​Computational Poetry: Tools for Playing with Language

​Workshop led by Alicia Guo

​This workshop will introduce participants to computational poetry, an act of treating language as a poetic material that can be examined, shaped, and animated through computation. We’ll explore the history of computational poetry and processes through artists and writers who have used rules, algorithms, and code as core methods of their work. Together, we’ll recreate a few computational poetry works and use them as a pathway to learn tools for working with language in code, including RiTa and Nounsing.

​Participants will then adapt, combine, or break these techniques to create a computational poem of their own, taking on the form of an endlessly generating poem, a text that changes over time, a strange language machine, or something else entirely.

​Workshop Prerequisites:

• ​Laptops required

• ​No coding experience necessary, though those who are more comfortable with code will have options to dive deeper

​About the Instructor:

​Alicia Guo is a computational poet, artist, and human-computer interaction researcher working to reimagine and redesign our relationships with creative technology. She is currently pursuing a PhD at the University of Washington, working in creativity support tools and theory.

​Across websites, performances, writing systems, physical installations, and participatory experiments, she is interested in technologies that are alive to process: things that change, decay, invite response, or reveal the traces of how they were made. She creates poetic instruments that invite participation: artifacts that create artifacts that create artifacts. Her research is rooted in her art and writing practice, and often begins from questions of who gets to shape a system? What kinds of creative labor become visible or invisible? How do tools change what we notice? Her computational poetry has appeared in magazines such as The HTML Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Taper, Ensemble Park, and Graywolf Lab. Her installations have been shown in spaces including Gray Area, Vector Festival, and Voidspace.

​You can find some of her work on her website or on Instagram.

​This Workshop is part of our new Patch Bay series:

​A weekly series of workshops, demos, and talks for media artists creative technologists in the Bay Area

​​Wednesdays, 6 PM

​Patch Bay is a new weekly series for anyone in the Bay Area who wants to get hands-on with emerging technology, grapple with the big questions AI is raising in creative fields, and connect with the wider world of media arts, design, and engineering. It's a space to plug in for newcomers who want to get involved at Gray Area for the first time, and for longtime members of our community ready to share new, experimental work.

​We keep the format flexible from week to week, so there's room to experiment, talk, and learn. You might catch a workshop on building poetic tools for the web, a round of lightning talks on agentic AI experiments, an artist talk on immersive installations, or a live-coded audiovisual performance that turns code into sound and image in real time. No two weeks look the same.

​All Patch Bay events are sliding scale, NOTAFLOF.

​Got an idea for a future session?
Email learn@grayarea.org and tell us about it.
We especially want to hear from people who've been looking for a way to share their bold, critical, and creative work at Gray Area but weren't sure where to get started.

​Event Logistics:

​Workshops and talks are open to all ages. Children under the age of 16 should be supervised by a parent.

​Workshop attendees should bring their own laptops.

​Workshops will take place in the classroom and are not ADA accessible.

​Talks will be seated in the theater.

​View our FAQ page for more info, or contact us at info@grayarea.org with any accommodation requests.