A LIVING POEM is a language game engine. Not a fixed text, but a poetic system built to rupture, recombine, and refract language into layered fields of meaning and resonance.
Drawing on the German-language philosophical tradition (Ludwig Wittgenstein’s idea that meaning emerges through use, Walter Benjamin’s conception of language as generative, Max Bense’s framing of language as informational structure), the work situates itself within a lineage that understands language as dynamic, relational, and systems-based—as fundamentally computational.
At the same time, what we mean by a “system” is itself changing. In the 21st century, language is not only spoken, written, or read; it is synthesized, slipping between image, sound, video, and code. It circulates through global networks at a volume and velocity no single mind can fully apprehend, operating at a speed and scale that demand new modes of perception. Meaning emerges through recursion, automation, co-creation, distributed processes.
These technocultural conditions give rise to new kinds of language games: no longer limited to human interaction, but played between human and machine. Language has always been more-than-human in that it requires collective participation; it is a dense infrastructure wherein connection begets meaning. In the age of AI, this extends into the posthuman: vast systems that decenter the individual voice and challenge prevailing notions of authorship and agency.
At The Museum of Modern Art, A LIVING POEM engaged the lineage of 20th-century conceptualism and text-based art, shaped by mass media, advertising, and broadcast logics. At ZKM, A LIVING POEM approaches computation not as a tool, but as a poetic intelligence through which algorithmic processes give rise to rhythm, pattern, and meaning. The work reconsiders itself through the concept of the game: a rule-based system in which outcomes are not fixed, but produced through interaction, iteration, and constraint.
The LED wall is not a page or a screen, but a space of play. Meaning does not precede the poem; it arises through interaction across human and machine processes, through inscription and erasure, rhyme and recursion, echo and drift. All unfolds within a field of distributed authorship where the boundaries between players (writer and reader, program and programmer, muse and machine, input and output, original and iteration, word and image, voice and pause) are both vital and ephemeral. The boundary is real, but the players themselves, and their respective roles, can shift at any moment. The work is not an object but a mindset and an environment, a process that takes attention and time.
Linguistic play is relational from the beginning: a space between parent and child, voice and listener, where language is not yet fixed, but emerging. Meaning is not given; it is negotiated through repetition, interaction, and care. We often think of play as childlike, but it is foundational. It is through play that language is first encountered, repeated, and internalized; we learn to communicate our inner lives through imitation and variation.
In my own lineage, I think of my mother, a Kalmyk of indigenous Oirat-Mongol descent, born in a displaced persons camp in Germany after Stalin’s wartime exile of Kalmyks. When she arrived in the United States as a child, Kalmyk, a deeply endangered language, was what she carried across borders, an encoded form of memory and relation. A generation later, as I was growing up, fragments of Kalmyk voiced by my mother, grandparents, and extended family became ways to inhabit the world they had left behind.
That early experience of translation (moving between Kalmyk and English) informs the ways in which A LIVING POEM approaches translation as a game of transformation under constraint. To translate—whether from feeling to language, from one human language to another, from natural speech to computational code, or from one artistic medium to another—is not to locate a fixed meaning in another system, because no exact equivalence exists. Meaning is bound to its conditions of expression. To translate is to approximate, remake, even invent meaning across systems that do not fully align. In this sense, translation is the core of generative systems: not the retrieval of existing meaning (as in a search engine, for example), but the production of new meaning through transformation. (What we tend to call “hallucinating” is a kind of translation between human and machine frames of reference, with a dynamic frisson between fidelity and drift.)
In A LIVING POEM, this tension charges the air between ways of understanding: between English and Mongolian epic traditions, between handwriting and code, inscription and execution, draft and revision, ancient and future. Meaning never passes from one state to another unchanged; it is continuously recomposed and reborn. Loss, distortion, and emergence are not errors, but generative conditions of the system. Translation operates as another form of play, allowing language to inhabit multiple worlds at once: extending beyond comprehension while remaining grounded in legibility.
Legibility is not only what can be read, but who is recognized or allowed to appear at all. Legibility is also about mistranslation, omission, erasure. Historically, computation was not only technical, but embodied: carried out by women whose invisible labor sustained systems of calculation and communication. Emerging from this context, A LIVING POEM can be understood as a maternal structure that explores computation as inheritance, language as continuity, and systems as carriers of memory. To that end, the ZKM installation illuminates the formative work of women in computational and media art contexts, particularly those present in or aligned with ZKM’s collection and discourse (Vera Molnár, Alison Knowles, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Tamiko Thiel, etc.).
The technology of language has long been carried forward through acts of care and communal transmission; not through rupture or replacement, but as a maternal process of preservation, adaptation, and renewal. Where dominant technocapitalist logics consolidate power through disruption and obsolescence, language evolves otherwise: through the gradual distribution and accretion of meaning across generations. (Poetry’s value is inversely proportional to its scarcity; abundance helps it thrive.)
Here, the “language game engine” takes on renewed significance. Play is not trivial; it is relational, a mode of transmission rooted in collaboration, empathy, and understanding; a way of engaging difference without erasing it. A LIVING POEM is an attempt to enact a kind of “game of life” in computational space, functioning as an incubator not only for emergent language, but for new modes of sense-making and inheritance—the deeply human processes that have long underwritten continuity and survival.
