Intelligent Belligerent is an interactive web work that explores the recursive logic, constraints, and breakdowns inherent in computational systems. Built around a generative poem, the piece allows users to activate stanzas by clicking on numbers, revealing fragments of code-like syntax, speculative physics, and existential questioning. This interaction mirrors the way systems—both technological and social—demand input to reveal their structures, forcing participants to engage with the mechanisms that frame their experience.
The poem itself operates like a feedback loop, repeating and distorting its own logic. It begins with computational directives—establishing center points, generating repetitions, defining orbits—before shifting into something more bodily, more unstable. The work pulls from my ongoing explorations of glitch, recursion, and speculative systems, treating errors not as failures but as sites of possibility. It also reflects the bodily toll of interfacing with digital systems—the nerve pain, the hypnotic glow, the disorientation of constantly wrapping and unwrapping around a structure that was never designed to accommodate human variance.
In this space, logic collapses into poetry, and interaction becomes an act of excavation. The viewer is implicated in the system, clicking through its layers, witnessing how constraints and repetitions shape not only computational forms but lived experience. The work asks: How do you navigate a system not built for you? How do you move within structures whose original purpose is inaccessible or unknowable? These questions extend beyond code, touching on the ways we inherit, adapt, and glitch our way through systems of power, identity, and technology.
By breaking open these mechanics, // establish a center point plays with the possibility of rupture—of finding ways to touch, tweak, and ultimately break a system that was never neutral to begin with.