T H E P O E M L A B : A M A C H I N E M A D E O F B O O K S.
The Poem Lab is a digital poetry installation that took place from November 19th to December 19th 2019. It played with the linguistic world of the Bauhaus master László Moholy-Nagy while shaping it into poetry. As to playfully confront the visitor with the media transition—from the analogue to the digital—it staged a typical digital poetry set-up in an untypical home-library scenario. In The Poem Lab, books are the writing surface. They dismiss their strict identity of text containers and, instead, house fluid content that can’t be grasped materially. In this way, the project seeks to free each device from its popular medium-bound preconceived qualities and analyze the effect this has on the behavior of text and readers.
Photos above by: ChungBin Kim, 2019.
T H E W R I T I N G P R O C E S S
The digital writing was conceived to be a discovery. The visitor's task was to unveil the poem generated by the text-generating algorithm and out of the—sometimes—nonsense, create meaning. This occurred through the playing with white books, the arranging and rearranging them, using them as if they were physical language. The individually displayed words (displayed in a syntactically correct order) compose a randomly-generated short verse and get projected with the placing books on the shelves.
T H E C O N C E P T
The Poem Lab was conceived to be a playground, a place for experimentation and games, where there are no rights and no wrongs. This hands-on experiment happened as part of a bigger concept, the bauhaus.labor (the Bauhaus lab). The bauhaus.labor was the result of a cooperation between the University of Applied Sciences Mainz and the Gutenberg Museum. Its appearance, a temporary venue located in the patio of the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz, Germany, allowed the normal passerby to peek into the exhibition without having to actually come in.
Regarding the personality of the installation, I decided to explore the concept of dualism, of two worlds clashing into each other in different ways: the digital and the analog, the scientific and the romantic, the black and the white, the natural and the artificial. This way, as to take the narrative thread further, I decided to create a collaborative space. To achieve this I decided to merge Moholy-Nagy’s linguistic world, with E.E Cummings’ experimental layouts and word-play, and computational randomness with visitors’ writing inventiveness.
C R E D I T S
A C A D E M I C S U P E R V I S I O N
Prof. Dr. Isabel Naegele, Prof. Dr. Petra Eisele, Florian Jenett
P R O G R A M M I N G A N D T E C H N I C A L S U P P O R T
Florian Jenett
F I N A N C I A L S U P P O R T
Gutenberg Museum Mainz + 100 Jahre Bauhaus
M A S T E R T H E S I S B Y
Isabela Dimarco
University of Applied Sciences Mainz
MA Gutenberg Intermedia
P H O T O G R A P H Y B Y
Vanessa Liebler
M O R E I N F o
http://www.bauhauslabor.de/#/exhibitions/the-poem-lab
T H A N K S F O R W A T C H I N G !
