Collocations

Keywords: Digital poetry, quantum mechanics, tablet computing, software art, art and science, interdisciplinary research practice, interactive art, new media art, experimental writing, electronic literature.

Collocations is a work of experimental writing that explores the disruptive implications of quantum mechanics for science, philosophy, literature and art. Designed for tablet computers, Collocations appropriates two excerpted pages from Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr’s debates about quantum physics and transforms them through algorithmically defined systems in order to produce an interactive work of innumerable poetic texts. Interaction with the work transforms the user into an experimenter whose physical manipulation of the device determines the materialization of any possible number of unique textual configurations in a dynamic, non-linear and kinesthetic reading experience. This paper contextualizes Collocations in relation to the fields of experimental writing and electronic literature, describes how the work operates, and demonstrates the correspondences between Collocations’ formal structure and the quantum phenomenon of complementarity on which it is modeled. Video documentation of Collocations can be found here: vimeo.com/119868407.

Collocations by Abraham Avnisan (teaser) from Abraham Avnisan on Vimeo.