Turning A-List Guests into Living Poems.
Cast your mind back to 2017. Before we were all using AI to write wedding speeches, summarise meetings we did not listen to and identify mystery rashes.
So when Google gave us a sneak peek of the technology, we jumped at the chance to test it out.
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 came to us looking to create something worthy of the occasion.
Something suitably artful, suitably techy and, beneath all the cultural splendour, suitably commercial, helping Google get the new Pixel into the hands of a room full of very influential people.
Part art installation, part tech demo and part very fancy photo booth, PoemPortraits was designed to send guests home with a keepsake a little more memorable than yet another goodie bag full of candles and hand moisturiser.
To help us elevate the experience, we brought on board 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.
An algorithm trained on six million words of 19th-century poetry then turned their contribution into a two-line poem. Which, at the time, felt rather astonishing.
The words were projected directly onto their faces as they posed for their own PoemPortrait. Each guest received a printed portrait to take home, complete with the poem their word had helped create.
Meanwhile, their portraits joined a growing display of faces and verse, allowing guests to discover themselves among the other contributors. What began as an individual exchange with a machine became a collective artwork, built from the people in the room.
By the end of the evening, it had become a more poetic version of a group photo. Minus the awkwardness of trying to wrangle everyone into one place.
“My soul swims with noon and bloom
Your laughter spreads in fields of gold
This bee that loves the burning moon
Sweet nectar like a star astray”
After its debut at the Serpentine Summer Party, PoemPortraits lived on as a travelling installation, appearing at cultural events across Europe and North America, including the Barbican’s AI: More than Human exhibition.
