The exposition collects materials and reflections from ‘A poem is a small machine … made out of words’, an exhibition and series of writing sessions that were held at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts in the spring of 2025. This five-part exposition presents different material from the writing sessions and the exhibition, including reflections from the participating writers, a vocabulary list, images, and new texts, or poems, that were written throughout the period.
‘A poem is a small machine … made out of words’ took place during the first year of the project Ways of Writing. Ways of Writing is a PhD project affiliated with the Department of Graphic Design at the National Academy of the Arts in Oslo. The title of the exposition is borrowed from poet and physician William Carlos Williams. It is taken from the introduction to his 1944 volume of poems The Wedge. The phrase points to a lot of the questions I address in my PhD project.
Being a graphic designer means being particularly sensitive to the material and visual aspects of language. As a graphic designer I am interested in how our bodies shape our language. The main ambition of this exhibition was to bring questions from my PhD research into a physical space. I wanted to look into ways of using the body to write new stretches of computational poetry.
