{"id":27052,"date":"2025-10-31T17:38:23","date_gmt":"2025-10-31T08:38:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/themassage.jp\/?p=27052"},"modified":"2025-10-31T17:56:46","modified_gmt":"2025-10-31T08:56:46","slug":"computational-poetry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/themassage.jp\/en\/archives\/27052","title":{"rendered":"Computational Poetry"},"content":{"rendered":"

From September to October 2025, the exhibition Computational Poetry<\/i> was held at the NEORT++ Gallery in Bakurocho, Tokyo. Works by five groups of artists were displayed here. While this exhibition was themed around “computers and poetry,” it wasn’t about “using computers to create poetry.” Most of the works were created through computer programs\u2014that is, code\u2014and prompted contemplation about what poetry is and what language is. Here, programming languages were used not merely as tools, but as special materials for thinking. The distinctive feature of these works is that they contain analyzable thoughts and memories within the works themselves. Each piece possesses an intensity that allows for infinitely deep exploration, and one could certainly consider their connections to art history, poetry, and historical contexts of art. However, I believe the purpose of this exhibition was not that, but rather to discover new words from here.<\/p>\n

I was involved in this exhibition both as one of the co-curators and as one of the participating artists. My motivation stemmed from a conviction that something was missing from the widely recognized history of computer art, and a desire to excavate it. However, once I actually began searching for works, that desire was tormented and crushed by the question of what it means to not be confined to existing fields or concepts. This exploration was contradictory from the start\u2014things without names cannot be searched for in the first place. In other words, I began to realize this was work about creating concepts and names. With the great help of co-curator Shono-san, including the ways things didn’t go according to initial expectations, pieces came together for this exhibition\u2014many of them new works\u2014as a result influenced by my own intuition and conviction. To be honest, my first impression upon viewing all these works was that they seemed like quite disparate pieces with different orientations. However, the deeper I came to know about the works, including through writing this article, the more I felt new common layers emerging that I hadn’t seen before. Sharing that sensation\u2014that is what this article aims to achieve.<\/p>\n

Hai-Tech<\/i> by Wen New Atelier (Kalen Iwamoto & Julien Silvano)<\/h3>\n

Wen New Atelier is an artist couple consisting of French artist Julien Silvano and Japanese-Canadian artist Kalen Iwamoto, who explore the boundaries of art, language, and technology.
\nHai-Tech<\/i> is a device that continuously generates random combinations of kanji characters commonly used in Japanese haiku and classical poetry with kanji frequently used in the technology domain. The kanji characters keep changing like a slot machine, occasionally interspersed with noise-like symbolic characters, before coming to a stop. The generated two-character kanji combinations prompt us to consider what these compound-word-like formations might mean. After 10 seconds pass, the next combination begins generating. Below the kanji, translated English words are displayed. The code is written in Python, and they call this work computational poetry. While the idea of generating compound words or sentences through such random combinations has existed for a long time, the distinctive feature of Wen New Atelier’s work lies in presenting the process itself with a contemporary sense of temporality. The combination algorithm is remarkably simple. This is because what the work emphasizes is not the algorithm itself, but rather the process of the algorithm’s execution and the thoughts it triggers within the viewer. This work also explores the identity of Kalen Iwamoto, who has lived across multiple different linguistic and cultural spheres\u2014Japan, Canada, and France. The selection of kanji and the occasional sense of incongruity felt in the kanji-to-English translations direct our awareness to what constitutes our taken-for-granted sensibilities in the Japanese we normally use. It is exceedingly environment-dependent, and our sense of language is something fragile and ephemeral that can be easily shaken by such a simple algorithm.<\/p>\n

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\u300aHai-Tech\u300bby Wen New Atelier (Kalen Iwamoto & Julien Silvano)<\/p><\/div>\n

Data Waves in the Rising Sun<\/i> by Wen New Atelier (Kalen Iwamoto & Julien Silvano)<\/h3>\n

Data Waves in the Rising Sun<\/i> is a work that continuously deconstructs and reconstructs the beautiful texts describing scenes of light and waves from Virginia Woolf’s literary work The Waves<\/i> through code-created algorithms. The Waves<\/i> takes a form that could be considered somewhere between prose and poetry, and the author herself called it not a novel but a “playpoem.” This work by Wen New Atelier might also be understood as a new form of literature that doesn’t fit into existing genres. First, this work quotes tens of thousands of characters of text from “The Waves.” After randomly rearranging these words, it triples each word, extracts words for each line according to screen size, and adjusts the spaces between words to achieve justified alignment. While the justified alignment gives a literary impression, a monospaced font commonly used in programming environments has been chosen. However, since the spaces between words are adjusted rather than monospaced, it may give a slightly strange sensation to those familiar with computer fonts. The randomly created text updates every 200 milliseconds. At this speed, it’s almost impossible to read the displayed text as sentences. Only fleeting impressions of individual words remain, and what we see is like continuously flowing waves\u2014a digital nature created there. Considering the number of quoted words, an almost infinite number of combinations occur. Thinking this way, this is no longer quotation but poetry creation. Yet it is made from nothing more than a beautiful but extremely limited length of text. Condensed within it is our process of creating sentences, presenting a contemporary answer to the question of what literature is. And through the gap between comprehensible finitude and perceivable infinity, it feels frighteningly critical.<\/p>\n

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\u300aData Waves in the Rising Sun\u300bby Wen New Atelier (Kalen Iwamoto & Julien Silvano)<\/p><\/div>\n

Miniscriber<\/i> by Wen New Atelier (Kalen Iwamoto & Julien Silvano)<\/h3>\n

Miniscriber<\/i> is presented as a literary device for the digital age. This device, embedded in a small wooden box, features a display that shows text along with several buttons and knobs. This is a text synthesizer. Pressing the \u201cINPUT\u201d button allows you to switch between source texts. These texts are two writings about the nature of writing in the contemporary era. By turning knobs and pressing buttons on this text, new text can be created. As an artwork, it’s important for viewers to physically experience this. The possible operations include \u201cERASURE,\u201d which blacks out random words; \u201cCUTUP,\u201d which displays frames that selectively read out random words; \u201cASCII NOISE,\u201d which replaces random characters with noise-like symbols; \u201cWAVEFORM,\u201d which shifts text positions like waves; \u201cHIGHLIGHT,\u201d which randomly changes text colors; and \u201cITALIC,\u201d which italicizes text. These operations merely manipulate the source text\u2014you cannot add your own characters. This feels like taking a bird’s-eye view of text creation in the contemporary era. Additionally, the modulation and noise application have rhythm, and the fact that they continuously flow according to this rhythm also symbolizes the spirit of our times. This work also questions the relationship between reader and writer, blurring their boundaries. …At the exhibition, I sometimes saw the device continuously generating text unread by anyone in a quiet, dark room. There was something lonely about it, a scene that also made one think about the fate of overproduced text.<\/p>\n

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