- Artist
- Sasha Stiles · sashastiles.com ↗
- Raster
- raster.art/artist/sasha-stiles ↗
- Based
- Born 1980, Pasadena, California. Based near New York City
- Practice
- Transmedia poetry combining writing, generative systems, moving image, performance, code, and human-machine collaboration
- In the set
- Still Moving ↗ · 240 editions
- Links
- Full bibliography ↗
Sasha Stiles is a first-generation Kalmyk-American poet, artist, and AI researcher whose practice treats language as both cultural inheritance and mutable technology. Her work moves among books, screens, installations, performances, and blockchain-based editions, repeatedly testing how a poem might behave when it is no longer fixed on a page. An interview in Dirt describes Technelegy, her 2021 book, as a collaboration with language models developed through GPT-2 and GPT-3, while Stiles characterizes machine language as a source of dialogue and surprise rather than an autonomous replacement for authorship.1
This orientation places poetry inside a longer history of technical mediation. Stiles links oral transmission, handwriting, print, code, and artificial intelligence as successive but overlapping systems for carrying memory. Her “AI alter ego,” Technelegy, is therefore less a separate author than a composite voice produced through iterative exchange. In conversation with Le Random, she locates her practice within generative literature and debates labels such as AI poet, blockchain poet, and metapoet.2 The instability of those labels is productive: her subject is not one tool, but the changing conditions under which language is made and recognized.
The reader enters the poem
Still Moving (2023), made with Nathaniel Stern, converts this inquiry into a bodily encounter. The Art Blocks release comprises exactly 240 editions and was released on April 26, 2023.3 Its title holds an intentional contradiction: stillness is a physical state, while moving names both gesture and affect. Each edition presents language as a responsive visual field rather than a stable inscription.
The collaborators explain that the work uses camera-based motion tracking, with data confined to the participant’s local machine, so bodily position and movement alter the onscreen composition.4 This mechanism makes reading reciprocal. A viewer does not simply decode a completed poem but supplies motion through which words are reorganized and encountered. The project’s camera is not primarily representational. It translates gesture into an input, making the body legible to the work without turning that body into a stored portrait.
Stiles and Stern describe Still Moving as an evolution from the read-only book toward a “read-write-interact” form.4 The formulation is useful because it preserves the literary stakes of the project. Its generativity is not ornamental variation around a static text. Instead, the reader’s physical decisions become part of syntax, pacing, emphasis, and visual rhythm. Stern’s account adds that the project “unreads” a poem written by Stiles and Technelegy, extending the collaborators’ shared investigation of language, embodiment, and networked identity.5
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Live on Art Blocks: still-moving-by-nathaniel-stern-and-sasha-stiles ↗
From binary marks to living language
Still Moving belongs to a broader practice in which the supposed opposition between human and machine is repeatedly unsettled. In the 2023 exhibition B1NARY 0DES, Stiles translated epic poetry into binary-coded paintings, drawings, moving images, and virtual works. The exhibition framed poetry and code as mutually transforming systems, with handmade zeroes and ones retaining the pressure and irregularity of the artist’s touch.6 Here, computation is not presented as immaterial. It returns as paint, handwriting, voice, screen light, and bodily duration.
That material emphasis also clarifies why collaboration is central to Stiles’s work. Her projects distribute authorship across writer, model, programmer, musician, reader, and display system, while keeping those roles visible. ArtYard’s account of Ars Poetica Cybernetica traces an earlier phase of this inquiry to Stiles’s poetic mentorship of the humanoid robot BINA48 and to questions about ethical inputs and applications for artificial intelligence.7 The concern is not whether a machine can imitate a poem, but what kinds of relation a poetic system can stage.
By 2024, Stiles described Technelegy as a “third voice” emerging through work with customized machine-learning models trained on her poetry, notes, voice, and research.8 Still Moving gives this composite authorship a public interface. Its 240 editions remain discrete blockchain works, yet each also behaves as an event renewed by a reader’s presence. The project thus makes a precise claim for digital poetry: language can remain authored and historically situated while becoming contingent, embodied, and responsive.
Bibliography
The references cited in this essay are listed below. For the complete bibliography see the Sasha Stiles links page ↗.