This visual poem has been created with the aid of an algorithmic poem generator, based on statistical analysis of a corpus consisting of a hotchpotch of European languages. Words are generated by a Markov chain for the probability of transitions from one letter to the next, as well as by randomly splicing pre- and postfixes together, or respelling words from a stored list. These are then assembled into poems, which are edited for readability, rhythm, and character. I don’t know what these poems mean, with the exception of a few words.

The messy tangle in the centre is a visualisation of letter frequencies in this poem. The curve results from the two-dimensional Fourier synthesis of sinusoids (in arbitrary but fixed phase), where the position of a letter in the alphabet gives the frequency (a=1, z=26), with vowels represented on the horizontal axis and consonants on the vertical axis, and the amplitude of each sinusoidal component given by the frequency of occurrence of each letter.

In other words, the tangle is created by the following equations:

x(t) = sum{a[k] sin(f[k]t) + phi}, k={vowels}
y(t) = sum(a[k] sin(f[k]t) + phi), k={consonants}

Bio: Risto Holopainen is a Swedish composer, artist, and writer living in Norway. He studied composition at the Norwegian State Academy, and has a PhD in musicology from the University in Oslo. As an artist, he has worked with performance, video, print making, and mail art. He is currently writing a book on modernism and contemporary art and generating a lot of incomprehensible poems.