Sasha Stiles + Technelegy ARE YOU READY FOR THE FUTURE?, 2020
Mixed media installation
24 ft x 12 ft
Experience an AI-powered poem written in 2020, performed and visualized by Sasha Stiles and her AI alter ego, Technelegy, with original music and sound design by Kris Bones. In this installation, a transhuman poem is split into two connected halves, representing the prompts used to elicit poetic responses from a customized text generator – embodying the back-and-forth, input-output relationship between an artist and her AI alter ego, as well as the digital dualism of human-machine collaboration. Visitors are invited to peer into the future of literature – in which humans and machines co-author poetic texts, and words come to life as multidimensional language art – and to consider their own readiness for what lies ahead at the dawn of a posthuman era.
Sasha Stiles is a first-generation Kalmyk-American poet, literary artist, AI researcher, and author of the “instant techno-classic” Technelegy, as well as co-founder of theVERSEverse. A pioneer of algorithmic authorship, blockchain poetics and publishing innovation, Stiles became the first writer to bring AI-powered literature to a major auction house when her poem, “COMPLETION: When it’s just you,” sold at Christie’s in 2022. Recent honors include a Future Art Award, nominations for the Forward Prize, Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and finalist status for the Christopher Smart Prize and Palette Emerging Poet Prize.
Stiles has spoken at Art Basel, The Brooklyn Museum, SXSW, Digilogue Istanbul, the Ai4 Summit, Miami Art Week, NFT.NYC and VCA Invites: London, and has exhibited at venues around the globe including Annka Kultys Gallery, Galerie Brigitte Schenk, Art Cologne, SuperRare Gallery, SCOPE Art Show, Superchief Gallery, the Carousel de Louvre, New York Fashion Week, the billboards of Shibuya, Tokyo, virtual Times Square, and elsewhere. A graduate of Harvard and Oxford, Stiles has served as Poetry Mentor to the humanoid android BINA48 since 2018, and lives near New York City with her husband and studio partner, Kris Bones.