HIGHLIGHTED #2 – re:VERSE, a poetry symposium

On April 23, theVERSEverse hosted their first-ever symposium: an evening program celebrating the evolving landscape of poetry in the digital age. Through curated panels, performances, and artwork displays, re:VERSE explored poetry’s power as a multifaceted, transdisciplinary art form, and illuminated key areas of poetic innovation.

On the evening of April 23, Ladbroke Hall in London transformed into a forum where verse, visuals and circuitry converged. Gathered beneath vaulted beams, an audience of poets, curators and technologists bore witness to re:VERSE, theVERSEverse’s inaugural symposium co-hosted with The Tezos Foundation. Partners – The Collectors Club, Muse Frame, Digital Art Week and The Disruptive Gallery – supported an ambitious program of panels and performances that examined how poetry is being (re)made in a digital world.

poem = work of art

The first panel, poem = work of art, surveyed blockchain’s impact on literary practice, moderated by Ana María Caballero; a multiple award-winning, transdisciplinary artist and co-founder of theVERSEverse.

Trilitech’s Head of Arts, Aleksandra Art, sketched how the Tezos blockchain has granted poets new pathways to experimentation, authorship and provenance while opening a door to a community of like-minded enthusiasts of art and technology. The London-based artist and bestselling poet Arch Hades spoke of staging spoken-word in unconventional spaces, challenging museums to rethink white-cube norms.

Melanie Lenz, curator of Digital Art at the Victoria and Albert Museum, detailed the V&A’s pivot from acquiring static prints to commissioning living, code-driven verse. And Artist and Partnership Lead at Avant Arte, Abigail Miller, weighed collector psychology, debating whether verse needs visual accompaniments to thrive in digital marketplaces.

poem = code

Next, poem = code laid bare the actual scaffolding beneath poetry’s lines, moderated by artist, AI researcher and co-founder of theVERSEverse Sasha Stiles.

As CEO of Muse Frame and Sedition, Dyl Blaquiere spoke about Muse Frame’s minimalist displays and Sedition’s curated drops. Eva Jäger, Arts Technologies Curator and Creative AI Lead at Serpentine, was there to describe Serpentine’s Creative AI Lab; where neural nets ingest poetic forms and propose fragmentary drafts.

Jen Roebuck, who is Chair of Lumen Prize and CMO at Houdini Swap, outlined subscription and fractional-ownership models that reconfigure how readers access editions. And the code-based artist Mark Webster reflected on two decades of teaching code as literate practice, arguing that p5.js sketches can actually read like syntax-inflected poetry.

poem = performance

In poem = performance, the night turned to live expression. Christian Bök narrated The Xenotext’s two-decade odyssey – an RNA-encoded poem bundled inside a living microbe. Arch Hades returned on the stage to unveil a multimedia excerpt that fused vocal loops with generative visuals. And Elisabeth Sweet, a poet exploring patterns of randomness and part of theVERSEverse, premiered her new work called ‘enough’ through a performance of the work as a chant meditation of the poem with the accompaniment of a shruti box (see image below).

poem = people

By night’s end, re:VERSE had not only mapped four years of experimentation but also sketched a future where education, technology and community interlace to sustain digital poetics. The event concluded with a special post poetry party at The Disruptive Gallery.

“re:VERSE attempted to summarize four years of hard work in one evening, taking a pause to review so that we may continue forward with more intention. It was exhilarating to see how far we’ve come in securing a place for digital poetics within the broader art ecosystem, with the help of our partners. I think the way forward lies in education, creating awareness for other poets, so they can use new tools to empower themselves and build sustainable, innovative practices.”
— Ana María Caballero, co-founder of theVERSEverse

Three new works

As part of the re:VERSE symposium, the team members of theVERSEverse all released a new artwork, which were streamed at The Disruptive Gallery:

> Items I Scour the Internet to Find by Ana María Caballero
> HEART MANTRA_The internet is a heart that leaps.txt by Sasha Stiles
> enough by Elisabeth Sweet (Species of Value)

theVERSEverse is a digital poetry gallery where poem = work of art. this 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. 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.


re:VERSE was co-hosted by theVERSEverse and the Tezos Foundation. Partners of the event were Collectors Club, Digital Art Week and Disruptive Gallery.