The Poem Lab is a digital poetry installation that generates short abstract verses with terms extracted from fourteen written works of Bauhaus master László Moholy-Nagy. 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.

Books were the writing surface: the digital poems could only be generated by interacting with the physical books present in the installation. The generation would be triggered by a set of barcodes found on each book that was placed on the shelf, consequently projecting each word of the poem on said book.

In The Poem Lab, books 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. The Poem Lab was a cooperation with the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz and opened on November 19th 2019 to the public for a total of four weeks.