We Built This City (On Rock And Roll)

The band Starship released in 1985 the song We Built This City that quickly became a hit. The lyrics describes the youthful idealism of a city built on rock'n roll, freed from the corporate world.

However, in order to construct the skyline of the city in the lyrics, the text has been deconstructed after several rounds in the translation tool Google Translate.

In his way We Built This City has built a city.

First published in Matrix Magazin's Conceptualisms Dossier (2012) and later in The New Concrete: Visual Poetry in the 21st century, Hayward Publishing (2014).