Haiku Garden

N.B. Your browser will prompt for your location on starting this piece. The data is used only by an internal routine to calculate appropriate local season and sun angle. If you decline, the piece will assume you are in Kyoto, Japan.

In this slow Bitsy art game, you are invited to spend a couple of minutes in a garden that changes with the time of day and the passing seasons, reading generative haikus drawn from the work of Matsuo Bashō (translated by David Landis Barnhill) and Yosa Buson (translated by Allan Persinger).

Instructions / Tips

This game is a single room, and is meant to be viewed at a leisurely pace - you are encouraged to meditate on the haikus, rather than rush to collect them! The haikus generated are unique to each session. To see more / different haikus, you are invited to return to the garden at different points during the day, and throughout the year, to witness the changing scene, with the generated text reflecting these temporal shifts.

The garden changes automatically in the morning (roughly between 5-10am), at daytime (between 10-5pm), in the evening (~5-8pm), and at night-time (~8pm-5am), depending on the time of year. It will change seasons automatically, depending on local hemisphere. For Northern latitudes, the start of Spring is 1 March; Summer is 1 June; Autumn is 1 September; Winter is 1 December. These invert for Southern latitudes. This piece plays with (gentle) ambient sound and music.

This piece was inspired by poem.exe, a haiku generating bot by Liam Cooke.

Feel free to share any interesting haikus you find in the comments below  - some may be more 'abstract' than others!