The poetron is an interactive poem-generating installation. Housed in a small wooden box, it generates and prints new versions of poems on receipts for visitors to take home. The poetron has been installed in a variety of contexts, including short term events and extended gallery displays.

The poetron installed in a garden gazebo surrounded with streamers of receipts blowing in the wind
At the 2021 NYC Anarchist Bookfair
The poetron in my workshop surrounded by test print receipts
In the workshop

In each installation I set up the poetron to generate new realizations of a particular chance poem. At its CJ. One installation it was set up with my chance poem Other Kinds of Mirrors. At events featuring my book of chance poems, I typically set it up to generate versions of the book's title poem. I like to encourage visitors to generate a few poems so they can compare them and get a feeling for the wider nature of chance poetry.

Under the hood, the poetron consists of a Raspberry Pi, an arcade button USB interface, and a receipt printer. The Pi is programmed to listen for button presses, and when they are received generate poems and print them out. The (highly disorganized) source code is available here.

While the poetron can be programmed to generate poems using any method, every installation to date has been with a poem written in my chance text programming language, BML.

A walkthrough of the 2021 NYC Anarchist Bookfair installation (apologies for vertical video...)
A closeup of the poetron in the gazebo with a printed poem hanging out of it
At the 2021 NYC Anarchist Bookfair
The poetron installed at CJ One gallery
On display at CJ. one Gallery in a group show with DigiAna.