“Welling, Replenishing”: A Shanghai Sea Lyric, an Anti-Travel Guide & Chance Encounters
Though I’ve been working on this project on and off since around 2015, I didn’t begin to arrive at the form it has begun to take until around 2016, and it wasn’t until 2017 that, with the help of creative coder Luis Morales-Navarro, that the idea of a ceaselessly changing digital poem based on explorations of Shanghai by way of its vast, expanding Metro system really came together.
And it wasn’t until quite recently that, with the help of a 2022 NYU Digital Humanities Seed Grant and site development help from Shanghai-based Get Together, that I’ve been able to begin to bring various pieces together to the point where, roughly a decade after having first conceived of an anti-travel guide and eight years after first venturing out into the city on an algorithmic walk with the intention of writing some kind of Oulipian verse in response, the project is ready to be shared.