VIRSHI. The experience of the first immersive visual poetry project
Keywords:
visual poetry, digital poetry, electronic literature, virtual reality, immersive media, VIR, VIR.SHI, Chinese calligraphy, Wu Xing, Unreal Engine 5, intercultural communicationAbstract
This article presents the experience of creating the VIRSHI project — the first implementation of the VIR (Virtual Immersive Rhyme) genre model, in which poetic text is transferred into a three-dimensional interactive environment not as an illustration, but as material for spatial, bodily, and intercultural experience. The article aims to describe the artistic, technological, and design solutions of VIRSHI and, based on them, identify the type of readerly agency characteristic of immersive poetry. The methodological work is based on a media-specific approach to the electronic adapter (Hales), the impact of ergodic literature (Aarseth), and the effect of immersion (Ryan). The project documentation for VIRSHI and ten poetic worlds organized around the complex Wu Xing system describes the transition from poetic line to scene, from words to hieroglyphic actor, from reading to contemplative and participatory presence. The article's central theoretical thesis is that a VIR cryptocurrency work represents an intermediate type of reader agency, reducible to either spectator observation or a game mechanism. The project's limitations, the risks of cultural substitution, and avenues for empirical research are discussed.
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Copyright (c) 2026 Станислав Лаук-Дубицкий, Анастасия Постернак
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