Recently launched in November, Lit Encounters is a long-term exhibition presented by Mad Arts in partnership with digital poetry gallery theVERSEverse. It brings one of humanity’s most enduring forms of expression into the museum space as the main event. Gathering writers, visual artists, and code poets, Lit Encounters presents poetry as a multimedia experience, showing how technological innovation can expand its power. It also educates on how the blockchain can serve as a means of publishing and sharing verse, ensuring its preservation.
This exhibition reconsiders how poems can look, sing, and perform — inviting a reexamination of the cultural currency of verse.
Visitors are invited to explore poetry and art across five unique spaces that offer a complete and entangled overview of theVERSEverse’s mission. In The Listening Room, visitors are invited to immerse themselves in spoken word poetry by renowned poets. poem = work of art redefines the boundaries of language and art, showcasing text-based works by today’s leading poets and artists. Being Borges explores the nuances of literary translation through AI’s interpretation. Finally, Holo/Voices presents holographic poetry readings, blending digital and analog worlds.
Poesía de Protesta brings together the powerful voices of Spanish-language poets, curated by Cuban art historian Gladys Garrote and produced by Elisabeth Sweet.
This collection carries the long tradition of protest poetry forward via technologically-empowered collaborations. Some of today’s top Spanish-language poetic voices contributed work on different themes of protest. Each poem was curated by Garrote, who paired the poems with digitally native contemporary artists to create unique experiences. The 12 poems in this section are presented in a theatrical setting that transforms digital poems into micro-poetic films.
Mad Arts acquired 12 works from the Poesía de Protesta collection, including collaborations between Alexandra Lytton Regalado & Gab Floramica, Caridad Moro-Gronlier & Ellie Pritts, Amalia Moreno & Genki Nishida, Legna Rodríguez Iglesias & Veštica, and Martica Minipunto & Iván Casís.
This installation was made possible with the support of the Tezos Foundation.
This space challenges the notion that immersion requires large-scale techno-installations. Instead, this room invites visitors to relinquish their senses to spoken word. Sink into the verses and voices of Julie Marie Wade, Christian Bök, Caridad Moro-Gronlier, Nicole Tallman, Elisabeth Sweet, Ana María Caballero, and Pierre Gervois.
In poem = work of art, a selection of today’s leading text-based artists and poets redefine the limits of language. Experience works by acclaimed poets and artists, such as Nicole Tallman, Denise Duhamel, Anne Spalter, Sarah Ridgley, Christian Bök, Pierre Gervois, and Nathaniel Stern.
Redefining the limits of presence and performance, Holo/Voices, jointly created by Mad Arts and theVERSEverse, presents holographic poetry readings. Purposefully minimalist in their aesthetics, these virtual (yet real) performances fuse the boundaries between the digital and analog realms.
Being Borges proposes a new form of literary translation, begging the question: What’s at stake when language becomes literal via the visual? In this series, Ana María Caballero takes Jorge Luis Borges’ and Margarita Guerrero’s Book of Imaginary Beings (a vast compendium of humanity’s imagined creatures) as points of departure from which to explore how AI interprets Spanish versus English text, unmasking biases ingrained in large data sets. A special collaborative component accompanies this exhibition, inviting visitors to contribute to Caballero’s series and explore AI-powered creativity.
This installation was made possible through a grant from the Tezos Foundation and Mad Arts’ non-profit wing.
theVERSEverse – a women-led collective of poets, artists, and creative technologists – commissions, curates, and sells digital poems, emphasizing craft and creating lasting value that can support artists financially. In this literary gallery, poem = work of art. Founded in November 2021 by Ana María Caballero, Kalen Iwamoto, and Sasha Stiles — with Elisabeth Sweet joining thereafter to support communications and community outreach — theVERSEverse is a collective of poets, writers, artists, editors, curators, and creative technologists working to unlock the literary potential of the blockchain.