Executed Poetry

Executed Poetry is a device that executes poetic code and displays its ephemeral traces.

When you press the button, short poems written in Python are executed within a microcontroller. The e-paper display shows the executed poem alongside execution count, processing time, and the microcontroller's unique public key and signature. These serve as proof that the poem was indeed executed on that specific machine.

The collected poems explore philosophical themes such as “existence,” “eternity,” and “nothingness” using Python’s primitive functions. Poems that instantly terminate infinite loops, define and delete non-existent classes, return themselves while negating their own existence. Lines of code oscillate at the boundary between computation and philosophy.

This work presents a new relationship between computers and poetry. Poetry is no longer something to be read, but something to be executed. What we witness are the traces of execution—epitaphs of poems carved by the machine.