Teardown Poems

Teardown Poems is a series of interactive poetry environments that run in the simulation game Teardown. Teardown Poems are made using 3D letterforms modelled in MagicaVoxel then imported into the game's local assets. These letterformss are then placed in a digital environment created in Teardown's level editor. Their in-game behavior is scripted in the Lua programming language, and, once imported, users can spawn and interact with these text objects in virtual space. A handful of vignettes illustrating the poetic possibilities of virtual text were released in 2023 on Teardown's integrated modding platform and can be downloaded from the Steam Workshop. This release includes The Death of Concrete Poetry, The Last Ecopoem, The Lyre of Athens, and Super Slam Poem.

Teardown Poems have spawned a number of derivative works incorporating its letterform assets or creative process documentation. A series of 3D sculptures made in response to three famous examples of text art has been minted to the Tezos blockchain, and a videographic excerpt from The Death of Concrete Poetry is forthcoming from Metatron Press on Glyphöria, a web-based platform for multimedia poetry, in fall 2023.

Teardown DLC
2023
Free

Steam Workshop

3D models (.glb)
Editions of 5
2023

objkt

Teardown DLC
2023
Free

Steam Workshop

3D models (.glb)
Editions of 5
2023

objkt

Trailer

Gallery

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3D Sculptures

A series of 3D sculptures incorporating the letterform assets from "Teardown Poems" were made in response to three famous examples of text art:

Inspired by the LOVE sculptures of Robert Indiana, "Concrete POEM" emphasizes the apparent weightiness and permanence of art that has passed into the virtual realm of the collective consciousness.

Inspired by "The Complete Works" by bpNichol, this version of "The Complete Works" re-enacts bpNichol's bold gesture of enfolding all writing within the scope of his own work by claiming all possible permutations of the letters on his typewriter.

Inspired by the stock ticker-esque text art of Jenny Holzer, "Price Fragility" plays with the transparency and volatility of crypto valuations to suggest the fragility and interchangeability of semantic units.

All three sculptures have been minted as .glb files to the Tezos blockchain. The letterforms were modelled in MagicaVoxel, and the sculptures were composed and animated in Blender.

Concrete POEM

The Complete Works

Price Fragility

About Teardown

What is Teardown?

Teardown is primarily a heist game built atop a highly modifiable physics engine and level editor. The game system uses voxels, or volumetric pixels, to represent physical materials in three-dimensional space. For example, wood voxels are a light brown color and burn readily, while steel voxels appear shiny and grey and will not burn. Objects are designed in a voxel editing program and imported into Teardown where they behave with the properties assigned their various voxel types. A large, supportive, and somewhat unhinged community of modders has formed around the game, and many of the assets you might wish for in a game of megalomaniacal world-building and -breaking are already available for download.

Why make DLC?

My hope for this project is to contribute to the Teardown modding community with a collection of letterform assets and level designs that foreground literary experiences in a non-literary medium. One of my primary interests as a poet is in the 'materials' of language, and Teardown is a game entirely about materials. Moreover, Teardown's modding community is energetic and free to participate in, and the game's development team is about as open and accommodating as any modder could hope for. I highly recommend you consider downloading the game, even just to muck around with their built-in levels and materials.