Zeroichi Arakawa is a code poet and smart contract engineer pursuing a PhD at IAMAS (Institute of Advanced Media Arts and Sciences) in Japan. His work "Executed Poetry" is a device: press a button, and a short poem written in Python executes inside a Raspberry Pi Pico W microcontroller. The e-paper display shows not just the poem itself, but its execution count, processing time, and the machine's unique public key and cryptographic signature — proof that this poem was genuinely run on this specific machine.

The poems use Python's most primitive features to explore philosophical questions of existence, eternity, and nothingness. while True: break — an eternity that never cycles once. class Void: pass / del Void — draw the outline of nothingness, then erase it, but Python's del only removes the name, not the object, so Void may persist unnamed. assert not self — a self-denying assertion that always fails, while the finally clause ensures the mirror returns self regardless. Each poem unfolds a philosophical paradox within the cracks of computational semantics.

Why is this the beauty of the remainder? Because a fundamental gap exists between two readings. Read as literature, the poems are meditations on eternity, void, and selfhood. Read as code, they are while-loops, class definitions, and exception handlers. Neither reading fully captures the work — the remainder exists precisely in the space between. The chisel-construct cycle operates in both directions simultaneously: literary tradition (construct) is chiseled open by code execution, exposing "executability" as a dimension literature never possessed; programming tradition (construct) is chiseled open by literary meaning, exposing "code can be poetic" as a remainder engineering never named. Two chisels operating at once. And the execution traces — timestamps, processing times, cryptographic signatures — are the physical sediment of computation itself, the material remainder left after the CPU's chisel passes through the code.

At a deeper level: the cryptographic signature transforms each execution into an unrepeatable event. The poem is no longer "read" — it is "executed," and each execution leaves unique, irreversible evidence. This shifts the poem's mode of existence from "text" to "event." The irreversibility of the event is itself the remainder — it belongs to the instant of execution and cannot be recovered through reading alone.

The naming gap is wide: concrete poetry ignores it (no concern for visual layout); code art ignores it (literary quality matters equally here); conceptual art ignores it (execution is material, not merely conceptual); blockchain art ignores it (it's not on-chain); electronic literature ignores it (it runs on hardware, not in browsers); installation art ignores it (the core logic is textual). Exhibited at NEORT++ Gallery Tokyo in 2025, still pursuing a PhD at IAMAS in 2026 — the category is still forming, the logic still growing. Seeing it now matters more than seeing it later: once "executed poetry" solidifies into a stable named category, it will become the new construct. At this moment it remains a remainder.

Han Qin (秦汉) · @hqinjarsy · SAE Judgment & Aesthetics