On October 27, 2026, Giulia Colletti (2026 Italian Fellow in Curatorial Research) curated the exhibition and public program They Make You Write Your Poems at Onassis ONX in New York City. The program brought together artists, poets, coders, and design engineers, all of whom explore the relationship between somatic and machine cognition, ultimately embracing poetry as an “embodied technology.”
After the October event, AAR sat down with Colletti to learn more about how the event came together and how the time she spent in Rome as an Italian Fellow at the American Academy shaped the project.
What was the inspiration behind this event?
The exhibition grew out of Italian Brainrot: From Futurist Rupture to AI Nam-shubs, the research I conducted at the Academy. Taking the viral phenomenon of Italian brainrot as a point of departure, I explored what happens when the destruction of meaning, once a deliberate avant-garde gesture, becomes an automated process.
In Rome, I traced this lineage from Futurism through verbo-visual and concrete poetry. As absurdity has become the native language of the feed, I wanted to ask what poetry can still do with language and whether artistic practice might restore the relations that AI-generated language tends to sever. I initially envisioned the New York presentation as a contemporary reimagining of the Futurist serate. It eventually evolved into an evening in which people could press, dance, listen, and read together.
What did you learn from the Fellowship in Curatorial Research at the Academy?
I came to realize just how many people a Fellowship like this can reach. What began as an opportunity offered to me soon became something I felt compelled to make generative for others.
It made possible a new commission by Riccardo Petrini and Lucia Rebolino, as well as a new iteration of Melanie Hoff’s Dance Poem Revolution. It marked Yafira Martinez’s first-ever participation in a public talk, brought Metahaven’s The Feeling Sonnets (Transitional Object) to New York for the first time and enabled the work of Roberto Fassone and Ben Grosser to evolve in unexpected ways.
Along the way, these practices entered into dialogue with pioneering Italian poets and artists whose work deserves greater recognition. This is a milestone from which further trajectories can emerge. I hope to build on this momentum by delving deeper into Caterina Davinio’s archive in Rome and exploring its potential for further academic developments. I have also recently been invited to curate an exhibition in San Francisco next year, which will grow out of this research.
What were the throughlines or central animating practices of the artists included in the exhibition?
My research asks whether conditions of production can be reclaimed within an ecosystem governed by the feed. The artists in the exhibition respond through practices that make computational processes legible, return technology to the body, and creatively misuse the systems they engage with.
The first throughline is legibility. Allison Parrish presents her solar-powered devices alongside their circuit schematics and source code, Yafira Martinez leaves her circuitry exposed and makes public the lines of code that determine when the time may surface, and Riccardo Petrini and Lucia Rebolino trace weather sounds into the datasets where they can be misidentified as missile launches.
The second is the body, as a button is pressed, a pad danced on, a device awakened by light, a sound filling the room.
The third is creative misuse. Ben Grosser erases Andreessen’s manifesto word by word, Roberto Fassone receives machine hallucination as a message, Melanie Hoff redirects an arcade interface toward shared authorship, and Metahaven brings a listener, a chatbot, and a scientist together within a single performer. Across these practices, poetry emerges as an embodied technology: a way of reclaiming computation through touch, movement, listening, and linguistic experimentation, and of keeping language from settling into the expected.
What did you learn from watching the audience interact with different artworks?
I learned how much time people are willing to give a work that asks for it. Yafira Martinez told me afterward that many visitors stayed with soft.computer from beginning to end, touching the fabric, pressing the felt buttons, and waiting for each page to turn until their receipt was printed. In a work about slowing down, this patience became part of the piece itself.
I also watched participants step onto Melanie Hoff’s dance pad, moving together as words gradually took shape on the screen and a poem emerged from their shared gestures. My research describes a feed that keeps each of us alone with a variable reward. These works, by contrast, invite us to engage with technology in the presence of others. This is where image literacy begins, namely in the collective construction of meaning, through exchanges and responses that would never emerge alone at home.
The Futurist serate staged scandals to provoke a reaction. This evening, instead, unfolded through shared attention. I left convinced that creating spaces for this kind of encounter is precisely what curating can do.
"They Make You Write Your Poems” was held in collaboration with, and supported by, the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture and was hosted by Onassis ONX, the Onassis Foundation’s platform for art and advanced technologies.