10 Digital Artists: Poetry in the Digital Age
Poetry in the digital age brings together the analog and digital worlds of text, incorporating poetic expression into various artistic media and bringing it out of the ordinary. Through the use of digital tools and platforms, poets and artists alike are transforming the genre, disrupting the linearity of text to create meaningful spaces where the poetic emerges in new and unexpected ways.
From interactive typography to AI-generated verse, these works translate life into visual language, merging text with the viewer’s mind to recreate the lived rhythms and social textures of specific times and spaces. They invite us to intimately experience someone else’s voice, words, and body in profoundly innovative ways.
This evolution of poetry reveals its boundless potential in the digital domain. By intertwining language with visuals, sound, and performance, contemporary digital poets challenge traditional boundaries, bridging art and popular culture while opening up new possibilities for emotional connection and cultural exploration.
In this feature, we’re spotlighting 10 pioneering artists whose work embodies this transformation, showcasing how poetry in the digital age transcends the medium as we know it.
Whether you are an artist looking for inspiration, a curator working on an exhibition, or a digital arts fan looking to discover digital artists, this list is for you.
Here is 10 of the best artists who are making waves in the world of poetry in the digital age.
Scroll the learn more about them! Here’s the featured artists:Franziska OstermannAlicia GuoEduardo KacAnna Maria CaballeroChia AmisolaSasha StilesDanielle Brathwaite-ShirleyEverest PipkinLillian-Yvonne BertramSarah RidgleyLet's be friends on Instagram!
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Franziska Ostermann is a German multimedia artist whose work spans digital images, photography, text, video, and performance. Rooted in themes of virtuality, the internet, and female identity, her creations reflect a deeply personal exploration of her online and offline presence. For over a decade, she has exclusively worn white — a non-color that profoundly influences the aesthetic of her photographs, writings, and videos.
A graduate of the Muthesius Academy for Fine Arts and Design in 2018, Franziska’s work has been exhibited internationally in New York City, Paris, Berlin, and beyond, with recent showings at HEK Basel, Synthesis Gallery, NRW Forum Düsseldorf, and EXPANDED.ART. Recognized for her unique voice, Franziska has received a residency grant from the Berlin Senate for young German-speaking authors at the Literary Colloquium Berlin and the Liliencron Award for Emerging Poets.
Her project ORE OF THE INTERNET exemplifies her innovative approach to digital poetry. By transforming her original poem into a multidimensional virtual space, she merges photographs, spoken word, soundscapes, animation, and text into a series of ten videos. This work blurs the boundaries between text and images, tangible and conceptual, creating an immersive experience that challenges traditional forms of poetic presentation in the digital age.
Alicia is an HCI (human-computer interaction) researcher, computational artist, and poet exploring the intersections of technology and creativity. Currently pursuing a PhD at the University of Washington, her work focuses on creativity support tools, human-AI interaction, and collaborative processes in creative uses of AI.
With a background in computer science (MEng and BS from MIT), Alicia bridges her technical expertise with artistic expression, creating experimental computational web art, physical poetry installations, and interactive tools that inspire creative collaboration. Her creations embody her fascination with blending the digital and the tangible.
Beyond her research, Alicia’s daily practices infuse her work with joy and mindfulness. She journals stream-of-consciousness morning pages, paints daily sky snippets to capture its ever-changing moods, writes a poem a day, and ends her evenings with energetic dance sessions. These rituals ground her creative journey while inspiring her ongoing experiments.
One standout project is her computational poetry series, where she transforms fleeting thoughts and digital tools into immersive, interactive experiences, blurring the boundaries between art, technology, and the human spirit. Try our favorite, love me or not.
Eduardo Kac is a Brazilian and American artist and poet whose innovative works have reshaped contemporary art and poetry. Since the early 1980s, Kac has pioneered digital, holographic, and online art, foreseeing the dynamic, information-driven culture of today. His expansive career spans groundbreaking contributions to poetry, performance, printmaking, bio art, and even space art.
In 1997, he coined the term “Bio Art” and sparked the evolution of this genre with iconic works like GFP Bunny (2000), which became a cultural phenomenon, and Natural History of the Enigma (2009), earning him the prestigious Golden Nica award.
His work Inner Telescope (2017) was realized in outer space, and in 2024, his piece Ágora entered a heliocentric orbit. Looking ahead, his artwork Adsum is set to journey to the Moon in 2025. His contributions have been celebrated worldwide in renowned venues such as MoMA, the Pompidou Center, and the Venice Biennale, and his works are housed in major collections like Tate Modern and The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Among his many iconic pieces, Letter stands as a testament to Kac’s fusion of language and digital technologies. Originally conceived as a VR experience, Letter features a poem visualized as two spiraling cones of text, inviting the reader into an immersive, three-dimensional narrative. The piece, rooted in deeply personal reflections on birth and death within Kac’s family, transforms language into a spatial, emotional journey.
Letter (still) by Eduardo Kac
Ana María Caballero is a Colombian-American poet and artist whose work boldly challenges societal norms and romanticized ideals, particularly around motherhood and sacrifice. Her poetry navigates the intellectual and the everyday, turning moments of private rebellion into public acts of truth-telling.
A pioneer in digital poetry, Caballero is the first living poet to sell a poem at Sotheby’s and a triple Lumen Prize Finalist. She co-founded theVERSEverse.com, a groundbreaking gallery celebrating poetry as digital art, recognized by the Lumen Prize and the Digital Innovation in Art Award. Her innovative blockchain-based works have been showcased at the Victoria & Albert Museum, Times Square, and Sotheby’s, and covered by outlets like NPR, Artnet, and Elle UK.
A Harvard graduate, award-winning scholar, and contributing writer for Forbes, Caballero continues to expand poetry's boundaries, blending tradition with cutting-edge technology to reveal its intrinsic value as art.
Ana María Caballero is also featured in 10 Digital Artists: Women in digital arts you need to know
Chia Amisola is an artist and designer from Manila, devoted to the internet’s ambiences — its intimacies, solidarities, and infrastructures — and their intersections with third-world ecologies. Through (web)site-specific art, performances, tools, and environments, Chia explores the internet’s shifting landscapes, blending net art, software, systems, sound, and archives.
They are the founder of Developh, a collective working toward an archipelagic internet, and recently curated KAKAKOMPYUTER MO YAN!, an exhibition of Filipino internet art. Their work has been exhibited globally, including at the Victoria & Albert Museum, Somerset House (London), ACMI (Australia), Tai Kwun (Hong Kong), Gray Area (San Francisco), and panke.gallery (Berlin).
A Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia recipient and 2024 Lumen Prize Winner, Chia’s practice extends to public speaking, guest lectures, and features in The New Yorker, Frieze, BOMB Magazine, and more. They describe their performances as environments where their computer becomes a public stage, embodying the browser as both interface and subject.
By day, Chia is a Product Designer at Figma, based between San Francisco and Manila, merging a love for creative tooling with a deep dedication to the internet’s poetic and communal possibilities.
“I always write within code and contain my words in data structures. I arrange text into arrays, and I find that the very arbitrary sizing of my editor and its word wrapping affect my enjambment. Sometimes I write into a spreadsheet before flattening the grids into my editor. Code constructs the world’s form. After text, I love to manually rearrange hundreds of windows, meticulously forming a landscape for my poetry. Before completing the text, I’m considering how everything will be algorithmically presented: reversed, shuffled, patternized, sequenced, bound to time or clicks, waiting, or decaying as the browser changes.”
Sasha Stiles is a Kalmyk-American poet and digital artist. She is a prominent AI researcher on the intersection of text and technology. Stiles is also the co-founder of theVERSEverse.com, the acclaimed crypto-literary collective. Her mixed media works have won multiple awards and have been exhibited at prestigious museums and art festivals including Miami Art Week, SXSW, New York Fashion Week, and Virtual Times Square.
Stiles started using AI-powered language models to revise her verses and even further reflect her voice as a poet. She trained her “AI alter-ego” by feeding it with her own writings as well as texts by other writers that were influential for her. By giving the AI all the information in her head, Sasha Stiles asks her AI alter-ego to write more like her.
Sasha Stiles’ hybrid poetry and artwork investigates artificial intelligence’s concept of humanly communication and consciousness, and her experiments present a brilliant human-machine collaboration that’s incredibly creative and unique.
Sasha Stiles is also featured in 10 Digital Artists: Human meets AI to expand creativity
Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley is a Berlin-based artist whose work seeks to archive and honor Black trans experiences, using technology to imagine lives in environments that center marginalized bodies—those living, those passed, and those forgotten. Her practice spans video games, interactive installations, and digital archives, transforming how audiences engage with identity, memory, and representation.
In works like THE OCEAN REMEMBERED YOUR BODY, a text-based video game, Danielle invites players to navigate deeply personal and collective histories. Drawing from early text-based adventure games, the piece asks players to reimagine the world through their own experiences, with the ocean as a powerful metaphor for identity and memory.
Danielle’s art challenges expectations, using discomfort and resonance as mediums to create spaces where no one is forgotten. Her practice is a call to action, shifting the focus from passive spectatorship to active emotional and intellectual engagement.
Everest Pipkin is a game developer, writer, and artist living on a sheep farm in New Mexico. Their interdisciplinary practice weaves themes of ecology, tool-making, and collective care, often reflecting on life during collapse. Whether working in the studio or tending to the garden, their creations explore connections between humans, non-humans, and the landscapes they inhabit.
Pipkin’s recent project, Drift Mine Satellite, is a low-energy text adventure set in a post-apocalyptic limestone mine repurposed as a community hub among dormant RVs. Inspired by a real visit to a decommissioned mine, the game imagines a utopian collapse where communication networks and social systems thrive underground. Created for Solar Protocol, a network of solar-powered servers, the project emphasizes sustainability through minimalist design, relying solely on spatialized text and basic coding.
Pipkin’s work straddles the digital and physical, embracing a philosophy of interconnectedness and care that extends from their computer to the hills of New Mexico, where they engage with neighbors, both human and non-human.
Lillian-Yvonne Bertram is an Associate Professor of English, Africana Studies, and Art & Design at Northeastern University. An acclaimed poet, writer, and educator, they are known for their interdisciplinary approaches to storytelling and their exploration of identity through innovative mediums. Previously, Bertram directed the MFA in Creative Writing at UMASS Boston and taught at institutions including St. Lawrence University, Ithaca College, and Williams College. They also serve as the director of the Chautauqua Institution Writers’ Festival.
In addition to their literary accomplishments, Bertram has ventured into the digital art world with projects like their NFT series, World Maps. These pieces reflect on their journey growing up queer and biracial, using fragmented memories as a foundation for artistic expression. Bertram describes the World Maps as emotional cartographies that punctuate moments of self-discovery and understanding — whether watching queer movies, being bullied for their identity, or navigating the complexities of early internet interactions. Each map serves as a vignette of experience, capturing how identity evolves, resists resolution, and fades in and out, much like memory.
The World Maps began as blocks of text and lines, later realized visually in collaboration with Thailand-based designer Yaya Thirada. Text within the maps strains toward legibility, echoing the sometimes opaque nature of memory and self-perception. This series exemplifies Bertram's innovative practice of blending textual and visual forms to explore themes of queerness, race, history, and personal transformation.
Sarah Ridgley is a creative coder and generative artist based in the USA. Describing her process as "painting with code," she merges hand-drawn aesthetics with computer-generated imagery, blurring the lines between organic and digital art forms. Using tools like Processing (p5.js) and JavaScript, Ridgley creates her own algorithmic brushes, crafting intricate visuals that embody a sense of highly ordered chaos.
One of her most celebrated projects is her Asemic Writing series, which explores a fusion of code and poetic abstraction. Ridgley uses JavaScript to develop a generative handwriting algorithm that produces unique asemic poetry, evolving the process with each iteration. This project has culminated in her co-authoring a book with her computer, documenting the development of her algorithm in real-time. Each page is minted as an NFT, as well.
The algorithm behind her asemic writing generates letters, words, and sentences using a set of five glyphs, with each glyph creating a unique variation every time it is drawn. As Ridgley continues to refine her program, she plans to introduce capital letters, punctuation, and more sophisticated text generation to mimic actual words and rhyming structures, imbuing her generative writings with a deeper sense of poetry.
Read next:
10 Digital Artists: Immersive Art Experiences
10 Digital Artists: The Best of Pixel Art
10 Digital Artists: The Best of Glitch Art
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