Poetics: this ‘app as art’ lets users mix media on photos

There’s apps for making art, finding art and viewing art, but can apps themselves be art? Of course they can. That’s why arts services organization Fractured Atlas shared its nonprofit status with a local maker, so he could get his artistic application off the ground.

Greenpoint’s Seth Carnes, the creator of Poetics, has spent the last ten years or so in the art world, but in the 90s he led a San Francisco startup that made immersive websites, music videos and took TV show concepts to Hollywood. Now he and a teammate are running an operation around an iOS app that’s meant to give people a way to put words and pictures together and share them in meaningful ways.

Buy a download of Poetics for $1.99.

The look of the app has a lot of the same feel as the popular refrigerator poetry magnets, except you can vary the size of the words and, importantly, the surface they appear on, using your own photos or those built into the app. It might just be the first pure app as art, according to PandoDaily, which documents the app’s origin as a real world art installation that became a digital project.

Once a user creates a photo with words on top, he or she can share it to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and, just recently, Tumblr. The most innovative form of sharing was just added though. For a small fee, you can transform your image into a postcard, write a message on the back and it will be printed and mailed to the person of your choice. Digital apps yielding real mail art: if only it was on Android too.

According to Carnes, the team has worked hard to make the app work with how  users create text: “Poetics is generative and multilingual, allowing one to cut and paste from any source, use emoji, any language available in Apple’s keyboards, or speak one’s words into the app via Siri,” Carnes wrote in an email to Technically Brooklyn.

The app has more than 27,000 users in 150 countries, Carnes tells us. Stay up to date on the Poetics app’s development here. There are new features in the works.

Here are some sample creations, provided by Carnes: