Between Poets: ZDB gallery (Lisbon) commission web project

Co-workers & Funding

Between Poets (2000), was created for the Go to Frisco exhibition, an online and site-specific show in San Francisco, with the aim to reflect a dialogue between Lisbon and the American city. This project was an invitation by Zé dos Bois gallery in Lisbon. The interchange between the two cities were part of the concept and, for that context, I created and developed an interactive piece about an imagined dialogue between two poets, the Portuguese Herberto Helder and the American Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Highlighting poetical phrases and poems about cities and exploring world wide web aesthetics with the purpose of using the internet as a creation source I emphasize the dialogue between two languages, Portuguese, and English. The viewer could interact with several overlapping windows and sounds, flash animations and code errors transformed into poems. The idea was to create a playful system where the overlapping of images, sounds and animations resulted in a cacophonous artifact that bothered people by making them think about the information excess that the aesthetics of a new communication medium such as the internet brought to the human experience.