About

The internet was built to connect people. And it has, sometimes profoundly. But something is lost when a poem becomes a post, when art becomes content, when the experience of culture is something you consume alone on a screen and forward to a friend instead of sharing in person. When you're online looking at what your friends are doing, and yet you still feel lonely, you realize online connection can be real — but it's thinner than what connection used to be.

Manifest Poetry: A Poetic State of the Universe is a site-responsive augmented reality poetry art walk that uses GPS-triggered digital experiences to layer poetry, visual art, sound, and animation into civic space, creating something the algorithm cannot replicate: a shared experience tied to a specific place, a specific moment, and the presence of other human beings.

The project pairs poets and visual artists to create installations accessible only in specific physical locations, through an interactive map and QR entry point. You have to show up. That's the point. Rather than rejecting technology or surrendering to it, Manifest Poetry harnesses it as a contemporary platform for creative expression — one that lifts the voices of diverse community artists and poets while bringing people together face to face.

Building on the foundation of Manifest Dystopia, a large-scale public AR exhibition across the Denver metro area, this project extends that work toward something more contemplative and collaborative, inviting voices from across the community to respond to the current state of the universe.

This is not a gallery show. This is not a feed. This is a walk. This is a pause. This is poetry in the wild.

The Archive

Manifest Poetry is, at its heart, an act of archiving — but not the kind that puts things behind glass. It embeds a record of this moment, this specific and urgent state of the universe, directly into the places where people live and move.

The archive is invisible until someone stops to look, which means it only becomes real through human presence and attention. You have to choose to see it. That choice is the work.

Because the poems and art exist in space rather than on a server or a shelf, the experience is trans-temporal — you are standing in the present, encountering something made right now, about right now, but the act of preserving it reaches toward people who haven't been born yet. It is a societal memory built from shared authorship, held not in an institution but in the air above the streets, waiting.

Call for Poets & Artists

Manifest Poetry invites poets and visual artists from the Colorado community — emerging and established, celebrated and overlooked — to respond to a single open prompt:

Participating poets will be paired with visual artists to create site-responsive AR installations along a walkable civic route. Collaboration structures are open — the pairing can work however feels right to you.