Banner Wisdom 2000

Banner Wisdom 2000 is a video poetry collection composed of sixteen haiku (senryū) poems created entirely from static frames of early-2000s web banner ads. Each poem is a bite-sized piece of upbeat “life advice,” remixed from the commercial language that once clamored for clicks across the early web. As the verses appear on screen, a voice synthesizer recites each verse, and viewers can witness marketing slogans transforming into strange, earnest, and sometimes absurd reflections on how to live.

By resuscitating early web banner ads as poetry verses giving life advice, Banner Wisdom 2000 pays homage to earlier artistic traditions of reworking commercial ephemera into new forms of meaning. The poems highlight the imperative-heavy rhetorics commonly featured on early web ads, and foreground the continuities as well as mutations in how the web tells us what to want over time.

Featured at Cannonball Arts, Dec 2025-Feb 2026.

A collaboration with Yufeng Zhao.