Installation photo from the Barbican's AI: More than Human exhibition featuring Es Devlin's POEMPortrait's installation

Artist and designer Es Devlin’s PoemPortraits is a social sculpture that brings together art, design, poetry and machine learning; it has been created in collaboration with Google Arts and Culture and Ross Goodwin. Each visitor is invited to donate a single word to the piece. This word is instantly incorporated into a two-line poem generated by an algorithm trained on 20 million words of poetry. This poem will form the photographic flash that illuminates each unique PoemPortrait.

The work is cumulative; each poem will also include a word donated by another visitor. At the end of the exhibition, a collective PoemPortrait will be generated from everyone’s contributions: a trace of this transient social sculpture.

The Barbican's AI: More than Human (16 May-26 Aug 2019) is an major exhibition exploring creative and scientific developments in artificial intelligence demonstrating its potential to revolutionise our lives. Part of Life Rewired, the Barbican's 2019 season exploring what it means to be human when technology is changing everything.