theVERSEverse is a poetry gallery built on the principle that “poem = work of art”.Founded in November 2021 by the poets Ana María Caballero, Kalen Iwamoto, and Sasha Stiles, with Elisabeth Sweet joining afterward to lead communications and community outreach, it is a women-led collective of poets, artists, editors, curators, and creative technologists working to bring poetry onto the blockchain.
The gallery describes its mission as onboarding writers to web3, celebrating the rise of crypto-native poetry, and helping empower writers both creatively and financially.It “commissions, curates, and sells” digital poems, working across blockchains with what it calls a “diverse, inclusive community”.,
Its collection Poesía de Protesta pairs fifteen Hispanic women poets with visual artists in bilingual digital poems addressing gendered violence, exile, economic marginalization, fragmented identity, and erotic otherness.The collection debuted at Refraction Festival in Miami in 2022 and returned in a second edition at Proof of People x Refraction in New York the following year, curated by Gladys Garrote and produced by Elisabeth Sweet.,The museum Mad Arts later acquired twelve works from the collection.
For “After Ginsberg”, theVERSEverse trained an AI model on Allen Ginsberg's poetry, prose, and photographs to generate six new poems, released as NFTs in partnership with Fahey/Klein Gallery, the platform fx(hash), and the Allen Ginsberg Estate.,The project was previewed at Paris Photo in November 2023 ahead of its online exhibition with Unit London, which opened on November 15.The collective has also built VERSA, an autonomous AI poet used in its programming and live events.,
theVERSEverse partners with the Miami museum Mad Arts on “Lit Encounters”, a long-term exhibition bringing poets, visual artists, and code poets together across the museum's galleries.
