Introduction:¹

Published in 1992, Agrippa (a book of the dead) is a collaborative work by speculative fiction writer William Gibson, artist Dennis Ashbaugh, and publisher Kevin Begos Jr. The work consists of a short poem by Gibson, stored on a 3.5” floppy disk programmed to self-encrypt after a single reading. This disk was housed inside an artist’s book created by Ashbaugh, whose images and printed texts on the pages were also designed to degrade through handling and exposure to light. Only 455 editions were released: there was a deluxe version, sold at the time for 1,500 dollars; a smaller version, sold for 450 dollars; and a collector’s edition, sold for 7,500 dollars (contained in a bronze box). The description of the object on artist Dennis Ashbaugh’s website states:

Agrippa is a collaborative project that confronts the ethereal nature of memories and the media used to attempt to record them. A case, bound in stained, singed linen, contains intaglios that include excerpts of DNA sequences from the transgenic fruit fly, set in double columns of 42 lines each that refer to the Gutenberg Bible. Treated with photosensitive chemicals, they would gradually fade with exposure to light. The final pages of the book, glued together like a prisoner’s hiding place, contain a hollowed-out section for a diskette, on which Gibson’s 300-line semi-autobiographical poem was encrypted. An embedded algorithm would corrupt or self-erase upon running. The project was debuted, or “transmitted,” live on the Internet from The Kitchen and The Americas Society, New York, when the poem was read by the illusionist Penn Jillette and performance artist Laurie Anderson. A pirated version spread virally, but the encryption was not hacked for 20 years (Ashbaugh).

Agrippa was conceived as a kind of anti-book or anti-work, insofar as the condition established for its reception was its self-destruction, both of the physical support — through printed images treated for degradation — and of the digital content — the poem, encrypted after execution. What is proposed, in this sense, is a game of impermanence that challenges, on the one hand, the traditional relationship of such objects to institutions of preservation, such as archives, libraries, and museums; on the other, this game of impermanence extends to the memory of those who experience the work, since, through interaction, the work itself ceases to be available. Not by chance, William Gibson’s poem is triggered by the discovery of an old photo album belonging to the poet’s deceased father, who died when Gibson was only six years old — a model sold by Kodak in the 1920s under the name “Agrippa.” The poem is divided into six parts and describes, among other objects, a series of images recovered from the Kodak album, the camera that produced the photographs, and a firearm — the latter two referred to collectively as “the mechanism.” In Agrippa, this mechanism functions as a technology of inscription that intervenes between subject and experience, producing material traces that stand in for lived moments while severing them from the conditions of their emergence. What it generates appears objective and external, yet the subjective experience from which it derives remains fundamentally irreducible to what the mechanism can materialize. The strategies of self-encryption and book destruction, in this sense, appear to reflect aspects of subjective experience and memory: what is not technologically formalized is subject to fabulation and forgetting, yet formalization itself does not capture an essence, instead transforming expression into a mediated trace governed by the logic of the mechanism.

This carefully staged game of impermanence was not limited to the material design of Agrippa itself; it also extended to the conditions of its public debut. The work’s first presentation, framed as a “controlled” event, was held on December 9th, 1992, in New York, with live transmissions to galleries in other cities, in a deliberate effort to regulate documentation and prevent the experience of programmed self-erasure from being prematurely frustrated by recording or unauthorized reproduction. Yet, by the day following the transmission, a complete version of the poem was already circulating on MindVox, a New York-based BBS (Bulletin Board System). In two different texts — “Hacking Agrippa: The Source of the Online Text” and “Text Messaging: The Transmissions of Agrippa” — Matthew Kirschenbaum attempts to reconstruct what is known about the chain of events that led to the poem’s diffusion. According to Kirschenbaum, the most likely hypothesis is that a group of NYU students, posing as documentarians, attended the transmission at the Americas Society and taped the large-screen projection of the poem that accompanied Penn Jillette’s reading. From this recording, they would have transcribed the poem and, only a few hours later, made the text file available on MindVox. In an introductory note posted alongside the first online copy of the poem, an individual identifying only as Templar claimed responsibility for the leak (“Templar’s Introduction to the First Online Copy of Gibson’s ‘Agrippa’ Poem”). A second — and, according to Kirschenbaum, less reliable — hypothesis was reported by Patrick K. Kroupa (also known as Digital Lord), cofounder, with Bruce Fancher, of MindVox. Kroupa’s account is that a breach of trust by someone involved in the project allowed the poem to reach MindVox even before the transmission, with the text being posted only afterward out of respect for the work.

From that point on, Agrippa dissolved into fragments: of the poem, of the images contained in the book, of the object itself, and of rumors and urban legends — each referring to a supposed unity of the original work — that together produced a specific effect in which the audience is compelled to assemble a collection of digital artifacts in an effort of infinite approximation (a logic that Gibson would later revisit as a thematic motif in his novel, Pattern Recognition). The Agrippa Files recorded a passage retrieved in 2005 from Gibson’s official website (and no longer available) in which the author — who, as is well known, contributed only the poem — provided a full-text version and remarked:

Today, there seems to be some doubt as to whether any of these curious objects were ever actually constructed. I certainly don’t have one myself. Meanwhile, though, the text escaped to cyberspace and took on a life of its own, which I found a pleasant enough outcome. But the free-range cyberspace versions are subject to bit-rot, it seems, so we’ve decided to offer it here with the correct line-breaks, etc.

Despite the early leak of the poem, the technical workings of the program itself were not fully understood until twenty years later. In 2012, building on the archival recovery work of Alan Liu, Matthew Kirschenbaum, and The Agrippa Files, Quinn DuPont launched the “Cracking the Agrippa Code: The Challenge” contest, enlisting cryptographers and hackers to reverse-engineer the disk’s code and explain the mechanisms behind its intentional scrambling and apparent self-destruction.² Nevertheless, what Kirschenbaum observed in “Text Messaging: The Transmissions of Agrippa” continues to hold true today: access to a stable, authoritative version of the poem remains elusive. Despite its wide circulation and repeated moments of recovery, Agrippa persists online in dispersed, partial, and often unreliable forms — a condition that, as Kirschenbaum suggests, echoes the artifact’s original intention of self-destruction. Yet if, phenomenologically, the work’s essence is already lost at the moment of first contact with the original object, the paradoxical outcome is that Agrippa’s self-destruction ultimately gives rise to self-reproduction — a fragmentary, offspring-like recollection of the original work, signaling a dynamic that would become increasingly common in digital media: the fragmented afterlife of objects as they circulate, face obsolescence, and are repurposed online.

* * *

Around the time of Agrippa’s publication, several works emerged that would help define the field of electronic literature and foreground new relations between literary form and computational media. Among them were afternoon, a story by Michael Joyce (1987), widely regarded as the first major hypertext novel; Victory Garden by Stuart Moulthrop (1991), which draws on Jorge Luis Borges’s “El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan” and other texts collected in Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings (1962), the English-language anthology of Borges’s work; Izme Pass by Carolyn Guyer and Martha Petry (1991/1992); Uncle Buddy’s Phantom Funhouse by John McDaid (1992), initially distributed as a boxed set containing multiple physical media — cassette tapes, 5┬╝-inch floppy disks, and other materials — later consolidated on CD-ROM; and Patchwork Girl by Shelley Jackson (1995). With the exception of Izme Pass — published on a floppy disk included in the Spring 1991 issue of Writing on the Edge — these titles were commercialized by Eastgate Systems, one of the most prominent publishers of electronic literature at the time; most were produced using HyperCard or Storyspace-based environments, the latter developed by Jay David Bolter in collaboration with Michael Joyce. They are important not merely as early digital artifacts, but because they reposition literary form within mutable systems of navigation, linking, software execution, and material support.

Hypertext fiction thus did not simply digitize literary reading; it transformed the conditions through which textual structure could be traversed and experienced. The term hypertext, coined by Ted Nelson in the 1960s, described forms of non-linear writing unfolding across non-sequential textual spaces, as envisioned in his Xanadu project. In some respects, this project anticipated the World Wide Web, conceived as a global system for hypertext publication. Yet branching and non-linear reading structures associated with hypertext had already appeared in print forms such as the Choose Your Own Adventure series (late 1970s) and Fighting Fantasy (1982 onward). These works are frequently read as early print manifestations of what Espen Aarseth would later theorize as “ergodic literature”, a genre that demands from the reader a nontrivial effort to traverse the text, going beyond simply reading words in sequence and turning pages. Electronic space, however, expands the possibilities for connecting textual segments (lexias/nodes) beyond print. For example, the Fighting Fantasy books contained, on average, around 400 lexias, whereas Stuart Moulthrop’s Victory Garden comprises 933 lexias interconnected by 2,804 links. Digital media also enabled more complex interactions between text and image, as in Patchwork Girl by Shelley Jackson, one of the first works to explicitly incorporate the aesthetics of digital collage. The reader navigates multiple narrative paths structured around five main segments (Graveyard, Journal, Quilt, Story, and & broken accents), “stitched” together from textual and visual fragments that reconfigure into different structures of meaning. In one emblematic passage, the narrator of the “Mary Shelley” strand within the Journal segment reflects on the distinction between print and electronic media, and on how digital forms transform both reading and meaning:

Assembling these patched words in an electronic space, I feel half-blind, as if the entire text is within reach, but because of some myopic condition I am only familiar with in dreams, I can see only that part most immediately before me, and have no sense of how that part relates to all the rest. When I open a book I know where I am, which is restful. My reading is spatial and even volumetric. I tell myself, I am a third of the way down through a rectangular solid, I am a quarter of the way down the page, I am here on the page, here on this line, here, here, here. But where am I now? I am in a here and a present moment that has no history and no expectations for the future (Jackson).

This passage condenses a condition of hypertextual form: digital literary experience is inseparable from the interfaces through which it is accessed and navigated. Unlike print reading, which situates the reader within a relatively stable spatial object, hypertextual reading unfolds through executable environments that mediate perception itself. What matters, therefore, is not only the material support of electronic literature, but the technical systems that make its appearance possible. At this point, it is important to distinguish between two types of support: on the one hand, the material means of processing and storage (microprocessors, hard drives, floppy disks and CD-ROMs, and more recently flash drives or even the cloud); on the other hand, the programs responsible for their execution, which over time must be updated or emulated (HyperCard, Storyspace, HTML, CSS, etc.). Whereas print objects may undergo material decay while preserving relative formal stability, electronic literature depends simultaneously on hardware infrastructures and software environments that continuously mutate through updates, migrations, and obsolescence. This dependency presents an obvious complication for the preservation of the experiential dimension of digital objects, since — if no intervention occurs — the result is their disappearance. In this regard, the provocation advanced by media philosopher Friedrich Kittler in his well-known 1992 essay “There Is No Software” leads to problematic simplifications when applied to digital aesthetics. For Kittler, what we call “software” is nothing more than an abstraction or metaphor that conceals the physical operations performed by hardware (electrical signals, silicon circuits, and flows of binary code), from which software itself “emanates”. Software can always be reduced to hardware operations — and at this level becomes dispensable: programming languages (C++, Java, Python) are merely compiled forms of machine instructions inscribed within the physical limits of microprocessors. However, the most significant dimension of our relationship with digital devices does not occur at the level of hardware but at that of interfaces — that is, software — where aesthetic experience itself takes shape. Any process of updating or emulation therefore inevitably alters our relation to the digital work, transforming its reception and, phenomenologically, the experience itself. As any videogame player knows — and as the case of Agrippa makes evident — digital objects can rarely be updated or emulated without decisively modifying the experience of their original form; hence the need for a phenomenology of the digital: a phenomenology of what appears on the surface of the abstraction that is software, precisely because the interface constitutes the plane of appearance that makes any meaningful aesthetic experience possible. No one, after all, “experiences” hardware.

In terms of computational affordances, the development of new hardware — with increased storage capacity and processing power — has nonetheless enabled qualitative leaps, making room for increasingly complex non-linear narrative experiences. One such example is 80 Days (Inkle, 2014), inspired by Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days: the game contains thousands of narrative nodes and, according to the developers, up to 750,000 words — “longer than the first five Harry Potter novels combined” (Inkle Studios). It also offers more than 10,000 individual choices; as Inkle co-founder Jon Ingold explains, “on one complete playthrough, you see perhaps 3% of the text that’s in the game … It’s possible to play the game six times without ever seeing a single piece of text repeated” (Martens). Beyond hardware advances, the development of new game engines — the foundational software frameworks for game creation — and artificial intelligence systems have opened the way for procedurally generated narratives of near-incalculable scope. Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor (Monolith, 2014), set in the universe of J. R. R. Tolkien, introduced the Nemesis system: a generator of non-player characters (NPCs), each endowed with a name, appearance, strengths, weaknesses, strategies, and personality traits. These NPCs evolve over time: they form relationships with one another, remember past encounters with the player, and respond accordingly — boasting of previous victories or fleeing in fear after defeats.

An even more expansive example appears in Watch Dogs: Legion (Ubisoft, 2020), in which the player joins a hacker resistance seeking to liberate London from a digitally enforced authoritarian regime. Unlike games centered on fixed protagonists, Legion allows a wide range of characters encountered in the game world — pedestrians, workers, bar patrons, shop employees — to be recruited as playable characters. As creative director Clint Hocking explains, “you can literally recruit and play anyone who you see in the open world,” with each character entering the narrative through a procedurally generated recruitment mission and subsequently functioning as a protagonist within the larger story (qtd. in TechSpot). Each character is generated with a name, appearance, accent, and a combination of background attributes, skills, routines, and behavioral traits. Reflecting the scale of this system, associate producer Shelley Johnson noted that there is no fixed upper limit to the number of playable characters, stating that internal estimates ranged from thousands to millions: “one of the numbers that was floating around at one point was nine million” (qtd. in TechSpot). This design trajectory is particularly significant given Hocking’s earlier formulation of the concept of “ludonarrative dissonance,” introduced in 2007 to describe the tension between a game’s narrative claims and the actions its mechanics actually reward (Hocking). The move toward procedural and generative narrative systems can be understood as an attempt — at least in part — to reconfigure this dissonance at the level of systemic design. When narrative emerges dynamically from the same systems that govern gameplay, rather than being imposed as a fixed, pre-authored layer, the gap between story and mechanics is potentially reduced. Because such generative narratives are not fully scripted in advance by a single author or team of writers but instead emerge through the player’s interaction with procedural systems, narrative meaning becomes increasingly contingent on the dynamic interplay between rules, player choice, and computation.

* * *

If early hypertext fiction foregrounded the dependence of digital literature on specific software environments and interface logics, contemporary videogame-based poetics extend this dynamic into procedural and engine-driven systems. One author who has engaged extensively with these hybrid forms is the Glasgow-based poet, Calum Rodger. While much attention has been given to how games generate literary meaning through iterative play and the recombination of narrative elements across multiple instantiations, Rodger’s work engages procedural systems not only as devices for producing variability in narrative form, but as structures that open up points of tension within gameplay itself — moments where play diverges from its own operational logic and becomes available for reflection or poetic articulation. His work is thus less concerned with the stability or variability of narrative across playthroughs than with what might be called the margins of play: the thresholds at which videogames disclose moments of detour and aesthetic surplus at the edge of their internal logics.³

In the conclusion of his essay, “Exits in Video Games: Immanence and Transcendence” (2019), Rodger reflects on how games extend literary imagination: “Games have their poetry: their transcendent exits, metaphoric apertures nestled deep within the metonymic totality of their worlds. For innocence and experience, for order and liberty, for squares and spheres, they are exits worth chasing.” In the essay, Rodger draws on Edwin Abbott Abbott’s 1884 book Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (published under the pseudonym “A.Square”) as a medium through which to explore poetics in videogames. The work depicts a peculiar two-dimensional universe inhabited by lines, squares, triangles, and polygons, organized within a rigid caste system in which social position is determined by the number of sides. The only way to escape Flatland is not immanent but transcendent: it consists in surpassing the limits of the dimension itself, whether “from above” or “from below.” Rodger points out the similarity between Abbott’s book and the two-dimensional games produced in the 1980s, but the more compelling analogy, he argues, lies between gamespaces — even in contemporary videogames — and the formal principles of Flatland: virtual environments governed by arbitrary constraints and structured through underlying mathematical models and computational systems to which players have no direct access. Beyond the “immanent exits” offered by games — deaths, save points, and level completions that inevitably lead to further gameplay — Rodger suggests that there are also “transcendent exits lurking imperceptibly somewhere between the game and the code, a ‘slight upward or downward motion’ (which is to say a whole world) away from the limits and objectives set in advance by the game’s structure. It’s an idea which has long interested developers and, more recently, players, with whole subcultures dedicated to finding those exits through which one might ‘look down upon the insides of the things’” (Rodger 2019). It is precisely in this in-between space that the possibility opens up for a poetics — and perhaps even an aesthetics — of videogames.

This possibility — the opening of a poetic space between the game and its code — underlies some of Rodger’s most compelling experiments. In several of them, the poem is not simply adapted into a game environment but reconstituted through the formal logic of that environment. Player traversal, branching choices, and the underlying code all participate in its production. What emerges, then, is a form of ephemerality tied not to variation across playthroughs but to the contingent realization of the work through gameplay itself. The distinction is important: variability concerns the generation of multiple possible instantiations of a work, whereas ephemerality concerns the instability of the conditions that make those instantiations accessible in the first place. A clear example is “Gotta Eat the Plums! With William Carlos Williams,” a videogame-poem that takes William Carlos Williams’s “This Is Just to Say” (1934) as its point of departure. In the game — created in RPG Maker MV — you play as the titular poet in a kitchen late at night, driven by hunger and invited to interact with objects and options that evoke the poem’s domestic setting. Rather than simply translating the text into pixelated form, the game reimagines the poem’s narrative as a series of choices: you can pet a cat, play music, or explore the kitchen, but ultimately the gameplay turns on the iconic act of opening the icebox and confronting the plums. When you finally decide to eat them, a battle-style window opens, after which Williams’s hunger is sated, and he is compelled to compose the poem as an apology to Flossie. As he sits and writes, a reading of the poem by Williams himself plays. In this way, the game functions as both a meta-poem and a videogame-poem, not merely adapting “This Is Just to Say” but enacting its thematic logic through gameplay and thereby generating a specific poetic form: what emerges here is less a transformation of the source text than a poetic event situated in the contingencies of play.

Another experiment is “Sha-lot,” a videogame-poem inspired by a passage from Veronica Forrest-Thomson’s Poetic Artifice: A Theory of Twentieth-Century Poetry, in which she comments on Alfred Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott”: “contact with reality destroys her fantasy world, but not the poem, for she is more than a creature of fiction; she is an organizing formal principle, and her abode has been chosen by the need to find a rhyme for ‘Camelot’” (Forrest-Thomson 123). Forrest-Thomson uses Tennyson’s poem to demonstrate how poetic figures can operate simultaneously on two levels: as fictional characters within a narrative world and as formal devices governed by the internal mechanics of poetic structure. Rather than simply translating Forrest-Thomson’s theoretical distinction into videogame form, the game treats the notion of the poetic figure as an “organizing formal principle” not as a stable analytical tool, but as something to be exposed and, ultimately, unsettled through play. When the Lady encounters Lancelot, their dialogue explicitly stages a conflict between formal necessity and the character’s resistance to it. Lancelot urges her to occupy her assigned position to preserve the poem’s structure, while the Lady challenges that logic, questioning why she must function as the organizing formal principle at all. She even points out that Lancelot himself also participates in the poem’s rhyme scheme by rhyming with Camelot — though, as he insists, he is not an organizing principle but only a secondary rhyme. As the game progresses, this logic is pushed to an absurd extreme. Upon entering Camelot and reaching the “temple of pure form,” the Lady is confronted with her own reducibility as a formal function and is offered the possibility of “freedom” through substitution — being replaced by a “monophonic onion” or shallot. This gesture satirically literalizes Forrest-Thomson’s formalist claim by turning the organizing principle into a replaceable object that nonetheless preserves the signifier. “Sha-lot” thus operates as a meta-critical videogame-poem: a self-reflexive work that stages poetic form not as a static structure but as a set of constraints that become legible only through play, where meaning emerges through friction between rule-governed roles and their resistance to completion.

Yet another significant example is “Rock, Star, North,” a poetic experiment realized within the videogame Grand Theft Auto V (GTA V) — the open-world game developed by the Scottish studio Rockstar North and released by Rockstar Games in 2013. The poem was developed beginning in 2016 through sustained interactions with GTA V and, according to Rodger, underwent several transformations before assuming its final form in 2021: a kind of poetic odyssey — drawing on influences such as Bashō, William Wordsworth, Nan Shepherd, and Allen Ginsberg — performed within the game world of GTA V, specifically in the fictional regions of Los Santos and Blaine County (inspired by Los Angeles and its surrounding deserts and mountains). Curiously, “Rock, Star, North” resonates with a broader cultural moment during the COVID-19 pandemic, when certain videogame environments were actively used as alternatives to videoconferencing platforms; notably, players organized conference calls and social gatherings inside Red Dead Redemption 2 — also developed by Rockstar Games — treating its expansive landscapes as shared virtual meeting spaces rather than relying on interfaces such as Zoom (Walker). Rodger’s poem does not merely incorporate the lexicon of videogames; it expands to inhabit the game environment itself, unfolding as a performance from within its atmosphere:

All the stars are being overwritten

by cloud from the south, a flat circle

pressed in thick, slow drifts. I stick

left-stick right-stick

as if in dream, to the summit-path.

Everything somnambulantly seems.

Rock, the sense of a star, north.

(Rodger, “Rock, Star, North”)

In doing so, it orients itself toward what Rodger identifies as a “transcendent exit”: a possibility embedded within the game world that the player can sense and pursue, even as it remains structurally inaccessible — simultaneously possible and foreclosed by the logic of the game. A filmed performance of “Rock, Star, North” can be found on YouTube, where the poem is recited as the player character traverses mountainous landscapes in the game — an instance of what Rodger describes as the “virtual sublime.” On the one hand, the character ascends a mountain path toward the summit; on the other, the work gestures toward an underlying immensity of code that remains fundamentally inaccessible, producing a disjunction between two orders of magnitude — that of nature as exceeding apprehension and of code as an unrepresentable totality — reminiscent of the Kantian mathematical sublime. Although the video recording preserves a specific performance of the poem, the performance itself exists only in the moment of traversal within the game world. In this sense, “Rock, Star, North” foregrounds a form of ephemerality not located in variation across playthroughs or procedural generation, but in the contingent realization of poetic experience through gameplay — an event that cannot be preserved outside the conditions of its enactment. Unlike Agrippa, where ephemerality is tied to programmed selfΓÇæerasure, here it emerges from the layered conditions of gameplay, performance and platform dependence.

* * *

An even more emblematic case of digital ephemerality — one that dismantles the assumption that digital works are inherently permanent and therefore exempt from preservation — is that of the Japanese poet ni_ka (who maintains her anonymity). Where Rodger’s videogame-poems bring to light the infrastructural mediation of poetic performance, and Agrippa stages disappearance through programmed self-erasure, ni_ka’s practice brings these two dimensions into closer alignment: ephemerality is no longer located either in the designed structure of the work or in its procedural unfolding, but in the gradual disappearance of the work itself as platforms, interfaces, and display technologies become obsolete. Her poems have thus undergone a process of progressive erosion, and most of what remains today is accessible only through migration across formats such as screenshots, video captures, and archival reconstructions — a condition that is not merely contingent but deeply aligned with the formal logic of her practice.

Ni_ka first became known for her monita-shi (monitor poetry), a form composed specifically for the computer screen and saturated with emojis, animated GIFs, and visual elements drawn from kawaii culture⁴ and from the digital subcultures of young Japanese women. These works resist stabilization not only because of their technological dependencies but also because of their compositional excess: they are structured as dense, dynamic fields in which text competes with animation, ornament, and interface effects. In this sense, the “text” of the poem cannot be isolated as a stable linguistic object; it emerges only within a temporally unfolding interaction between browser, device, and user. Readability itself becomes intermittent, contingent on processing speed, rendering capacity, and the timing of animated overlays. A striking example is W E B h a l l e l u j a h「a」— blood/arc (2011), in which petals, hearts, and flickering icons proliferate to the point of near-opacity. Rather than functioning as decorative supplements, these elements actively reorganize the conditions of reading: they interrupt, obscure, and displace textual fragments, producing a mode of engagement that is less linear than accumulative and dispersive. The poem unfolds as a surface in constant flux, where meaning is not progressively revealed but momentarily glimpsed between layers of animation. In this regard, ni_ka’s monita-shi exemplify a form of digital writing in which legibility is inseparable from technical performance — where the limits of the interface (lag, overheating, visual congestion) become constitutive of the aesthetic experience.

This dependency on execution environments becomes even more explicit in her AR-shi (augmented-reality poetry), developed using the now-defunct Sekai Camera application. In these works, ni_ka overlays visual poems — composed of floating text, images, and symbolic motifs — onto specific urban locations in Tokyo. The poems are not simply displayed in space; they are instantiated through a triangulation of device, software, and site. As such, they do not exist as discrete objects that can be archived independently of their conditions of access. Their ontology is fundamentally relational: each work comes into being only at the moment of encounter, when a user, equipped with the appropriate application and situated at the designated location, activates the overlay. Sekai Camera was among the earliest augmented-reality platforms to gain widespread popularity in Japan; however, its services were discontinued in 2013, and with the disappearance of the platform, dozens of ni_ka’s AR poems effectively ceased to exist. What persists are traces — documentation of prior encounters rather than the works themselves.⁵ The best-known of these works belong to the series, Poetr-I Float Towards March 11th, 2011 — From Tokyo, a sequence of AR poems produced in the aftermath of the triple disaster of 11 March 2011 (the earthquake, tsunami, and Fukushima nuclear accident). The series overlays large-scale digital flowers and textual fragments onto urban environments, creating layered perceptual fields in which multiple spatial and temporal registers coexist. Yet these overlays are inseparable from the platform that renders them: when the application disappears, so too does the possibility of accessing the work as such. What remains is not a diminished version of the original but a fundamentally different object — documentation rather than instantiation. In this sense, ni_ka’s practice is also imbricated in a crucial distinction within digital literature between record and event. While screenshots and videos preserve aspects of the visual output, they cannot reproduce the situated, interactive conditions under which the poems originally operated. The work survives only as a derivative artifact, detached from the interface logic and spatial specificity that once defined it.

Ni_ka’s work thus extends the logic already observed in Agrippa, though in a distinct register. Where Gibson’s project enacts a deliberately scripted vanishing, ni_ka’s poems are subject to a more diffuse form of obsolescence, tied to the lifecycle of platforms, devices, and software ecosystems. In both cases, however, impermanence is not an external threat to be mitigated but a condition that shapes the work’s formal and experiential structure. More broadly, alongside Rodger’s videogame-poems, her work highlights a key feature of digital literature: that literary form is not simply inscribed in a medium but emerges from the interaction between code, interface, and user. As these elements shift or vanish, so too does the form itself. Ni_ka’s poems do not merely risk disappearance; they are constituted by it, existing only within the fragile convergence that sustains them. In this sense, they offer a particularly clear instance of how ephemerality operates not as a limit of digital media but as one of its defining formal principles. Taken together, Agrippa, Rodger’s videogame-poems, and ni_ka’s practice delineate three technically distinct configurations of this principle: programmed self-erasure, procedural mediation through interaction and gameplay, and infrastructural erosion across platforms and interfaces.

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Footnotes

1. This work was developed with the support of FAPESB (Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado da Bahia), Grant No. 1070/2025, through the Mobility CONFAP Italy (MCI) scholarship, during a postdoctoral research period at the University of Bologna (UniBo), Italy. ↩

2. For primary archival materials, see the original “Cracking the Agrippa Code” contest website, which preserves the original challenge and technical posts (www.crackingagrippa.net), and The Agrippa Files (agrippa.english.ucsb.edu), an extensive repository including book images, emulated software runs, and documents related to the December 9, 1992 “Transmission” event. ↩

3. For a related exploration of videogames and poetic form, see Game Poems: Videogame Design as Lyric Practice by Jordan Magnuson. ↩

4. Kawaii culture refers to a Japanese aesthetic emphasizing cuteness, childlike innocence, charm, and simplicity, and has been widely associated with consumer culture, character design, and youth-oriented digital subcultures in Japan. ↩

5. Portions of ni_ka’s augmented-reality poetry are documented on her personal website, including screenshots and project descriptions preserved independently of the Sekai Camera platform; see ni_ka, Personal Website. For an in-depth analysis of her AR-shi, see Campana, esp. Chapter 5, “World Webs: Augmented Reality Poetry and Japanese Sign Language Poetry Online,” where her practice is understood as mobilizing the changing media environment as a method of poetic composition. ↩