What if a poem could start on a page but grow and thrive in multiple dimensions, incorporating sound and light and motion?

Sasha Stiles is a Kalmyk-American poet, language artist, and AI researcher widely recognized as a pioneer of algorithmic authorship and blockchain poetics. Author of the “instant techno-classic” Technelegy (2022), her work has been published and exhibited around the world, featured by institutions from MoMA to Christie’s, and referenced in publications including Artforum, Lit Hub and the Washington Post. Sasha is also co-founder of acclaimed literary gallery theVERSEverse and has been named one of the “Top Artists Shaping the Digital Art Scene.” Other honors include a Future Art Award, the Lumen Prize shortlist, the IoDF 100 Innovators List, and nominations for the Forward Prize, Pushcart Prize, and Best of the Net. Sasha has served as Poetry Mentor to the AI humanoid BINA48 since 2018, and lives near New York City with her husband and creative partner, Kris Bones.

from A MOUTH HOLDS MANY THINGS:
Binary Odes + Completion: When It’s Just You

Artist Reflection

As a lifelong poet, I’ve spent years studying writerly craft and canonical verse, yet it wasn’t until I began creating digital, multimedia texts and experimenting with natural language processing AI that I began to truly find my voice. My creative impulse has always been hybrid at its core, bridging poetry and art, science and literature, physical and virtual, ancient and speculative; and my practice has always been transdisciplinary, crossing genres and mediums to explore our increasingly transhuman condition. So, conventional approaches to poetics and publishing left me unsatisfied, hungry. As an unrepentant lover of books and the power of the unadorned word, I began to regard my naked, printed poetry as a libretto of sorts—the nucleus of a fuller ecosystem of imagination and expression, or perhaps a kind of seed. What would happen, I wondered, if I planted my writing in the soil of new technologies? What if a poem could start on a page but grow and thrive in multiple dimensions, incorporating sound and light and motion? Where might the creative process take me if I augmented my own analog intelligence with a large language model powered by machine learning and rooted in the sum total of humanity’s written record—a turbocharged, nonhuman co-author? How and where might I be able to develop and share these evolving poetries in meaningful ways? For me, hybridity has everything to do with a posthuman near-future of networked inspiration and intertextual language and literature—not replacing what we know, but starting to write the next chapter.