Riccardo Benassi

Daily Dense Dance Desiderio (DDDD)

Verse by Verse: Daily Poetry in Public Space

The multidisciplinary artist Riccardo Benassi’s (b. Cremona, Italy, 1982; lives and works in Berlin, Bergamo, and online) art focuses on the impact of technology on our everyday relationships with space, and on the ways in which technological devices alter the structure of our daily lives and organize reality. His works are the results of an articulated assemblage of images, sounds, colors, texts, design objects, and various materials that are brought together to create large-scale installations, videos, performances, artist books, and sculptural elements. The audiovisual installation Daily Dense Dance Desiderio (DDDD) displayed fragmented messages for public transport commuters in Geneva’s Champel station, changing daily for an entire year.

The 365 messages that make up the body of the book DDDD are poetic fragments that broadly reflect everyday life and were cowritten by the artist and the artificial intelligence model GPT-3—at the time the most advanced in the field of predictive text—which he trained to imitate his own language. The cowriting process demonstrates the inevitable overlap between the organic and the inorganic, the human and the machine.

The poetic collection is accompanied by installation views of the public work, an introduction by Noa Merlini and Beatrice Sartori, and a conversation between the artist and the director of the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, Andrea Bellini.

The project is supported by the Italian Council (2022), Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity, Italian Ministry of Culture.