Google PoemPortraits

Google PoemPortraits

Turning gala guests into living poems.

Cast your mind way back to 2017. Little did we know the nightmare that awaited us in just a few years. Nor could we imagine that our lives would soon be bombarded with AI-generated slop.

Back then, AI was still better known as one of Steven Spielberg’s rare cinematic misfires. So when Google gave us a sneak peek of this emerging technology, we jumped at the chance to give it a whirl.

Every summer, the Serpentine Gallery hosts a star-studded fundraising gala in Kensington Gardens. That year, the eclectic guest list included Sir Paul McCartney, Cara Delevingne, Claudia Schiffer, Idris Elba and Grayson Perry, to name-drop but a few. It’s basically London’s low-key answer to the Met Gala.

In 2017, Google was the headline sponsor. They wanted to celebrate their involvement while placing the new Pixel phone into the influential hands of the event’s high-profile guests.

Part art installation, part tech demo and part very fancy photo booth, PoemPortraits was designed to add a little digital magic to the evening and send guests home with a keepsake that was, hopefully, more memorable than yet another gift bag.

Far beyond a branded photo booth, PoemPortraits captured what made the evening special: a garden party full of wildly distinct personalities, brought together in one impossibly well-dressed creative crowd.

To help us make an experience worthy of the occasion, we teamed up with award-winning designer Es Devlin, known for her epic theatrical sets and production design for the likes of Beyoncé.

Inside the installation, guests were invited to contribute a single word using the new Pixel phone: a tiny token of their own creative voice. The AI then did its thing, turning that word into a two-line poem using an algorithm trained on six million words of 19th-century poetry, which, at the time, felt genuinely astonishing. Honestly, it did.

Their poem was then projected back onto them, quite literally, as they posed for their own unique PoemPortrait. The result was both a personal memento and part of a collective artwork, with each portrait becoming one element in a larger piece that grew throughout the evening. By the end, it had become a lasting record of the gathering as a whole: a more poetic version of a group photo, minus the awkwardness of trying to wrangle everyone into one place.

After its debut at the Serpentine Summer Party, PoemPortraits lived on as a travelling installation, appearing at cultural events across Europe and North America. It reached its most prestigious outing as part of the AI: More than Human exhibition at The Barbican.