Time for a Vispo is a blog by Satu Kaikkonen which provides a weekly visual poetry “challenge” to artists. The rules for participation are as follows: participants must have their own blog on which to publish their own visual poems, projects must be “suitable” for public viewing, they must be appropriate to the weekly challenge. Contests begin on Mondays and conclude the following Sunday, with participants submitting titles and links for Kaikkonen’s review and publication. Anyone who follows the rules can participate.

The result is a weekly collection of vispo, poetic pieces which are comprised or artfully edited, arranged, designed, invented compositions of text and/or image, along a certain theme. Vispo contributions may be static or dynamic, and often include no letters or numbers, at all.

While individual contributions vary aesthetically, rhetorically, and poetically, the broad span of responses to Kaikkonen’s weekly challenges make for an intriguing experiment in networked poetics. It is at the level of scale, speed, and integration that the pieces operate, as each challenge presents a multitude of divergent takes on a particular theme. It would be possible to consider individual contributions to the project as discrete digital images presented in an open gallery, it is the playful spirit of the project and speed of digital communication that makes Time for a Vispo an interesting, open-ended, Fluxus-inspired model of intermedial collaboration.