Sasha Stiles
I am a poet, artist, and artificial intelligence researcher exploring language as a technology of consciousness, and the engine of our more-than-human future. My work fuses ancient lineages with AI, blockchain, and digital media to create immersive, multi-sensory poetics — large-scale installations, intimate live performances, cinematic projections, sonic environments, generative encounters, VR exhibitions, calligraphy, typography, hybrid poem-sculptures, traditional book arts, and beyond — that embody the complexities of being human in an increasingly posthuman age.
I am fascinated by poetry as a dynamic system, an enduring data storage mechanism that encodes memory, emotion, and wisdom across space and time. Through research-based and transdisciplinary projects, I investigate how linguistic innovation — from the birth of oral tradition to the rise of literacy to the advent of generative language models — influences perception and understanding, transforming how we think, feel, and create. As a first-generation Kalmyk-American with nomadic ancestry and a diasporic tongue, I am especially attuned to the tension between presence and obsolescence, continuity and change. This informs an elegiac point of view that is both primal and speculative: language as inheritance and transcendence; voice as a lingering artifact of flesh and blood in a reality of virtual presence and spectral signals.
Since 2018, I’ve pioneered a singular approach to generative AI: mentoring bespoke language models on my own writing and research to develop Technelegy, an emergent AI poet and conceptual forerunner of today’s autonomous artists and agents. Our next-gen writer’s toolkit includes purpose-built datasets, intricate promptcraft, Processing codices, blockchain protocols, and a suite of motion graphics and design software — all deployed as conceptual collaborators in shaping the recursive, co-creative interplay between human and machine. Our 2021 book of verse, Technelegy, was praised by Ray Kurzweil and Hans Ulrich Obrist for offering a groundbreaking framework through which to understand AI and our evolving relationship to it. In 2022, a media-rich poem from the collection became the first work of AI literature to be sold at a major auction house (Christie’s), a milestone in the cultural reception of machine-augmented poetics.
My work has been exhibited and performed internationally — from Times Square and Lincoln Center to London’s Outernet, the V&A, Art Basel, and the Jeu de Paume in Paris — demonstrating new possibilities for poetry in the digital era. These works activate the poetic text not just as a literary form, but as a living, immersive experience: poetry that is not merely read, but embodied, encountered, and felt at a visceral level, in dialogue with the multimedia vernacular of contemporary culture.
At its core, my practice is guided by the belief that language is our oldest and most powerful interface — a bridge between minds, bodies, cultures, generations, and now, humans and machines. As we move into an epoch shaped by neural networks and algorithmic agency, I use poetry to explore how the tools we’ve created continue to reshape the story of language itself — how we make sense of our world and our place within it — and how poetic expression can continue to do what it has always done: illuminate the shifting contours of consciousness, authorship, and meaning in times of profound transformation.
