Interactive installation of apoem.life shown at Vector Festival in Toronto.
A garden of gradually transforming poems manifests in Alicia Guo’s interactive web installation living &growing &decaying (2025), each poem seeded by a user and governed by a grammar predetermined by Guo. The website imbues online text with the capacity to independently grow as time passes, and eventually decay and die. Over the course of a few days, a poem expands and mutates, sprouting new verses until digital foliage creeps over the body of the transformed poem, warping and excising individual words. Visitors are able to interact with past poems, and witness their transformation and decomposition over time, or make use of the seeds of past entries to plant a new poem. The resulting index positions itself against stagnancy, cataloguing poems that are never the same at any two given points in time. A receipt printer allows visitors to print out a poem and take it home with them, offering a materiality and apparent permanence that is directly countered in the digital: whenever a poem is printed and brought into the physical world, it subsequently disappears from the digital world of its nascance.
Excerpt from essay by Dallas Fellini.
