Melanie Hoff's Dance Poem Revolution Turns Steps Into Poems
The piece joins a one-night exhibition of poetry machines curated by Giulia Colletti for the American Academy in Rome at Onassis ONX in New York.
- When
- Oct. 27, 2026, 5 to 8 p.m.
- Where
- Onassis ONX, New York
Melanie Hoff's Dance Poem Revolution, a dance pad wired to a screen and a thermal printer, is on view at Onassis ONX in New York on Oct. 27. Each step on the arrows pulls a word from texts, songs and histories about revolution, and the finished poem prints for the visitor to take home. Watch an excerpt from Metahaven's The Feeling Sonnets (Transitional Object), which screens the same night, below.
An excerpt from Metahaven's The Feeling Sonnets (Transitional Object), 2024. Watch it with sound on Vimeo.
It is part of They Make You Write Your Poems: Artistic Practices Amid Automated Cognition, a one-night exhibition curated by Giulia Colletti, the American Academy in Rome's 2026 Italian Fellow for Curatorial Research. The title comes from Adrienne Rich's 1961 poem "Artificial Intelligence." Per the announcement, visitors can touch, press, dance and take home printed poems.
The show also includes Yafira Martinez's The Soft Computer, a knitted panel with four felt buttons that prints poems on receipts; Allison Parrish's Solar Powered Alba Generator, which writes dawn poems only when sunlight wakes it; an AI by Roberto Fassone with Sineglossa that narrates mushroom trips; and work by Ben Grosser and by Riccardo Petrini and Lucia Rebolino. A panel runs at 5:30 p.m. and the film at 6:30 p.m.
Hoff built the piece from open-source assets and code reverse-engineered from software modeled on Dance Dance Revolution. It premiered at the Bronx Museum in 2025. Hoff teaches at Harvard, NYU and Yale and formerly co-directed the School for Poetic Computation.
For more reading, see Hoff's CultureHub residency page, Playable poems now come with peer review and Online art installation examines propaganda in the Internet age.
Dance Poem Revolution at CultureHub, photos by Olenka Shkoda, courtesy CultureHub; Yafira Martinez's The Soft Computer, images courtesy the artist.
Killscreen lists the shows where poems, dance pads and code meet, the ones almost nobody else is tracking. Get them in your inbox, free.
