Bio

Sasha Stiles is a first-generation Kalmyk-American poet, language artist, and AI researcher working at the nexus of text and technology, known for her pioneering experiments with generative literature and blockchain poetics. Her practice refracts heritage and tradition through disruptive studies of creativity and consciousness, exploring human voice in a machine age.

Having collaborated with artificial intelligence since 2018, Stiles’ insights and innovations have earned her a place among the most influential contributors to our global discourse about the future of art, technology and humanity. From the hybrid collection Technelegy (2021), coauthored with a personalized AI-powered text generator and praised by Ray Kurzweil, to award winning projects such as “Cursive Binary” and “Repetae,” her groundbreaking work considers poetry as both art form and technology – an ancient, enduring data system that encodes human experience across space and time.  Through seamless integration of text, transmedia art and  creative technologies like machine learning and blockchain, Stiles situates AI within the broader continuum of linguistic innovations that have always rewritten what it means to be human.

Stiles’ work has been honoured by the Prix Ars Electronica, Sigg Art Prize, Lumen Prize and Future.Art.Awards; featured by MoMA, Artforum, Christie’s, NPR, the Washington Post, and Poets & Writers; and presented at numerous venues worldwide, including Lincoln Center, the V&A, Art Basel, Art Dubai, SCOPE, Kunsthalle Zurich, Outernet London, and Tokyo’s Shibuya Crossing. Stiles also partners selectively with such global brands as Gucci and Bang & Olufsen. 

A graduate of Harvard and Oxford, co-founder of experimental literary collective theVERSEverse, and longtime poetry mentor to humanoid android BINA48, Stiles lives near New York City with her husband and studio partner, Kris Bones

Synopsis

CURSIVE BINARY: FRAGMENTS (THE SUNDERLAND REMIX) - A transcendent poem in which oral tradition, written literature and generative language coalesce to form a digital Rosetta Stone. Lines of AI-powered verse from Stiles’ 2021 book, Technelegy, are writ large, translated into dynamic palimpsests of Cursive Binary – the poet’s proposed language for transhuman entanglement – and performed as analog and augmented spoken word. 

The work embodies Stiles’ belief that poetry is our most ancient and enduring technology, a kind of data storage system for vital information, and troubles the simplicity of binary thinking, inviting deeper reflection on our intimate relationship with the digital. 

Original music and sound design by Stiles’ long-time collaborator, Kris Bones.