Gallery Spotlight
Alicia Guo:
The Poem is the Instrument (2026)
Gray Area presents a solo exhibition of interactive computational poetry by Cultural Incubator Member Alicia Guo
Alicia Guo:
The Poem is the Instrument
August 29 - September 13, 2026
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Gray Area presents The Poem is the Instrument: a solo exhibition of new computational poetry work by Alicia Guo. Developed this summer in the Cultural Incubator program, this immersive, interactive installation unfolds across three channels in the Gray Area gallery.
The Poem is the Instrument is a system for performing poetry as a live process, in the lineage of live coding, where a word can summon an image and an image can become a sound. As a collaborative poetic instrument, it utilizes grammars (sets of visible, editable rules) to assemble phrases in real time alongside sound and image. The language (code) is a poem that produces poetry as a looping, ever-changing collage.
Visitors touch and rewrite the poem as it runs. The artist asks, what if a poem were not a finished object, but a room people could enter and perform together? Pulling online imagery from a carefully curated selection of wonders from the natural world, The Poem is the Instrument offers audiences the opportunity to write their own visual verses within Guo’s poetic universe.
Artist
Alicia Guo
Alicia Guo is a computational artist, poet, and HCI researcher looking at how we can imagine and redesign our relationships with creative technology. She is currently pursuing a PhD at the University of Washington, working in creativity support tools, the processes behind creative uses of AI, and how technology can empower artists and creative collaboration. Her research is rooted in her art and writing practice, where she creates computational art and poetic instruments that invite participation: artifacts that create artifacts that create artifacts. Her responsive text installations and web-based poems invite audiences to collectively create poetic artifacts that blend physical and digital spaces. Her work has been featured in Vector Festival, Michigan Quarterly Review, Graywolf Lab, The HTML Review, and Crawlspace.
