SASHA STILES: A LIVING POEM

A LIVING POEM (2025) is a text-based generative art installation that explores how human and machine minds process language, shaping new forms of expression for a rapidly changing world. The infinite text is powered by human imagination and computer algorithms and is inspired by text-based art from the MoMA collection. The poem rewrites and performs itself anew every 60 minutes: each page comes to life in real time via a bespoke language model, intricate prompting, custom datasets, and sensory elements such as voice, sound, and visuals. The words appear in multiple fonts, including Cursive Binary. Fusing the artist’s handwriting with the zeros and ones of binary code, this custom typeface offers a poetic metaphor for humanity’s evolving relationship with technology.

About the Artist

Sasha Stiles is an award-winning Kalmyk-American poet, artist, and AI researcher based in New York. Her work uses language to explore what it means to be human in an increasingly more-than-human age. A pioneer and leading voice of the generative era, her distinctive approach bridges tradition and innovation to reframe verse—humanity’s oldest and most adaptive data system—as poetic intelligence: a living continuum between visceral and virtual, emotion and logic, flesh and code. In multimedia projects and performances, Stiles invokes poetry as a ritual of attention, empathy, and wonder, illuminating language as a vital force in contemporary art, culture, and technology.

Her work has been recognized by the Prix Ars Electronica, Lumen Prize, Women in AI Awards, Sigg Art Prize, Monument Lab Fellowship, Digital Art Awards, Optimism AI Prize, Future.Art.Awards, and Phil Howe Artist of the Year Award; commissioned by Google Arts & Culture; and exhibited and performed internationally, from MoMA and Lincoln Center to Outernet London and Tokyo’s Shibuya Crossing.

Stiles is a graduate of Harvard and Oxford, co-founder of the experimental literary collective theVERSEverse, and longtime poetry mentor to humanoid android BINA48.