Jul 19 2025

Synthetic Legacies | Poems of Artificial Intelligence with Davide Balula, Charles Bernstein, Rindon Johnson and K Allado-McDowell

Sat | 2-4PM

SI is pleased to present Synthetic Legacies, a series of programs conceived in collaboration with artist Davide Balula. These programs, encompassing a poetry reading, a performance, and a roundtable discussion, will reflect on notions of memory, legacy, and creativity under current conditions of digital technological mediation and critical debates around artificial intelligence. Though offering diverse forms of engagement with these topics, each of the programs consider the potential of human-machine collaborations in enabling sustainable and experimental practices of transgenerational transmission.

To inaugurate the series, poet Charles Bernstein (together with Balula) and artists Rindon Johnson and K Allado-McDowell will each read their works of poetry, some of which have been co-authored with AI technologies. The poems, touching on themes of neuroscience, spirituality and physical embodiment, will creatively explore horizons of artistic vitality with and against machine learning. A special beverage conceived by Balula and produced from local weeds will be served during the event.

Please RSVP to rsvp@swissinstitute.net.

Davide Balula is an artist and animal trainer based in New York.  His work is often developed in collaboration with algae, fungi, A.I. systems, fire, chefs or dancers, merging both organic and synthetic ecologies. Since 2018, he has trained various A.I. surrogates in collaboration with philosophers, artists, critics, and poets. He is a co-founder and active participant in various community-based environmental initiatives, and also edits the online poetry publication Viseu.Us.

Charles Bernstein is the author, most recently, of The Kinds of Poetry I Want: Essays and Comedies (2024), Topsy-Turvy (2021) and Pitch of Poetry ( 2016). With Davide Balula, he wrote a series of AI-generated poems published as Poetry Has No Future Unless It Comes to an End. Poems of Artificial Intelligence (2023). The book was longlisted for the Golden Banana by the Venice Beach Association of LLM Poetics (VBALLM). Bernstein is professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania. 

Rindon Johnson is an artist. His work is driven by language. He is the author of four books of poetry and prose. 

K Allado-McDowell is a writer, artist, and musician. They have authored several books with GPT-3, co-edited and contributed to multiple anthologies, and regularly publish essays on art, AI and ecology. They created the neuro-opera Song of the Ambassadors, and record and release music under the name Qenric. They established the Artists + Machine Intelligence program at Google in 2015. Allado-McDowell has spoken at TED, The Long Now Foundation, New Museum, Tate, Serpentine Gallery, HKW, Moderna Museet, Christie’s, MacArthur Foundation, MfN Berlin, Ars Electronica, Sónar, and many other venues, and has taught at SCI-Arc, Strelka, and IAAC.

Image: Davide Balula, Cocktail Series: Flambéed Lubricants, 2025.