In collaboration with vauvau-verlag für interaktive lyrik, Lettrétage sought to create a visionary approach to the intersection of literature and space, analogue and digital, production and reception, by intertwining live performance with digital interaction, thereby bringing the various elements (text, graphics, video, music) to an open-minded, media-savvy and adventurous audience.

It all began with a small working conference in February 2017 with the participating authors and visual artists, at which the basic concept of the historical Japanese chain poem was presented and explained in more detail. Subsequently, the four participating authors and the two visual artists jointly established the rules and themes of the writing project. The following rules were agreed upon: Six linear chains will be created. Each participant will appear twice in every chain. Each chain will be twelve links long in total. Link 3 of each round should be devoted to the concept of ‘atmosphere’; link 6 of a round should describe an ‘event’, and link 10 of a round should be devoted to the ‘turn’.

After the one-day conference, the invited participants each opened the intertextual dialogue with a verse or an image. These opening contributions were not created out of thin air; they built on a link from an old chain poem from the classical Japanese chain poetry tradition of Basho and his colleagues: „Alle hübsch in einer Reihe“ (All lined up nicely).

Following the basic principle of Japanese chain poetry, the existing texts and images were expanded upon, whereby a wide variety of connections and approaches were possible: text material from the preceding verse is taken up, or echoes of the preceding verse (through sound, rhythm, etc.) are developed. An image or photograph formally incorporates a line of verse or refers associatively to individual word images, etc.

Between February and April 2017, a text field was created in this way – everyone worked on connections and text/image contributions over several rounds, so that the overall body of text and images grew and grew. Overlaps, analogies, continuations, branches, comments, etc. emerged.

The six chain poems were created in two phases:
In the first phase, rounds 1–7, all participants were aware only of the specific work to which they were responding; they were thus familiar with the emerging chain poem and the contributions of others only on a random basis, partly because this was the first time the individual participants had collaborated on a joint project. This led to a heterogeneous aesthetic field of reference consisting of independent artistic positions.

In the second phase, rounds 8–12, the chains developed up to that point were made public and thus only then became known to the artists, who then continued their work with an awareness of the aesthetic framework that had emerged and of the positions of the others.

Following the two months of actual text-and-image production, the entire material, consisting of text and images, was released to the musician and the video artist. In parallel and independently of one another, they developed a video installation and a spatial musical composition, respectively, in a second phase of work, which could be experienced live at the Lettrétage on 20 May 2017.

On this closing night, the video installation and the musical composition were presented side by side in two adjoining rooms, allowing the audience to experience the interweaving of text and image created by the authors and visual artists within a field of tension that was both digital and analogue on the one hand, and acoustic and visual on the other.