Overview ↓

Goiás Music Festival_Visual Experiment

Goiás Music Festival was a collective experiment launched on Facebook in 2013. A group of designers announced concerts by world-famous artists in small towns in Goiás, Brazil, such as Madonna in Acreúna and Adele in Caldas Novas. The posters looked like a real festival campaign, but the unlikely pairing caused doubt, and people shared and searched to find out if the shows were real. The project went viral and made the news.

With humor, mixing show business with pequi and regional culture, the project questioned online credibility, mass culture and how Brazilians see their own regional identity.

It was also an early sign of what was to come. Years before "fake news" became an everyday term, the open letter explaining the project was right on the page, yet few people read it. They reacted to the image alone, without knowing where to check the facts, showing on a small scale how the Facebook machine could later be used to spread fake news.