Complementing the correspondences are notes and writings pertaining to poems ranging from 1962 to 2017, such as Vietnam Superfiction (1967–1968), Cat and Mouse Public Poem (1974), and The Public Surveillance Poem (2003); writings and visual poetry published in Logomotives (1984), Poesia Vixual (1994), and Art in America (2004); sketches, photographs, and paste-ups for plexiglass projects.” [37] Extensive holdings of works and documents can also be found in the Ruth and Marvin Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry, which is part of the special collections of the libraries of the University of Iowa,[38] in the Archivio Nuova Scrittura (Bozen) and in the Fondazione Bonotto (Colceresa).