A Poem’s Safe in Your Mouth, Invincible
A triptych of new multimedia works by award-winning poet and language artist Sasha Stiles, composed of three 1-minute mp4 adaptations of the AI-generated verse. Excerpted from the long poem Every Poem Starts with a Seed, each stanza invites contemplation of the relationship between organic creativity and synthetic imagination and explores how poetic language, like data, can store and transmit meaning across space and time.
Having collaborated with AI since 2018, Stiles is known for her pioneering experiments with personalised data sets and custom models fine-tuned on her own writing. In this trio of silent, meditative pieces, she and her AI alter ego muse, together, reflect on the role of the human voice in an increasingly post-human age, and on the ancient, ageless impulse to encode and share wisdom, emotion, and memory.
Sasha Stiles is a first-generation Kalmyk-American poet, language artist, and AI researcher known for her pioneering experiments with generative literature and blockchain poetics. Her practice refracts heritage and tradition through disruptive explorations of imagination and consciousness, probing human voice in a digital age.
Fusing text, media art, and digital humanities, Stiles elevates poetry as both an ancient art form and cutting-edge technology—an enduring data storage system made to encode the human experience across space and time. Since 2018, she has pushed the boundaries of human-machine collaboration and language itself through groundbreaking work with AI; her insights have earned her a place among the most influential contributors to our global conversation about machine learning and the future of creativity. From her hybrid collection Technelegy (2021), co-authored with a personalized AI model and praised by Ray Kurzweil, to award-winning works such as Cursive Binary and Repetae, Stiles situates next-gen text within the continuum of linguistic innovations that have always rewritten what it means to be human.
Stiles’ work has been recognised by the Prix Ars Electronica, Sigg Art Prize, Lumen Prize and Future.Art.Awards; showcased by MoMA, Artforum, Christie’s, NPR, the Washington Post, and Poets & Writers; and exhibited and performed worldwide, including at Lincoln Center, the V&A, Art Basel, Art Dubai, SCOPE, Kunsthalle Zurich, Outernet London, and Tokyo’s Shibuya Crossing. Stiles partners selectively with such iconic 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.