What it’s about
And We Thought, Roberto Fassone’s artistic project curated by Sineglossa, in which AI hallucinations become “prompts” from which the artist develops posters, music albums and films, joins They Make You Write Your Poems – Artistic Practices Amid Automated Cognition, the programme hosted by Onassis ONX in New York and curated by Giulia Colletti for the second Italian Fellowship for Curatorial Research of the American Academy in Rome, in collaboration with and with the support of the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture. Born in 2022 from our encounter with visual artist Roberto Fassone, the project now enters into dialogue with an international group of artists: Ben Grosser, Metahaven, Riccardo Petrini and Lucia Rebolino, Allison Parrish, Yafira Martinez and Melanie Hoff.
What is And We Thought
And We Thought was born in 2022 from the encounter between Sineglossa, visual artist Roberto Fassone and the idea of an artificial entity capable of experiencing and recounting psychedelic trips. The collaboration between the artist and a creative technologist gave rise to Ai Lai, an artificial intelligence fed with thousands of accounts of hallucinogenic trips published on Shroomery.org, which Fassone read and analysed, selecting the most interesting passages. Some of these accounts described artworks that do not exist: a lost psychedelic trilogy by Led Zeppelin, an album titled O.O.C. by an artist named Killa. Fassone took on the task of bringing these objects into reality, turning them into “prompts” from which he developed posters, music albums and films: a reversal of the standard process, in which it is usually machines that receive a prompt from humans.
Since its debut at Combo Torino in 2022, the project has travelled to Ars Electronica in Linz, Art City Bologna with Alchemilla, the Nuit de la Culture in Luxembourg and MAXXI in Rome, where in 2023 it received the MAXXI BVLGARI PRIZE for Digital Art.
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The programme in New York
They Make You Write Your Poems brings together artists, poets and designers working on the relationship between embodied experience and automated cognition. The title draws on Artificial Intelligence, the poem Adrienne Rich dedicated to the General Problem Solver in 1961, in which she described, with remarkable foresight, the extraction of language on which today’s large language models are built. It is no coincidence – as curator Giulia Colletti points out – that a 2025 preprint (Bisconti et al.) showed that rewriting a harmful request in the form of a poem can be enough to get many of these models to comply with it anyway: a sign of how poetry continues to unsettle the conditions under which AI systems stabilise meaning.
The works in the programme move precisely in this direction, embracing opacity as a practice: from latent spaces made perceptible to concrete objects that reinvent computation through hardware and soft electronics, these works seek to give expression back to poetry – understood, to quote Rich once more, as “an exchange of electric currents through language”.
The works on show
The programme They Make You Write Your Poems brings together different practices that share common ground: Ben Grosser works by subtraction on Marc Andreessen’s Techno-Optimist Manifesto, erasing its text word by word until it becomes redaction poetry; Metahaven contributes The Feeling Sonnets (Transitional Object), an essay film drawing on the poetic tradition of OBERIU; Riccardo Petrini and Lucia Rebolino present Pretty Deceitful Noise, a real-time sound simulation built from atmospheric sounds that datasets have mistaken for something else; Allison Parrish exhibits her Solar-Powered Alba Generator, a solar-powered device that composes poems when the sun wakes it up; Yafira Martinez brings a series of “poetronic” objects, spanning knitwear, e-ink displays and generative tarot, that rethink computation as craft; Melanie Hoff presents Dance Poem Revolution, a dance pad that turns movement into printed poetry. Alongside these works, Sineglossa brings And We Thought, the project born from our collaboration with visual artist Roberto Fassone.
Programme
📍 Onassis ONX, 390 Broadway, 4th Floor, New York, NY 10013
📅 27 October 2026
🕠 5:00–8:00 pm
🎟️ Free admission
They Make You Write Your Poems is curated by Giulia Colletti for the second Italian Fellowship for Curatorial Research of the American Academy in Rome, in collaboration with and with the support of the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture. The programme is hosted by Onassis ONX, the Onassis Foundation’s platform dedicated to art and advanced technologies.
