Play here: https://www.poemabout.place

Interactive web application, 2020.
In collaboration with Graham Livingston.


When a user visits poemabout.place, an Euclidean path is created between the user’s location and the location of the server that hosts the web app. The website then sequentially displays a seamless video of slides generated from text gathered from other websites along this route. The project traces geographies to explore the intake of information on the web–instead of confirming relations of content or subject matter, as in navigation through hyperlinks, the celebrated as a unique epistemic form allowed by the Internet.

User calls needed to use the Internet are rooted to geographic coordinates and IP addresses, elemental to any location-finding, ad-targeting, and surveillance operation on the Internet. On the other hand, the web increasingly posits itself as a space (or a realm of spaces), but it requires a new gestural language, or a new way of walking to be recognized as place.

We propose that every encounter with digital information, every “search” around a location is local; yet, fundamentally the product of the internet as a de-localizing tool. What poems map between the embodied and the networked subjectivity? What reading constitutes understanding in the chimera of semiotic and epistemic systems?



The documentation shown here is from users in Chicago and Berlin, while the server is in Mountain View California.