a poem: living and growing and dying

Description:

a poem: (living &growing &decaying) is an interactive installation apoem.life, where poems grow and die, treating text not as a permanent digital artifact, but a living material: one that grows, decays, and eventually dies following the rule that objects in the real world do not stay the same over time. Visitors use words from existing, living poems to "seed" new poems, which evolve algorithmically over time. They can then revisit to witness the evolution of their poems and peruse the text planted by others, choosing to take a poem home, printing out its current state through a receipt printer which then removes the poem from the site. It becomes theirs and theirs alone. The project relies on grammars to grow poems, gradually adding to the text over time through a set of carefully crafted rules, before syntax mutates and meanings drift, words glitching and withering until the text's meaning is unrecognizable. Each poem is never the same at any two points in time. Through the ongoing participation of visitors, the site is kept alive as old poems seed new ones, forming a continuously shifting ecosystem shaped by the collective authorship of viewers, leaving behind a graveyard of forgotten prose and requiring more poems to be seeded than taken. In a time where "generative" is synonymous with AI, this work uses an older technology, following a lineage of computational literature and procedural text, emphasizing a process behind the making of text, and bringing each viewer into that history of creative generation.