Safe Harbor Safe Harbor

Safe Harbor is a poem made with the words that corporations use to talk about the future. It is presented as an audio recording and a graphic score. This score adapts the design of stock market prediction tools to visualize the text’s prosody—its poetic and musical qualities.

The words that make up the poem were collected from the ‘quarterly earnings’ conference calls of every company on the SP 100 index. These are phone calls in which a company discusses its recent profits and future prospects with shareholders, who ask questions.

At the beginning of these calls, each company reads what is called a ‘safe harbor’ disclaimer. These statements acknowledge that the future is unknowable, that their predictions are unsure. Uncertainty is acknowledged to caution against speculation, yet it is precisely this uncertainty that makes speculation possible.