Executed Poetry for JavaScript
Presented in EMERGENCE, an online exhibition curated by Kate Vass Galerie.
Each of the seven poems exists once, minted on Ethereum as a fully onchain token. The originals already exist onchain; a purchase transfers the poem from the artist to its new owner.
Reading and executing the poems is free and open to anyone. Purchase is a separate act.
These code poems are written in JavaScript. They run in your browser.
They live on the web, and can be executed on any computer in the world.
To own one is a proof that you shared in the small poetic gesture I am trying to make. Perhaps that is all it is.
Zeroichi Arakawa is a Japan-based code poet and smart contract engineer who treats program code as a structure to be read, tested, and executed. He locates its beauty in conditions, changing states, and the possibility of failure. His works include inside window, a poem that invokes the functions of the browser running it and uses the resulting error messages as its language, and BUGCAT, a series of five Ethereum smart contracts that embody historical vulnerabilities as code poems. He researches how code is read at the Institute of Advanced Media Arts and Sciences (IAMAS), and has published research in electronic book review. His work has appeared in Doc(k)s, the French review of experimental poetry, and has been shown at NEORT++ in Tokyo, at the Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media (YCAM), and in the Electronic Literature Organization’s 2026 online exhibition.