Boid Poems is an animated digital text in which a sequence of boids, each displaying a word, variously flock, murmur, school, and swarm into different visual and semantic formations.
Boids (standing for ‘bird-oid’ object) is an artificial life algorithm developed by Craig Reynolds in 1986, which uses a simple set of rules to simulate the flocking behaviour of birds and other animals. In this text, the movement of each boid is driven by a vectorised model of language developed from literature discussing this kind of emergent behaviour across technical, conceptual, and aesthetic registers. Each individual boid attempts to formate with others whose assigned words are topically similar, clustering and splintering as they go. These words change randomly over time, to keep the flock in a state of flux.
Boid Poems is a speculative effort at realising another imaginary concerning language-driven, generative ‘AI’, in which its already more-than-human qualities are modelled expressly on those of the animal world. In so doing, it invites us to consider a vision of ‘AI’ that is far stranger, quietly unknowable, and resolutely ‘unproductive’.
Boid Poems was published in the AI Review, in October 2025. It is available at this link here, or directly via this site here. A mirror is also available at itch.io.