Live Poetry

Description:

The Poem is the Instrument is a system for performing poetry as a live process, in the lineage of live coding, where a word can summon an image and an image can become a sound.

This collaborative poetic instrument utilizes grammars (sets of visible, editable rules) to assemble phrases in real time alongside sound and image. These simple rules question the idea of what it means for a technology to be "generative" -- words and fragments combined in ways that are never seen in real life can still evoke meaning, with their entire process on display. For example, what does it mean to be darling-shaped? The language (code) is a poem that produces poetry as a looping, ever-changing collage. Each pre-arranged set asks for your attention towards different details, such as to the names of things around us or the miniscule changes in the passage of time.

Visitors touch and rewrite the poem as it runs: what if a poem were not a finished object, but a room people could enter and perform together?