Monica Storss, a TGLP scholarship recipient and member of our current Certified Listener Poet training cohort and current PhD student, created The Augmented Reality Poetry Machine as a way for people to experience poetry through cutting-edge technology.
On March 5, 2025 Monica’s project, The Augmented Reality Poetry Machine was part of MIT’s Artfinity festival, and the cornerstone of the March 5 Augmented Reality Day celebration on the MIT Campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Image Credit: Sue Lichtenstein
Augmented reality is a technology that overlays digital content over the real world. The digital content is made visible through a device like a cell phone or smart glasses. Monica says she created the project to make “two exclusionary spaces – high art and high tech – accessible to all.” The Augmented Reality Poetry Machine, blends emerging technologies and poetry for interactive, co-creative poetry experiences in augmented reality. Participants co-create poems with a live poet in a durational site-and-time based installation. The poems are placed into augmented reality environments to find, interact, experience, and archive. The project bridges personal expression and technological mediation, creating a space where individual narratives become shared experiences through poetry, augmented reality, and relational aesthetics.
Beginning with an intake form, each participant's information inspires a custom poem crafted by a live human poet. These poems populate an augmented reality environment, grouped thematically to create a collective experience. As participants discover their poems in the AR space, they engage with both the virtual artwork and the physical community, exploring intersections of spatial justice, data analysis, performance writing, and experiential storytelling, transforming personal narratives into site-specific poetry through real-time collaboration between participants and poets.