(1) ‘An Apparition’ is available online in ‘ghost in the loop,’ The Photographers’ Gallery & Goethe-Institut London, 2026
(3) ‘Scribe’ will be in the ‘imperfect index,’ Vol. 3, Abbie Vickress & Laura Parke, 2026
(4) Writing about social media platforms for the ‘Website Owner’s Manual,’ Vol. 2, Emil Woudenberg & MaryAnn Icaro, 2027
And yet, for all its imaginative potential, the metaphor in interface design is rarely allowed to be anything more than functional. It borrows from the familiar simply to make technology easier to understand, stopping short of the kind of transformative or poetic possibility that metaphor, in any other context, might open up. The very tool that could inspire wonder is instead put to work.
I’m curious about the ways we can take this metaphor to make poetry. In contrast to coding conventions, poetry is a writing system where human language is considered for its aesthetic qualities in addition to, or instead of, its meaning. Words are valued for how they look, sound, feel. Where code relies on binaries poetry holds open multiple interpretations simultaneously. This quality makes it a particularly powerful form for voices that have historically been silenced by dominant systems of meaning.
In ‘Poetry Is Not a Luxury’, Audre Lorde argues that poetry is a necessity, because it allows us to "give a name to the nameless," enabling self-expression that can be unbounded, unconstrained by oppressive logic. It comes to little surprise to me then that the poetry of women of colour are repeatedly about naming experience on one's own terms. Without having to reduce complexity into a standardised, limited framework, alternatives can arise.
My experiments consider the words of Lorde to explore how interfaces might function as expressive and poetic forms rather than purely functional tools. In ‘Orbit,’ browser interactions become a part of the reading experience. Take 'Y>x,' for example. Minimising the browser causes the text to shift from "man" to "woman," thus mapping the act of shrinking a window onto the social experience of being diminished under patriarchy. Through gestures like this, ‘Orbit’ frames interaction as a mechanism through which hierarchy is rehearsed and made to feel intuitive.
Most systems are designed to be used rather than examined. Their logic remains hidden within a container of instructions, from code to social scripts. By repurposing familiar gestures, I try to unfold that container and lay its structure flat. What once appeared fixed reveals itself as a series of choices that could have been made differently. The question shifts from "What does this system do?" to "What does it assume, what does it limit, and what else could it become?