As interactive, technology-based artworks go, Dial-A-Poem is closer to Alexander Graham Bell than it is to ChatGPT. The brainchild of the artist and poet John Giorno (1936-2019), the project officially kicked off in early 1969, with six jury-rigged phones and answering machines housed at the Architectural League of New York, all connected to the same phone number and each set up with an audiotape that would play once a call came in. Anyone could call the 212 number and hear a randomly assigned poem — though sometimes the recording was a piece of music, a song or a speech — usually introduced by Giorno himself and then read aloud by writers and other cultural luminaries like John Ashbery, William S. Burroughs and Anne Waldman. Read more
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