‘You must laud your death in a symphony of silver.’

————— FIFTY DAYS AT ILIAM takes its inspiration from a series of ten canvases by Cy Twombly (who paints a scribbled discourse, citing the Iliad of Homer in order to evoke the juvenile madness of war). Christian Bök has used the title from each painting as a prompt for Sudowrite (an AI author), which responds to this input by generating a line of poetry, beginning with the pronoun ‘You.’ Sarah Ridgley has then used her own bespoke program (perfected over many years) to repeat this line (50 times) on a page of digitized parchment, thereby creating handwritten flourishes, all reminiscent of the ‘writing’ evident in the paintings by Cy Twombly.

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Christian Bök is the author of ‘Eunoia,’ the bestselling winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize.

Sarah Ridgley is the creator of ‘Himinn’ at artblocks.io, with works featured at Art Basel.