Daily Dense Dance Desiderio (DDDD)

Verse by Verse: Daily Poetry in Public Space

The work of multidisciplinary artist Riccardo Benassi (born 1982 in Cremona, Italy; lives and works in Berlin, Bergamo, and online) explores the impact of technology on our everyday relationships with space and how technological devices alter the structure of our daily lives and shape reality. His works are the result of mutable assemblages of images, sounds, colors, texts, design objects, and various materials, which he combines into large-scale installations, videos, performances, artist books, and sculptural elements. The audiovisual installation DDDD (Daily Dense Dance Desiderio) presented daily changing messages to commuters at the Geneva Champel train station over the course of a year.

The 365 messages that make up the book DDDD are poetic fragments reflecting everyday life, co-written by the artist and the artificial intelligence GPT-3—at the time the most advanced in text recognition—whom he taught to imitate his own language. The process of collaborative writing demonstrates the inevitable overlap between the organic and the inorganic, the human and the machine.

The poetry collection is accompanied by installation views of the artwork in public space, an introduction by Noa Merlini and Beatrice Sartori, as well as a conversation between the artist and Andrea Bellini, the director of the Centre d'Art Contemporain Genève.

The project is supported by the Italian Council (2022), Direzione Generale Creatività Contemporanea del Ministero della Cultura.