Channel of the North is an online poem that grows and shrinks twice daily as a function of the tide in the Westerschelde river on the Dutch/Belgian border. At low tide, the text is too small to read, while at high tide, the screen is filled by just a few words. As the sea levels at this location are highly variable, each day the poem behaves differently. The text of the poem reflects the continuously shifting fate the tide brings.

Channel of the North is part of our ongoing project The others did it, a series of poems whose content and presentation change under the influence of online data on dynamic events that occur elsewhere in the world. The text has a thematic kinship with these data, but this relationship is not uniform or one-dimensional.

The phenomena that drive these data usually cannot be influenced by individual “users” at all (the time of the day, stock exchange rates, public transport data, high and low water), likewise the reader of the text has no influence on the content and presentation of that text.

Currently, two more data poems are online:

Mood Exchange Rate is an online poem whose content is determined by the percentage the Amsterdam Stock Exchange Index rises or falls relative to the opening price of the day.

The right person depends on the time of the day at four different places in the world. This poem is not yet translated, but a Dutch version is online. A fourth poem, Time to leave, uses live public transport data to create a never ending story, driven by four different subway or bus lines in four cities that intersect on a virtual public transport map, thus creating a totally unpredictable phenomenon beyond control. Open Data as Second Nature, so to speak. We expect this work to be online soon.