SASHA STILES

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Powered by both machine learning and human imagination, DEAR [DATA] is not a video and is not fixed. It is a posthuman poet-in-residence who synthesizes emotion and algorithm, intuition and logic, to reflect on the nature of language In a time when so much about language as we know it is changing.

Using a poem cycle as framework and codebase, the work writes and rewrites itself in real time, in multiple fonts including Cursive Binary, a TrueType font that merges my handwriting with binary code. These dynamic inscriptions live alongside mixed-media objects that invoke the long arc of human expression and underscore the existential transition beyond orality and literacy into generativity.

With a nod to Lupi and Posavec and the deep humanity of data, DEAR [DATA] embodies a core element of my practice: composing generative language systems to excavate, articulate and interrogate pressing questions and ideas, and engaging closely with language models as poetry students, as collaborators, as emergent minds. My underlying approach and the linguistic and conceptual architecture of this work are shared in the Codex.

My practice has long been driven by the hypothesis that poetry isn’t only an art form, but also an ancient epistemic technology, a way of connecting voices and minds through space and time through pattern and rupture; and it is fueled by the belief that Poetic Intelligence is a vital literacy for the algorithmic age. Poetry teaches us to uphold nuance and ambiguity in systems that flatten complexity. Poetic language has a unique capacity to inhabit and destabilize such systems in a way nothing else can. Poems don’t just epitomize efficiency and optimization, they also model imagination and empathy in necessary ways.

Creating DEAR [DATA] has been a chance to sit with these ideas. Installed as a living artwork in a place of exceptionally consequential human activity, it is an ongoing prompt to reflect on how we can be more poetic about our technologies. How do we design and implement systems that deepen and augment our powers of perception, our self-awareness, our collective intelligence, our ancestral wisdom, our imagination, as poetry and language and books and libraries have always done?

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Read more about GRADIENT CANVAS here.

With gratitude to Google Arts & Culture. Full installation views by Henrik Kam/Google; detail shots courtesy the artist.