They Make You Write Your Poems: Artistic Practices Amid Automated Cognition

🗓️ Oct 27, 2026, 5:00 PM - 8:00 PM 📍 Onassis ONX, 390 Broadway Fl 4, New York

ABOUT THE EVENT

What happens to poetry when we share our language with machines?

They Make You Write Your Poems brings together artists, poets, and designers who explore the relationship between human body and machine cognition.

The title comes from Adrienne Rich’s 1961 poem Artificial Intelligence, addressed to one of the first AI programs, the General Problem Solver. Decades before large language models, Rich imagined a machine force-fed on the archive of human thought. Today, as AI agents become part of the environments in which we speak, think, and relate, the exhibition asks who is the “you” being made to write?

The exhibition reflects on artificial intelligence as a model of cognition that artists have long engaged in conversation by imagining it, borrowing its procedures and turning them toward unexpected uses. Along the way, it traces surprising lineages, from avant-garde noise machines and transrational poetry to spiritualist séances, tide-predicting machines, Cold War computer poems, and the textile legacy of computing.

Expect solar-powered poem generators, knitted computers with felt buttons, an AI that narrates mushroom trips, a dance pad that writes revolutionary poetry, and a simulation that lets you hear the weather through the ears of a machine.

PROGRAM

5:00 PM · Doors open, exhibition on view

5:30–6:00 PM · Panel discussion

With Melanie Hoff, Yafira Martinez, Allison Parrish, Riccardo Petrini and Lucia Rebolino
Moderated by curator Giulia Colletti

6:00–6:30 PM · Reception

6:30 PM · Screening

The Feeling Sonnets (Transitional Object) by Metahaven, an experimental essay film adapted from Eugene Ostashevsky’s poems about feeling, language and getting lost and found in translation.

ARTISTS

Roberto Fassone with Sineglossa, Ben Grosser, Melanie Hoff, Yafira Martinez, Metahaven, Allison Parrish, Riccardo Petrini & Lucia Rebolino

CURATOR

Giulia Colletti is a curator exploring technological imaginaries and the automation of language. She is the 2026 Italian Fellow for Curatorial Research at the American Academy in Rome and an AiR/ONX Mentor and Fellow at the Onassis Foundation.

CREDITS

They Make You Write Your Poems is curated by Giulia Colletti for the American Academy in Rome’s second Italian Fellowship for Curatorial Research, in collaboration with and with the support of the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture. Hosted by Onassis ONX, the Onassis Foundation's platform for art and advanced technologies.

GOOD TO KNOW

Several works are interactive. Visitors are invited to touch, press, dance and take home printed poems.