Hai-Tech

Hai-Tech is a work of computational poetry that bridges haiku tradition and digital culture through the logic of code.

The work randomly pairs kanji from two distinct lexicons: one drawn from the imagery of haiku and classical Japanese poetics, the other from the contemporary vocabulary of computation and digital technology. On screen, the characters spin like a slot machine before settling into compounds — sometimes profound, sometimes humorous, often uncanny — that appear and dissolve in an endless recombination.

The piece highlights the unstable, generative, idiosyncratic nature of language, where meaning slips between registers and is continually reconstituted by the reader and their history, experience, and imagination. For Kalen Iwamoto, a second-generation Japanese born in Canada, the work also plays out the gaps and slippages of living between two cultures and tongues.

In staging an encounter between distinct semantic fields to birth a third meaning, “Hai-Tech” unsettles the boundaries between tradition and technology, sense and nonsense, writing and reading.

Coded with the invaluable support of Zeroichi Arakawa.