"Will we have a machine capable of replacing the poet and the author?" the Italian writer Italo Calvino asked in 1967, predicting that computers would write "literature." In 1962 poet Nanni Balestrini instructed a computer to write a poem eager to hear "the voice of the machine." Thanks to ChatGPT, GPT3 and AI novels, non-fiction books, media, music and videos are composed through algorithms in a digital Renaissance. How do we instruct a computer to write a novel? Should we use algorithms or machine learning? Class will experiment with machine writing, its role on disinformation and the polarization of politics.

A study of Italian novels and poems in English translation, works of visual art, and films which thematize food as reality and metaphor, examining how eating functions within ideological and mythological structures of modern society. Topics include "Futurist" cuisine as an aesthetic experience and a prophetic vision, the theme of the "Last Supper," and the "interrupted dinner."