Banner Highway 01: Get on the Fast Lane, 汽车是旅行的工具 is a browser-based visual poem. The reader drives down a virtual highway lined with billboards. Each billboard is a static frame from a 1990s or early 2000s web banner ad, pulled from the Banner Depot 2000 archive. As the billboards pass, fragments of their original ad copy appear in sequence and assemble into something that reads like a roadside poem.
Burma-Shave for the Information Superhighway
The form is borrowed from Burma-Shave. From the 1920s through the early 1960s, Burma-Shave bought small wooden signs along American highways and spaced them out so drivers read one line at a time, at speed, until the jingle landed on the last sign. Banner Highway 01 runs the same trick on the Information Superhighway that early web copy was already promising. The metaphor was always literal in the ad copy. This piece takes it at its word.
Four poems
There are four poems on the highway: two in English, two in Chinese. The piece's subtitle, Get on the Fast Lane, 汽车是旅行的工具, is itself the opening verse of two of them, one from each language. Each poem is read sign by sign as you drive past it.
English banners carry a Chinese caption underneath. Chinese banners carry an English one. The translations are not strict. They are the kind of bilingual subtitling you would have seen on a turn-of-the-millennium Chinese website trying to look international, or an English one trying to reach a market it didn't quite understand.
Driving
Scroll or swipe to move forward. Each billboard arrives, holds, and gives up its fragment. Click any billboard to see the original banner ad and where it came from. There is a soft MIDI score behind it, sourced from CD-ROM compilations on discmaster.textfiles.com.
Featured in The HTML Review
Banner Highway 01 was featured in The HTML Review, Issue 05 (Spring 2026).
A Switcheristic Telecommunications project, with Richard Lewei Huang. Logo by Kay Zeng. Part of the Banner Depot 2000 family of projects, alongside Click Here… and Banner Wisdom 2000.
