Fortner Anderson
James Schidlowsky

Le poème perpétuel
10.25–12.01.2018

Le poème perpétuel is a sound installation that presents the listener with a continual (and almost perpetual) flow of poems in real time. Each 10-word poem is read aloud with the author’s voice, and each poem is unique.

Each poem is created from a matrix of 100 words divided into 10 rows and 10 columns. The choice of each word, according to its position in the matrix, was determined by certain syntactic and poetic constraints. For example, the 10 words in row 1 are all adjectives of four syllables, and in row 2, each word is a noun of three syllables, and so on. From 100 sound files, each containing a word, the computer generates a new random combination of 10 sound files so as to create a new poem of 10 words.

The number of possible poems is 10 billion. It would take about 6971 years of continuous listening to hear all possible poem combinations.