The CITYSPEAK project, an online “poetry magnet” game for the Web and for mobile phones, is among the finalists at the Content 360° international competition, part of the MIPTV/MILIA 2006 in Cannes. This international co-production of Kung Fu Numerik, Turbulent Média (Montreal) and IP4U (Valenciennes) is one of the 24 projects that have been retained, amongst 181 entries from 23 countries, to compete in 6 categories covering the spectrum of digital innovation. MIPTV featuring MILIA is considered the world’s first audiovisual and digital content market.
CITYSPEAK is competing in the Web 2.0 : Next Generation Collaborative Web Concepts category, side by side with two British projects and a Dutch project. On April 6,  Ghassan Fayad, who conceived CITYSPEAK with multi-disciplinary artist Mat Donnelly, will take the stage of Cannes’ Palais des Festivals to defend his “virtual Babel” in front of a jury composed of producers from the BBC. The winner of this pitching session will be awarded a development grant of €15000 from the British public broadcaster. At the end of this development phase, the project will be considered for an official co-production with the BBC. The Fayad/Donnelly duo had already won, at the Open Source event of Montreal’s Festival du nouveau cinéma, the Grand Prix Formule i development grand offered by the Bell Broadcast and New Media Fond, the Interactive Projects Lab from INIS, the Videographe, and Fjord Interactive Marketing.

CITYSPEAK invites an online community to contribute to a bank of photos depicting words from the urban landscape, including posters, billboards, graffiti, signs, cards, and to use them to compose messages and poems. “We invite internet users who are saturated with words and typography to express themselves through the urban centre’s vocabulary,” explains Ghassan Fayad. The collaborative Web space becomes like a virtual “fridge door” where visitors appropriate the language of their cities by manipulating the signs that surround them like poetry magnet tiles. CITYSPEAK is an entertaining extension of the connected citizen’s lifestyle: camera-equipped cell phones allow capturing signs and the Internet’s ubiquity allows sharing them and distributing the messages. With its enormous propagation potential, CITYSPEAK celebrates the imaginative disorder of our cities.