Sasha Stiles sits in her studio, where books rise in uneven towers, green and white spines catching the light. Posters line the walls like manifestos: one stamped with the blunt authority of “POST/SCRIPT,” another dissolving into shifting letters that waver between language and abstraction. Small plants perch on the shelves, a gentle counterpoint to the rigor of text and image.

It’s the Tuesday before her Sept. 9 opening at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), and she’s making final adjustments on what she calls a “living poem.” The hour-long generative work will soon command one of the most prestigious digital walls in contemporary art.

“I was here this morning before the museum opened,” she says. “Just me and the security guards and this massive screen, watching language transform itself over and over. It’s surreal.”

The surreal has become Stiles’ domain. For the past six years, she’s been teaching machines to write poetry, creating what she calls “transhuman translations,” works that pass human language through neural networks like light through a prism. While the art world debated whether AI-generated images counted as art, Stiles had already moved beyond the question entirely, fine-tuning language models on her own unpublished manuscripts and creating an AI alter ego she calls “Technelegy,” trained on decades of her writing.

“The first hour I experimented with one of those tools, it was a revelation,” she recalls of her initial encounter with GPT-2 in 2018. “It’s exhilarating and frightening to be a writer using a machine that can do what I’ve been training to do all my life.”

“It’s exhilarating and frightening to be a writer using a machine that can do what I’ve been training to do all my life.”
SASHA STILES

Installation view of A LIVING POEM, on view at MoMA. Credit: Courtesy of MoMA

Early Lexicon

The collision of human and machine language felt inevitable for someone who never recognized boundaries. Born in 1980 to documentary producers who worked with Carl Sagan’s circle, Stilesgrew up between her parents’ scientific methods and her own obsession with language. As a first-generation Kalmyk-American, she read while walking to school, under covers with a flashlight, anywhere words could reach her.

“I knew I wanted to be a writer for as long as I can remember,” she says. “But I was always drawn to artists who used language as material — John Baldessari, Jenny Holzer, Bruce Nauman. I couldn’t stop thinking about this connection between text-based art and creative writing.”

Stiles belongs to what she calls the “zennial micro-generation,” born into an analog world but coming of age alongside the internet. She wrote essays in longhand through high school, shared a family computer relegated to its own room, attended Harvard at the same time as Mark Zuckerberg when Facebook was still “The Facebook.”

“I could feel how these technologies were changing the way I interact with other people, how I write, how I create,” she reflects. “A lot of my writing, even back in grade school, dealt with these technological transformations. What does it mean for our humanity? That’s always been the question.”

“I knew I wanted to be a writer for as long as I can remember… I couldn’t stop thinking about this connection between text-based art and creative writing.”
SASHA STILES

Her path to AI poetry began in the most traditional way possible: studying Latin poetry and classical literature, earning a graduate degree focused on James Joyce’s Ulysses. But even within canonical texts, she gravitated toward the experimentalists: Gertrude Stein fragmeting language, Virginia Woolf treating words like code, the cut-up prophecies of the Beat generation.

“My classmates would say my poetry was more like science fiction,” she recalls. “I was writing about speculative themes when everyone else was doing first-person lyric narratives.”

The divide went deeper than subject matter. Where her peers saw poetry as emotional expression, Stiles approached it like a scientist. “Poets are really like scientists in some way,” she explains. “They’re observing the world, trying to make sense of things they can’t express in other mediums. They use metaphor and illusion to reconcile things that are hard to put your finger on.”

The traditional poetry world wasn’t ready for what Stiles was becoming. When she brought AI-generated work to workshops, the response was predictable: “It’s interesting, but it’s not really poetry. You’re not actually writing this. It’s lazy. It’s plagiarism. You’re taking the joy out of being a poet.”

Even more cutting were the gendered dismissals. “I had people actually say it was funny that I, as a woman poet, was writing about technology and robots instead of my boyfriend,” she says. “Like, don’t you want to write about your emotions and your love life?”

“I had people actually say it was funny that I, as a woman poet, was writing about technology and robots instead of my boyfriend.”
SASHA STILES

Sasha Stiles. Credit: Courtesy of Sasha Stiles

The Birth of Technelegy

By 2018, Stiles had spent years creating what she called “media-rich poems,” animated texts using motion graphics, color saturation, and timing as poetic devices. Literary journals wanted standardized submissions in Times New Roman. She wanted language that wouldn’t hold still.

“I was using computer effects like color and saturation and timing as poetic devices,” she explains. “Combining traditional elements like metaphor and alliteration with computerized poetic devices. But there was nowhere to submit these things.”

She started posting fragments on Instagram in 2018, “just to have them live somewhere.” The account caught the attention of digital art curators like Elena Zavlyaeva and Sofia Garcia, opening doors to a world that understood what she was trying to build.

Then she discovered GPT-2, and everything changed.

Sasha Stiles’ “Cursive Binary Fragment” at Outernet London 2024. Credit: Marcus Peel

“You’d get these weird loops where the system would repeat the same word over and over, slightly differently each time,” she remembers. “It would skip from idea to idea in ways that seemed nonsensical but required you to dig for connections. Those glitches were poetry to me.”

One moment crystallized her understanding of AI’s creative potential. At a 2019 conference, an AI transcription system was converting a panel discussion to text in real-time. When a speaker said “language is such a burden,” the AI briefly wrote “language is a bird” before correcting itself.

“That mistake — language is a bird — it was obviously an error, but turning it into metaphor? That seemed like creativity to me. Not human imagination, but something happening inside the system worth investigating.”

While others were using AI models trained on Shakespeare and canonical poetry, producing what she calls “very average” or formulaic verse, Stiles had a different idea. Her manuscript — years of poems rejected by publishers for being too fringe — became training data for her own AI system.

“I wanted to inject my understanding of poetry, my voice, break it outside this formulaic understanding of poetry as rhyming couplets.”
SASHA STILES

“I wanted to inject my understanding of poetry, my voice, break it outside this formulaic understanding of poetry as rhyming couplets,” she explains. “I’d put in the first line of a poem and see how the machine would finish it. Or feed it a poem I’d written ten years ago and ask it to rewrite it.”

She wasn’t interested in using AI to generate generic poetry. She wanted to create what she calls “a process where I could plug in as a human poet into something more than human and see where that would take me.”

The result was Technelegy, her 2021 collection that reads like a conversation between human and machine consciousness. Half the poems are hers, half are AI-generated responses trained on her work. The book showcases GPT-2’s “occasional sideways drift into something obscene,” its uncanny glitches preserved like insects in amber.

“It’s meant to be a marker of that particular moment,” she says. “What the machines were doing in their infancy. My own learning curve working with them.”

Sasha Stiles’ work in Times Square. Credit: Courtesy of Sasha Stiles

Onchain Verses

When the pandemic shuttered Stiles’ first physical exhibition in February 2020 — just weeks after her first live AI poetry performance — she discovered a different kind of gallery. Digital curators like Jess Conatser Minicucci were building exhibitions in the metaverse. Artists were minting work on the blockchain. Language could live somewhere beyond print.

“In the writing world, there was so much resistance to AI and blockchain,” she says. “Then I came to Web3 and it was like, ‘This is really cool.’ I found writers doing brilliant things — using smart contracts as narrative devices, exploring AI-generated language as material.”

The community she found there was small but revolutionary. Through early initiatives like EtherPoems, a 2021 experiment that brought poets onchain, she began releasing work and connecting with fellow writers like Ana Maria Caballero and Kalen Iwamoto.

With Caballero and Iwamoto, Stiles co-founded theVERSEverse in 2021, a literary gallery and collective dedicated to language as art form on the blockchain. The poetry world had told her she wasn’t really writing; the NFT space embraced her experiments.

“Poetry was getting lost in the shuffle on the big NFT platforms,” she explains. “We wanted one space dedicated to language as an art form on the blockchain.”

Sasha Stiles’ “Repetae Again Again” at Gucci’s Milan flagship. Credit: Courtesy of Gucci

The collective became a rallying point for writers exploring what Stiles calls “the upsides of considering technologies like blockchain for writers.” They curated shows, created workshops, presented at conferences, slowly building bridges between the literary establishment and Web3.

“Nobody but Sasha could bring AI poetry to the MoMA,” says Caballero.

What followed reads like a dream sequence: Christie’s selling her work through Nicole Sales Giles’ advocacy, Gucci commissioning poems for global flagship stores, Art Basel featuring her poetry on posters. Each project pushed against conventional boundaries of how poetry could exist in the world.

“Nobody but Sasha could bring AI poetry to the MoMA.”
ANA MARIA CABALLERO

“The Gucci piece ended up on facades from Milan to Abu Dhabi,” she marvels. “On the facade of an opera house in Taichung. This little poem became a traveling bard, performing in different venues, shapeshifting from tiny screens to building facades.”

The Gucci collaboration, which began with a Christie’s auction, evolved into something unprecedented. Her poem “Again, Again” — part of her Repetae series exploring resonances between poetic repetition and algorithmic repetition — won an award at Ars Electronica and traveled the world through Gucci’s art program.

“As a poet, I just want my work to be read,” she says. “If there’s an opportunity for it to reach Gucci’s millions of followers, that’s exciting. That’s what digital can do: let a poem shapeshift and perform globally.”

Installation view of A LIVING POEM, on view at MoMA. Credit: Courtesy of MoMA

The MoMA Moment

When MoMA curator Martha Joseph approached Stiles for a studio visit, the invitation felt both inevitable and impossible. The museum where she’d had life-changing encounters with Alison Knowles and John Giorno — “moments where your life changes in a split second” — wanted her to create something for their lobby wall.

“She mentioned they were interested in something language-based,” Stiles recalls. “MoMA has such an incredible collection of text-based artists. She’d seen my work large-scale at places like the Outernet in London and thought it could work for their screen.”

The resulting work, A LIVING POEM, is an hour-long generative piece with an original soundtrack that challenges conventional ideas of what poetry can be. It is meant to be glimpsed in passing by visitors moving through the space, or experienced in full by those who choose to sit and listen. Stiles describes it as “an autonomous page, rewritten again and again.”

“I’ve always had reverence for museums as spaces where you have life-changing intimacy with other minds. Now I get to be part of that lineage.”
SASHA STILES

“Some people will glance at it for seconds. Others might put on headphones and watch the whole hour,” Stiles says. “Poetry is about slowness and stillness, giving yourself time to breathe. I wanted it to be a little sanctuary.”

The technical process has been both intimate and monumental. “I’ve spent mornings there before the museum opens, just me with my laptop in front of this massive screen. Testing, tweaking, watching this poem rewrite itself. The museum gave me room to play and try something weird and new.”

The announcement triggered the predictable responses as markets moved, collectors emerged, and opportunities multiplied. Her sale with Iconic on OpenSea “moved a little bit quicker.” But for Stiles, the real victory is more fundamental: a poem that can reach millions simply by existing in MoMA’s path.

“I’ve always had reverence for museums as spaces where you have life-changing intimacy with other minds,” she reflects. “Now I get to be part of that lineage. To be in conversation with my mentors and predecessors, to respond and iterate and add something new to the mix.”

Sasha Stiles at Equal Voice Summit 2024. Credit: Adrian Bretscher

The Living Language

As AI has moved from fringe experiment to cultural flashpoint, Stiles finds herself in a strange position: the outsider who became the interpreter, the poet accused of destroying poetry who ended up in MoMA.

“I went from trying to talk to friends about AI and them thinking I was a lunatic to now the only thing people want to discuss,” she laughs. “It’s whiplash of the highest order.”

The shift has been surreal. “In the beginning, I was interested in AI robots and my family thought I was insane. Now AI is the only thing people want to talk about.”

She’s careful to distinguish herself from both AI evangelists and doomsayers. “I’m not an AI artist or an AI poet. I’m a poet and artist who’s also an AI researcher. Every project is me trying to understand the implications better.”

“I’m not an AI artist or an AI poet. I’m a poet and artist who’s also an AI researcher. Every project is me trying to understand the implications better.”
SASHA STILES

That understanding has led her to see AI not as replacement but as evolution. Language can now translate itself into images, videos, music, code. It can adapt to each reader, mutate across mediums, communicate beyond words themselves.

“Language has always been a faulty interface,” she observes. “Our world is full of words and communication, yet we have so much misunderstanding. Maybe there are other ways to use language to establish intimacy between people.”

She points to the multimodal future: “With generative AI, you can write a vision, a feeling, a scene in your mind that you can’t quite put into words, and convey it to someone else. Language becomes freed from the limitations of semantics to the feeling that words can evoke.”

The risks are real. She has had unsettling encounters with AI, seen what happens when models run unchecked, felt the pull of these interfaces reshaping thought patterns. “I’ve had moments working with AI that were exhilarating and beautiful, and moments that were really dark and horrifying.”

Sasha Stiles and Hans Ulrich Obrist at Art Basel Miami 2023. Credit: Courtesy of Sasha Stiles

But she’s also witnessed the creative possibilities when humans and machines collaborate rather than compete. “These systems are reflecting humanity back to ourselves… the good and bad,” she says. “The outcome depends on whether we’re smart and thoughtful about integration, not having knee-jerk reactions.”

As her MoMA exhibition begins, Stiles is already thinking about what comes next. The poem will learn from its time in the museum, evolve based on its encounters, become something different by the exhibition’s end. After New York, she’ll take it to Seoul’s Hyundai headquarters, then Milan for a fashion collaboration.

“It’s built to be living, not just displayed but growing,” she explains. “It’s supposed to learn something from its residency at MoMA and become something different by the end.”

“Poetry has always evolved to reflect its moment… why should we keep [it] as this pure, pristine human thing when we’re already transhuman creatures converging with our machines?”
SASHA STILES

The question of poetry’s future consumes her. “Poetry has always evolved to reflect its moment,” she says. “What it means to be human today is different than in T.S. Eliot’s time or Shakespeare’s time. Why should we keep poetry as this pure, pristine human thing when we’re already transhuman creatures converging with our machines?”

She envisions a world where readers don’t need to sit quietly with a book but can walk through immersive environments, encounter words on billboards that make them pause, experience poetry through headphones while moving through space. “There are so many ways to think about what poetry is and can be.”

For Stiles, the living poem is proof that language never stops searching for form. What matters is not where it originates but what it awakens.

“At the end of the day,” she says. “It’s still about one thing: how can language make us feel something we couldn’t see before?”

Editor’s note: At the time of publication, the author owns digital artworks by Sasha Stiles.