Nigerian artist and technologist Omayeli Arenyeka has a new piece in the latest issue of The HTML Review: Kp’ọjọ kp’ọjọ, an interactive folktale written in Itsẹkiri that unveils itself to readers as they learn words from the language. The work sits alongside thirteen other pieces in Issue 05, released this spring, a lineup spanning interactive fiction, generative poetry, sound art, and other work built specifically to live on the web.

The HTML Review is an annual journal of literature edited by Shelby Wilson and Maxwell Neely-Cohen, built around publishing work that takes full advantage of the web as its own medium rather than treating it as a container for text that could just as easily sit on a printed page. Since launching in 2022, the journal has become a notable name in the small but serious world of web-native literature and digital art, its work has been covered by The New York Times, Frieze, MIT Technology Review, and Longreads, and pieces it’s published have gone on to win the New Media Writing Prize and appear in institutions including Rhizome, Pioneer Works, and the de Young Museum.

Arenyeka, who publishes online as YellzHeard, brings a background that sits squarely at the intersection The HTML Review is built for. She graduated from New York University in 2017 with an individualized degree spanning computer science, art, and design, and has since built a body of work — a library of gendered language, a Chrome extension for glitching Google Docs, a browser-based grief poem — that treats code as a genuinely literary material rather than just a delivery mechanism. Kp’ọjọ kp’ọjọ extends that practice into language preservation, turning the act of reading into an act of learning: the Itsẹkiri folktale only reveals itself as the reader picks up its vocabulary, folding the language itself into the piece’s interactivity.

The full Kp’ọjọ kp’ọjọ can be experienced at kpojo.world, alongside the rest of The HTML Review’s Issue 05 lineup here.