Poetry Machine - core
David Link
2001/2020

Shows:

“Oracle Machines”, Computer Arts Society London, 21st October 2026 – 8th December 2026

Poetry Machine is a text generator based on semantic networks. The generation of the texts doesn’t take place by statically scripted answering modules. What it expresses is therefore also new to its author. When the machine starts, its database is empty. It then collects huge amounts of information in the internet. The software transforms texts into networks of semantic relationships on one hand, on the other into syntactical frames.

Poetry Machine builds up semantic networks. When generating text, it selects the starting word and follows the strongest connections randomly from there. Imagine shooting energy into a network with the energy flowing along the strongest connections. Every word encountered on the way will appear in the output.



In the single-screen-version shown in the live generative display, Poetry Machine searches for topics to talk about in its vast database. The word appears on the screen in red, as if some visitor had entered something. Poetry Machine starts to generate sentences about this topic, and after a while, it either uses words from the text produced as new input and continues the theme, or it goes to the database again and comes up with a completely new topic. Poetry Machine generates text endlessly, and it never repeats itself.

The original algorithm of Poetry Machine was conceived in 2001. It constitutes a very early precursor of today’s Large Language Models.

Serendipity plays an important role in Poetry Machine.



Poetry Machine is part of the permanent collection of the Center for Art and Media ZKM, Karlsruhe.

For more information on the Poetry Machine project, see here.