Verses Release “Poems” to Allow Artists to Create Evolving Content

Every time Verses releases a new artifact, it always takes time to get your head around. This is mainly due to the immense creativity and experimental work this community is showing. Verses aims to be a persistent institution dedicated to articulating visions for a flourishing future through a method of loose collaboration – called “stone soup”.

If you are lost in the above sentence’s concepts, it’s ok, that’s probably the intention of Verses founders. Simply put, they are leveraging software to bring new streams for creatives, and, of course, it’s all built on Arweave. 

Verses is a community of poets, artists, researchers, creators, and others that have come together to envision a world where different kinds of collective culture and self-organization can coexist.

The latest work they have unleashed is Verses Poems. Poems is a collection of transforming verses from the Verses community. Or, as they put it:

A gallery of interactive poems from the verses community that uses an open-source library we’ve developed for transforming text.

In practice, this is what Poems look like. Below, you can see a poem created by Kelsey Chen, named Peach bits. At first glance, it seems like a four-liner.

But once you start clicking on the highlighted text, you begin to expand the poem, and the story begins to unfold. There is more to the expanded version below. Unlock its secrets for yourself.

How it works

Poems utilize a form of transforming telescopic text. Specifically, it uses this open-source library created by Jacky and Spencer. According to their GitHub page:

This library is meant to be the start for anyone to create telescopic text, including those who are non-technical.

If you want to find out more about how telescopic text works, visit this page here to get an understanding.

To put it simply – telescopic text allows for layers and text variations to be compressed down. The result is either more context or alternative meanings when you start expanding the text. Think of reading, for example, the sentence:

I walked home.

That could be expanded to:

I walked past the record store, on my way home.

Which could expand, and evolve, even further into:

I walked past the “Massive Sounds” record store, where Joe’s brother used to work, whilst on my way back home.

Each additional (or even alternative) part of a sentence must be adequately separated by the right bullet points, several spaces, or symbols, for the software to read it correctly.

Make your own Poem

Once you are familiar with the concept, you will find it much easier to jump in and experiment with the playground that Verses have put together, where you can write your poem. Simply use the same format as the example text in the text box, and your poem will be generated on the side. Visit the playground here.

So, once again, Verses have provided a unique use case for Arweave’s Permaweb, and we couldn’t be more thrilled to play around with it. If you want to read more on what Verses have been up to in the past, check out our article here.

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