21 March 2025. The spring issue of Poëziekrant 2/2025 (March–April 2025) features an interview with Ghayath Almadhoun (1979), as well as new poetry by Hanneke van Eijken, Anne Vegter, Lars Ruben, Babs Gons, Tijl Nuyts, Stefan Hertmans, Marc Reugebrink, Casper Burghgraeve, Hannah Zaouad, Tim Bongaerts, and Eelco Couvreur. And much more — including a report by Roel Weerheijm on poetry in installation art. He speaks with Maud Vanhauwaert, Kila van der Starre, Rozalie Hirs, and Richard Vijgen about recent projects. Weerheijm writes, among other things:
“Together with visual artist, designer, and programmer Richard Vijgen, Rozalie Hirs created the museum installation the case for a small language network, based on oneindige zin (infinite sentence), her 2021 poetry collection. ‘In the collection,’ Hirs explains, ‘words and phrases can connect both to what precedes and to what follows. That’s how the idea of the infinite sentence arises — one that continues endlessly, for as long as you keep reading. In a sense, it’s also a metaphor for life itself.
The book is about reading possibilities: combining words and phrases in different ways — a typical example of natural intelligence. People do this intuitively; we see patterns and experience beauty when we create new connections. Our installation brings those reading possibilities to life in a tangible way. When reading a poetry book, you jump back and forth across the page and from one poem to another. When you revisit a book, or reread a passage, you create connections between different poems. That’s a process of creating and recreating meaning. The installation makes that process visible and perceptible.’”
Vijgen: “Rozalie reached out to me out of the blue. We quickly discovered shared interests, especially the relationship between technology and language. We talked a lot about that early on, including the rise of AI language models that were starting to make headlines — this was back in 2019. Today’s AI technology functions like a black box — hidden and abstract. We wanted to make the process of artificial intelligence visible, to offer a glimpse into how recombination works.
Our first digital prototype is a website, accessible at oneindigezin.nl. The algorithm explores new reading possibilities based on the full text of the collection. The text appears on several virtual reading ribbons, which together generate new combinations. The text is continuously analyzed, and the combinations gradually come closer to the original. That’s how we arrived at the final museum installation: we printed the entire text on long strips of paper, which the computer then uses to create new combinations. You see the reading ribbons rotating, making the process of the installation concrete and tangible.’”
Read Roel Weerheijm’s full article here.