Listening Unit is a browser-based, generative text work structured as a minimalist system log. The page remains in a permanent listening state: it registers presence while explicitly refusing to respond.

Over time, the text erodes algorithmically until only a single word remains. This residual output can be read as a non-intentional oracle: meaning is not produced by the system itself, but projected by the viewer.

Listening is framed here not as communication or empathy, but as a cold, procedural operation. At the same time, the work combines poetic language with an oracular structure.

The design deliberately evokes old terminal systems, radar and military interfaces, surveillance technology, and early network computers.

Listening Unit marks a new formal practice in which poetry is no longer approached as expression or narration, but as residue, system state, and surface for projection. In this form, poetry becomes newly accessible to the artist—not as authored text, but as a process through which meaning emerges only in the act of perception.

 

The Listening Unit is part of the ongoing online format Listening Eyes, conceived by Projet Betula.