Poetry is Just Words in the Wrong Order

Poetry is Just Words in the Wrong Order (2015) proposes an unconventional way of creating and presenting poetry based on improvisation, language/sound experimentation, fragmentation and randomness. Poetry as a social practice is here developed in an anti-narrative manner. Built with custom code, a computer chooses random phrases from a predetermined Twitter hashtag (e.g. #Syria) and a database of verses which are selected by the two artists (e.g. verses from poems by Arab women writing in English). The phrases and the verses from the two sources are combined partly randomly and partly following a given pattern. At the same time, sound events are being produced by estimating the number of the letters of every incoming word as well as the total volume of the incoming data. When the project is presented live, the three artists build and improvise on the poem that is created by the computer. (Source: Adapted from authors’ text)