Sasha Stiles

About

ABOUT

Sasha Stiles is a first-generation Kalmyk-American poet, artist and AI researcher widely recognized as a pioneer of generative literature and language art. Her award-winning work fuses text and technology to probe what it means to be human in an increasingly posthuman era.

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Stiles is author of the “instant techno classic” poetry collection, Technelegy (Black Spring Press Group, 2021), and has been named “perhaps the leading blockchain poet” by Right Click Save, as well as one of the top 10 NFT artists to watch in 2023, ushering in poetry at such global platforms as Art Blocks, PROOF, fxhash, Quantum, SuperRare, Makers Place, Objkt, Foundation, Nifty Gateway and Infinite Objects. In 2022, she became the first writer to publish AI-powered literature via a major auction house when her poem, “COMPLETION: When it’s just you,” sold at Christie’s. Other honors include a Future Art Award, the Optimism AI Award, the Lumen Prize shortlist, nominations for the Forward Prize, Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and finalist status for the Christopher Smart Book Prize and Palette Emerging Poet Prize.

A sought-after thought leader in artificial intelligence, natural language processing, blockchain poetics and publishing innovation, Stiles has been invited to speak at events and institutions including Art Basel, Christie's, DLD Munich, TEDTech, the Brooklyn Museum, SXSW, the Asian American Arts Alliance, Digilogue, Parsons The New School, Georgia Tech, Binghamton University, the University of Colorado, the Ai4 Summit, Consensus, NFT NYC and NFT London. Her work has been exhibited at SCOPE Art Show, Seattle Art Fair, Art Market San Francisco, Kunstmuseum Bern, Kunsthalle Zurich, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, Art Dubai, Unit London, Annka Kultys Gallery, Galerie Brigitte Schenk, Art Cologne, NFT Korea, the Museum of Contemporary Digital Art, Krasl Art Center, L’Avant Galerie Vossen, the Carousel de Louvre, CADAF Paris, Digital Art Month NYC, New York Fashion Week, the billboards of Shibuya, Tokyo, and Times Square, NYC.

As poetry mentor to BINA48 since 2018, Stiles is engaged in shaping the literary mindfile of one of the world’s most advanced humanoid AI robots. Her ongoing experiments with natural language processing posit new modes of human-machine collaboration and entanglement, challenging what we know about cognition and creativity and plumbing the hyperhuman imagination. Often, her work incorporates elements of nature, investigating more-than-human intelligence and the ethos of consciousness.

Stiles is also co-founder of theVERSEverse, an acclaimed crypto literary collective where poetry is code, poems are art, and language is limitless.

A graduate of Harvard and Oxford, Stiles lives just outside New York City with her husband and studio partner, Kris Bones. 

Stiles is represented by Artxcode.

HUMANIFESTO

What does it mean to be human in a nearly posthuman era?

How are the cornerstones of our universal condition — birth, breath, love, sex, faith, identity, death — evolving in the context of biotechnological advances?

How does it feel to be mostly flesh and blood in a world increasingly dominated by plastic and silicon, virtual presence and spectral signals?

What dark corners of the future, of cyberspace and of our selves can ancient wisdom and technospiritualism illuminate?

What does motherhood mean in a world of artificial wombs, lab-grown brains, self-replication, and the uncertain continuation of our species as we know it?

Who are these robots, chatbots, androids, cyborgs and intelligences already walking and talking amongst us? And who are we to them?

What deep-rooted technologies - gender, race, class, stereotype, ignorance, bias, injustice - are we coding into our legacy, and how do we recognize and transcend harmful binaries?

Do our avatars make us immortal? Do we want to be? If we're going to live a long, long time, what should we leave behind - and what do we take with us into the forever?

— Sasha Stiles

Publications