When the machine sprang to life, it chattered out the nonsensical words ‘zang tumb tuuum.’ Russolo and the circle were quick to provide an artistic interpretation — it’s a sound poem, you see, about the siege of Turkish Adrianople — and they eagerly hustled this new work of concrete poetry through to production. But this time, it was decided not to publish it in their own short-lived periodical, Arte Intima, but to instead ascribe it to a pseudonym, the anagrammatic ‘Marinetti.’ And so was born the fictitious persona of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti: poet, firebrand, theorist, and scapegoat appointed to become father of the Futurist movement. A true embodiment of Futurist principles, ‘Marinetti’ was an assemblage of steel and springs made flesh. Later, Russolo would try to kill him.

Luigi Russolo was a painter, composer, and maker of mischief, and the loudest voice in a secretive circle of Futurists in Milan. With Ugo Piatti he created the outrageous intonarumori (noise machines) to which he subjected disapproving audiences, soberly defending the caper in his manifesto, The Art of Noises. Along with a Bergamo machinist named Salvatore Delompiare, Russolo and Piatti created the first simple machines to use randomness and probability to create strange, funny, anarchic writing, a mechanical cousin to the ‘exquisite corpse’ of the Surrealists.

From these curious seeds grew a new philosophy, directed and cultivated by the circle, but with an unpredictability and a growing momentum that disturbed Russolo. The nascent Futurist Manifesto, to be published under the Marinetti name, was no longer a statement of artistic principles, but a call to violence. Perhaps it was the manifesto’s veneration of the ‘roaring motor car which seems to run on machine-gun fire’ that gave Russolo the idea: he would obtain from somewhere a crumpled Fiat, and arrange for a few eyewitnesses, so that the Corriere della Sera would dutifully report the account of a speeding car, piloted by Marinetti, that had careened down the Via Domodossola and overturned into a ditch, killing its driver instantly. All but the final point were published, and so the persona lived on, his manifesto growing into a withering parody of Russolo’s intervention. ‘We want to sing the love of danger,’ it began, and ‘declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed.’

Published December 5, 2023. Copyright © 2023 Jonathan Hoefler.