›Fisches Nachtgesang‹ is one of the poems from Christian Morgenstern’s (1871-1914) ›Galgenlieder‹. He started working on this collection of poems at the end of the 19th century which were later published in 1905 and is best known for his humorous playful poetry.
›Fisches Nachtgesang‹ by Christian Morgenstern
›Fisches Nachtgesang‹ (›fish’s nightsong‹) is one of his more daring pieces and dissolutes the function of language by being entirely made up of dashes and brackets. As it has no readable language it can’t be read out loud but this doesn’t mean it has no meaning. In combination with the title the reader can draw conclusions that the shape of the poem resembles a fish and might also recognize faces in the combination of characters.
I wanted to continue Morgenstern’s playful approach to language and give the user the opportunity to flesh out the typographic fish with different additional characters by filling out a HTML form. Combining concrete poetry with HTML forms is an idea I discovered in one of Chia Amisola’s projects. The designer and artist published the website ›Concrete Form‹, where they ask questions about identity in a modern interpretation of concrete poetry.
The user also has the opportunity to look inside of the fish and reveal its HTML skeleton, which is normally hidden. It is an ode to the poetry that sometimes hides in the code itself and the work that is put into handmade websites.