They Make You Write Your Poems: Artistic Practices Amid Automated Cognition is an exhibition bringing together artists, poets, and designers who explore the relationship between the human body and machine cognition. It is hosted by Onassis ONX, the Onassis Foundation’s platform for art and advanced technologies, and marks the culmination of the research undertaken by Giulia Colletti as part of her Italian Fellowship for Curatorial Research at the American Academy in Rome, in partnership with the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture. The research, titled Italian Brainrot: From Futurist Rupture to AI Nam-shubs, examined how the collapse of language moved from deliberate avant-garde gesture to automated transgression, as algorithmic feeds select, amplify, and monetize semantic volatility.

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

The exhibition reflects on artificial intelligence as a form of computational cognition that artists have long engaged with, imagining it, borrowing its procedures, and turning them toward unexpected outcomes. In doing so, 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.

It features works by Roberto Fassone with Sineglossa, Ben Grosser, Melanie Hoff, Yafira Martinez, Metahaven, Allison Parrish, and Riccardo Petrini & Lucia Rebolino, alongside a documentary section featuring publications by and about Nanni Balestrini, Giovanna Sandri, Gianni Toti, and Caterina Davinio; a film by Marinella Pirelli; a reconstruction of a noise composition by Luigi Russolo; and a historical recording by F.T. Marinetti.

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 & Lucia Rebolino, moderated by Giulia Colletti

6:00–6:30 PM Reception 

6:30 PM Screening of The Feeling Sonnets (Transitional Object) by Metahaven

Giulia Colletti is a curator whose work explores technological imaginaries and the automation of language, tracing how computational systems inherit the unresolved legacies of twentieth-century industrialization. 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.

In 2025, she co-curated The Vast Automaton, the 5th Industrial Art Biennial, supported by the 13th Italian Council. In preparation for it, she was a Research Resident at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA) and the Inaugural Research Fellow at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts (NTMoFA). From 2019 to 2025, she served as Curator of Public Programs and Digital Content at Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, where she developed projects on digital trauma and energy cultures. She lectures in Contemporary Art at ABADIR Academy, and her writing has appeared in CURA., Mousse, and Flash Art, among others.