compost.page is currently being redeployed. In the mean time, here is a demo:
[https://drive.google.com/file/d/14CTK1g6PH20XWzjM41HGtqbDdleVS08A/view?usp=sharing](https://drive.google.com/file/d/14CTK1g6PH20XWzjM41HGtqbDdleVS08A/view?usp=sharing)
A participatory web-poetry garden
www.compost.page is an interactive poetry experiment that transforms the web into a generative, ever-evolving garden. It is a meditation on search, detournement, and the poetic potential of digital space. Inspired by early web aesthetics and concrete poetry, it invites visitors to cultivate poetic artifacts from the vast compost of the internet.
The experience unfolds in three layers, mirroring the organic process of growth and decay:
At the bottom of the page, visitors can plant a link—submitting any webpage URL into an input field. This acts as a seed, initiating a network of growing roots that extend toward other links embedded in the submitted page. Clicking on these roots allows them to grow further, recursively expanding across the web’s hidden connections. This alternative search method mimics how roots seek nutrients underground, revealing an organic, nonlinear way of traversing information.
As roots extend, the textual content of visited websites filters down into the middle layer—the substrate. Here, words from different sources mix together in fragmented clusters. These textual scraps create a chaotic, shifting collage, a compost heap of language drawn from disparate corners of the internet.
Visitors can click on a cluster of words, selecting a mixture of found text to form the raw material for the next stage.
When a word-cluster is chosen, it blooms into a flower—a generative poem created using an AI-assisted poetry model. A recurrent neural network (LSTM) shapes the initial poem, while a large language model (LLM) refines and edits it.
Each flower holds a poem, visible when hovered over, and read aloud in a glitchy text-to-speech voice when clicked. Over time, the page becomes a growing archive of visitor-planted flower-poems, left behind for others to discover.
www.compost.page is an ode to the experimental spirit of early Web 1.0 art and the aesthetics of concrete poetry. It challenges conventional web navigation, proposing an alternative search experience driven by poetic emergence rather than algorithmic efficiency. It is playful, participatory, and subversive, detourning the web’s hyperlinked structure into a fertile ground for creative recombination.
In a digital landscape dominated by speed and optimization, www.compost.page invites slowness, curiosity, and poetic rewilding.