Unknown Wiki
Unknown Wiki is an exploration into what it'd look like if we treated our internet browsing, social media clicking, substack hopping, Wikipedia rabbit hole reading, doom scrolling activities into digital structures.
Type
Genenrative Art
Coding
Team
Darcy McSwain
Stack
p5.js
Javascript
HTML CSS
Visit the generator here :)
Last update: 05.24.26
Table of content
Introduction
Unknown Wiki
More algorithm things
Gallery
Notes
Concrete Poetry meets Wiki Page meets Generative Art
This project was born out of an accidental rabbit hole into the history of Concrete Poetry and how artists like Poet and Programmer, Allison Parrish are reinventing this art form in the modern day.
Instead of training a machine learning mode, like Parrish, to construct poems, I decided to use "Wiki Trails" and hyperlinks to construct poem structures.
Fig 1. Nihilism Wiki page, what started this project initially
What does your trail say about you?
As I built poems by clicking through hyperlinks, I became aware of how similar this process felt to moving through the internet itself. I followed the words that stood out to me, going deeper and deeper into links, eventually forgetting where I began. That disorienting, absorbing movement mirrored the way we doomscroll, drift into strange corners of the web, and lose any clear sense of a starting point or intention.
I'd posit what we click on is an act of self-definition of reflection upon ourselves. Think screen time, watch history, like activity… In a similar way, this project treats each hyperlink click as a trace of who you are, what you notice, what you absorb, what you fear, etc…
Generative Wiki Trails
As you click into different pages, a viewport on the right tracks the word you clicked on and maps 1 second spent on said page to a character being added to the overall structure.
Each wikipage in this project was constructed using copy from their respective actual Wikipedia pages.
If every link, every post, every button we clicked on the internet was tracked, what would that structure say about you?
Gallery
The Wiki Trails structure on the right continually fluctuates in both form and shape. It uses a combination of user-guided input and randomized symbols to generate an ever-changing silhouette. Through this process, the structure also grows infinity.
Notes
This is apart of a larger project I'm creating delving into the world of Wikipedia and Poetry. I also plan on expanding Unknown WIki to contain more custom pages, allowing for more varied structures.