FOUR CORE TEXTS: SEVEN GENERATIONS (2024)

mp4 with audio
5:39 min
1920 × 1080

Unique media-rich palimpsest of “Seven Generations,” an original poem written and performed by Sasha Stiles and her AI alter ego, Technelegy, using a suite of next-gen poetic devices, augmented with electronically enhanced spoken word and music created in collaboration with Kris Bones. The second work in FOUR CORE TEXTS: HUMANIFESTO AND OTHER POEMS, “Seven Generations” is a multimodal exploration of kinship, sifting through personal and collective storytelling to unearth variations on fundamental narratives that inform our sense of self, and our place in history’s continuum.

From FOUR CORE TEXTS: HUMANIFESTO AND OTHER POEMS, a quartet of transhuman poems powered by the ever-evolving technology of language. Fusing Stiles’ ancestral heritage with a longtime interest in futurity, the collection pays homage to spoken word and the musicality of verse, marrying ancient rhythms with algorithmic cadence in a quest for meaning in our posthuman age. The project probes how the development of language and storytelling has shaped our shared humanity, from oral tradition to scripted literature to the emergence of generative creativity. Each work blends personal narrative and analog performance with layered forms of authorial intelligence — Stiles’ bespoke AI co-author, multilingual translations, digital voice clones trained on personal recordings, text-to-image materials and metaphors — honoring literature’s roots while testing the limits of poetic innovation.

In addition to evoking T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets,” oral epic poetry and lyric folklore, the collection’s title nods to the role of the Core Text in training data, computing and cultural canon, as well as to the cerebral cortex as locus of consciousness, memory and emotion. FOUR CORE TEXTS is part of an ongoing effort to cultivate autobiographical AI models to explore cultural memory, encode and decipher the dying Kalmyk dialect, and preserve family history.

Sasha Stiles is a first-generation Kalmyk-American poet, artist and AI researcher widely recognized as a pioneer of generative literature and language art. sashastiles.com