Airborne

"Airborne" (2013) by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer

"“Airborne” was an interactive installation by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer designed to transform a 900 square metre wall in Norfolk’s public space into a poetic shadow play. Participants blocked the light of two powerful projectors casting their shadows on the wall, and these were tracked by computerized surveillance systems. Out of the shadows emanated bellowing smoke which was mapped onto the wall and accumulated in it. Readable within the smoke were clouds of text, themselves turbulent, from salient poetic texts on light and shadow by Dylan Thomas, John Ashbery, Nicole Brossard, William Blake, Wallace Stevens, Adrian Matejka, Kathy Acker and other poets. In the installation each poem could be heard declaimed, often by the actual poet, while its text was converted into smoke by passers-by."