Creativity
Lighthouse of Secrets
Anonymous messages turned into Morse code and beamed into the sky over Porto Alegre: website, system and visual identity for Carlos Nader’s work at the 13th Mercosul Biennial.
The work
Farol de Segredos (Lighthouse of Secrets) was a piece by journalist and writer Carlos Nader for the 13th Mercosul Biennial, held in Porto Alegre in 2022. A searchlight installed on one of the domes of the Casa de Cultura Mario Quintana, reaching up to 10 km into the sky, turned secrets sent in by the public into signals of light over the city.
The system
Messages arrived through the project’s website, were converted into Morse code and sent automatically to the searchlight. To make that work, I mapped ISO characters to Morse — some, like the cedilla, were replaced with simple equivalents so they would not break the transmission.
By the artist’s choice, no filter was applied: while the light was on and connected to the internet, every message was projected in full, with no curation or censorship.
Outcome
Besides working on production with the Biennial team, I designed the visual identity and promotional materials. While it was active, the lighthouse received and projected more than 500 anonymous messages.
