www.desvirtual.com/poetrica, 2003
Poetrica investigates reading and reception in entropic and cybrid situations and practices the appropriation of the advertising system as public space. It was launched at Galeria Vermelho in São Paulo in 2003 and concluded at P0es1s at the Kulturforum in Berlin (2004).
The project involves a series of visual poems I conceived using nonphonetic fonts (dingbats and system fonts), a DVD, digital prints, movie trailers, and a teleintervention allowing anyone to send messages via the Web or SMS to three commercial electronic billboards in downtown São Paulo, using the same typographic basis as my nomadic poems. Messages were transmitted from 4 to 8 p.m. for 10 seconds every 3 minutes, following the order of advertisements scheduled for the same billboards. All users were notified by email or SMS confirming transmission on the electronic billboards. The Poetrica website archived all messages with captions identifying the original text before its conversion into an iconic font family, revealing, in a sense, a community of poetic hackers of the telecommunications system acting in public space. A projection inside Galeria Vermelho relayed the action on the electronic billboards and street images back to visitors.
For the P0es1s exhibition at the Kulturforum, a DVD documentary about the teleintervention was produced, and a series of “ad_oetries” (ads + poetry) was conceived to announce Poetrica at P0es1s on the Ku’damm electronic billboard and as trailers in Berlin movie theaters.
Poétrica: São Paulo – Berlin
