Imagine landart. An artist arranges stones in a remote desert, and the meaning of the work is inseparable from its location. Where would you plant a poem, not just for it to be read, but for it to be sited? Where is the digital earth that resonates with its soul?
Questions like this led me to create _loveLetterToTheAnarchy, a piece of writing that needed a very specific home—a love letter whispered into a container that could properly hold it.
The Message is in the Medium, also
I chose GitHub as the ‘land’ for this poem because the philosophies of anarchism and open-source software share a common heartbeat: decentralization, voluntary association, and transparency. To publish a text about non-domination in a space built on these principles (at least somewhat) allows letting the form and content to merge, to blend.
For those unfamiliar, this may create a unique reading experience. Here is a brief guide on how to navigate this small piece of digital landart:
- The Arrival: When you click the link, you don’t land on a typical webpage. You arrive in a code repository. This is the terrain. Before you read a word of the poem, you see its structure—a collection of files, commit histories, a space for “Issues.” This environment itself is the first stanza.
- The Welcome Mat (`README.md`): As you scroll down the main page, you find the first `README` file. In software, this is a user manual. Here, it’s the plaque at the entrance to the trail, introducing the gesture of the work and pointing you toward the poem itself.
- The Poem (`Anarchisms.myREADME.md`): A click brings you to the love letter’s body. It’s written in a dual-language of human-readable prose and machine-readable markdown. It is designed as if it could be executed by both people and systems—a text that performs its own logic, and is.
- The Deep Dive (`Explanation.md`): For those who wish to linger, the repository also contains `Explanation.md`, a file offering a line-by-line look at the thinking behind the text.
Boundaries as Features
This structure is intentional, and for some, it can be confusing. That’s not a failure; it’s a feature. The work’s dependencies and high barriers to entry are the very boundaries of this particular sheet of drawing paper. They create a space that asks for a different kind of attention.
“Your artworks are like crystals with complex, micro worlds woven inside. I want to dive, right IN!”
— A friend, Marie’s reflection on the work
It’s an art of chiaroscuro—a dance between the shadows of complexity and the light of understanding. This approach is part of a larger, consistent ethos in my work, grounded in my Vita-Socio-Anarco framework and also present in series like bodyTime().
The work is located here:
github.com/AndreClements/_loveLetterToTheAnarchy
I invite you to visit this small piece of digital landart. Follow the path from the welcome mat to the poem, and see the container as part of the composition. Or simply observe its strange form from a distance.