Babel Poem
Participatory Website on Misunderstanding, Randomness, and Infinite Possibilities
Babel Poem is an online participatory work that transforms language misunderstanding into a chain of collective creation. By intentionally blocking participants from reading in their familiar languages, the project invites meaning to slip, mutate, and reform.
The interaction begins with a choice: select your mother tongue, then choose the languages you can read. The system ensures you will receive prompts in languages you cannot fully understand. Your task is simple — continue the story in your own language, based only on partial comprehension or pure guesswork.
No guidelines are given for “accuracy.” Each contribution becomes a new link in a chain of translation, interpretation, and misinterpretation. As the chain grows, so does the distance from the original sentence — yet every version is equally valid, equally part of the poem.
The result is an evolving archive of multilingual fragments — a record of how human communication thrives in gaps and errors, revealing that misunderstanding and randomness are the only inevitabilities in our current universe.
Digital Interaction
Language & Perception
Online Collaboration
August 2025