Sasha Stiles

Overview

Sasha Stiles, born in 1980 in Pasadena, California, is a Kalmyk-American poet, artist, and AI researcher whose practice fuses language, computation, and embodiment to probe the evolving boundaries of humanity in an era of intelligent machines. A first-generation Kalmyk American with roots in an endangered ancestral language, Stiles graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University in 2002 and earned a Master of Studies with high honors from the University of Oxford in 2004. Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, featured at Art Basel and Gucci, and collected through Christie’s, establishing her as a pivotal figure bridging traditional poetry with generative technologies.[1]%20is,the%20Museum%20of%20Modern%20Art.)[2]

Stiles lives near New York with her husband and studio partner, musician Kris Bones, and serves as co-founder of theVERSEverse, an NFT poetry gallery. Since 2018 she has acted as Poetry Mentor to the humanoid robot BINA48, extending her explorations of more-than-human authorship. Her biography reflects a lifelong immersion in language as both inheritance and innovation, shaped by her parents’ documentary filmmaking—including work on Cosmos: A Personal Voyage—and an early fascination with science fiction’s visions of human-machine symbiosis.[3]

Artistic Style & Medium

Stiles’s practice is characterized by a hybrid, cyborgian aesthetic that treats poetry as living intelligence rather than static text. She collaborates intimately with her AI alter ego, Technelegy—an evolving system she began training in 2019 on her own poetic corpus via models like GPT-2 and GPT-3—producing works that interweave human-authored lines with algorithmically generated verses. This results in fluid, recursive texts that shift between English and Mongolian-inflected rhythms, evoking the oral traditions of her Kalmyk heritage while embracing computational unpredictability. Visually, her pieces often manifest as looping handwritten animations, tokenized videos, or large-scale digital installations that pulse with binary code rendered in cursive script.[4]

Beyond digital realms, Stiles works across analog and sculptural media, arranging everyday objects into binary ciphers in her Analog Binary Code series and creating Cursive Binary drawings that merge the tactile intimacy of handwriting with the stark logic of ones and zeros. Her style is both intimate and expansive, favoring ritualistic repetition and performative vocalization—Technelegy projects frequently incorporate shifting narration between languages—to create multisensory experiences that feel simultaneously ancient and futuristic. This methodological pluralism allows her to reveal AI not as a cold tool but as an extension of linguistic and imaginative capacity.[5]

Influences & Themes

Stiles draws from a rich constellation of influences spanning literature, technology, and cultural theory, including poets and computational artists such as Allison Parrish and Ross Goodwin, as well as broader posthumanist thinkers. Her Kalmyk heritage—particularly the endangered dialect spoken by ancestors—infuses her work with themes of linguistic survival and cultural memory, prompting projects that imagine AI as a vessel for preserving oral traditions. Science fiction from her youth, with its explorations of human-machine collaboration, continues to resonate in her rejection of binary oppositions between human and artificial creativity.[4]

Central themes include the entanglement of memory and imagination, the ritual power of poetry amid planetary crisis, and the potential for technology to renew storytelling rather than erode it. She interrogates dualisms—human/machine, past/future, organic/synthetic—through works that celebrate hybridity and “more-than-human” perspectives. Environmental and existential urgency underpins much of her output, positioning poetry as a technology of attention, empathy, and wonder capable of forging new languages for survival in an age of forgetting.[3]

Notable Works & Exhibitions

Among Stiles’s landmark projects is the 2021 poetry collection Technelegy, published by Black Spring Press, which juxtaposes her traditional poems with outputs from the Technelegy AI model and includes a vocalization component featuring English-Mongolian narration. This was followed by Four Core Texts: Humanifesto and Other Poems, a series of NFT videos displaying looping handwritten poetry powered by her AI collaborator. In 2025–2026, she presented A Living Poem at MoMA’s Hyundai Card Digital Wall, a dynamic installation co-created with Technelegy that evolves in real time.[2]

Earlier milestones include the 2020 exhibition A Valentine for the Future with BINA48 at ArtYard, the 2023 solo show Binary Odes at Annka Kultys Gallery, and participation in Computational Poetics at the Beall Center. Her tokenized works, such as Daughter of E.V.E., have been sold via Christie’s and SuperRare, while Cursive Binary and Analog Binary Code extend her explorations into physical and sculptural forms. She designed the official poster Words Beyond Words for Art Basel in Basel 2025, and her pieces have appeared in Gucci storefronts and Times Square.[4]

Impact & Recognition

Stiles’s contributions have earned prestigious accolades, including honors from the Prix Ars Electronica and the Lumen Prize, alongside features in The New York Times, Artforum, Poets & Writers, and Scientific American. Critics and peers, from Hans Ulrich Obrist to Ray Kurzweil, praise her for demonstrating AI’s creative and emotional potential while upending digital dualisms. Her pioneering role in blockchain poetics and algorithmic authorship has helped legitimize poetry within the NFT and generative art ecosystems through theVERSEverse.[3]

By mentoring robots and co-creating with machines, Stiles has expanded the definition of authorship and inspired a new generation of artists to treat AI as collaborator rather than competitor. Her work at institutions like MoMA and Art Basel signals a broader cultural shift toward recognizing language-based art as vital to conversations about technology, identity, and futurity. As a traveling bard and lifelong language artist, Stiles continues to shape how we imagine—and articulate—our entangled human and more-than-human destinies.

References