Sasha Stiles’ Technelegy is more than a book—it’s a manifesto of algorithmic intimacy. The 2021 collection of poems, co-authored by New York-based Kalmyk-American artist and AI researcher with GPT-2 and GPT-3 (the progenitors of today's ChatGPT), stands as a luminous artefact at the intersection of language and code. First published as a physical edition and mirrored digitally at technelegy.xyz, the project gestures toward a hybrid future—one that blurs the binary of the printed page and the blockchain. Touted by futurologist Martine Rothblatt as an “instant techno-classic,” Technelegy catapulted Stiles into the spotlight as a trailblazer of algorithmic authorship and blockchain poetics. As the NFT boom swelled, Stiles emerged not only as a key voice in this evolving literary landscape but as its face—redefining poetry’s place within web3 economies and virtual spaces. Her performances in immersive environments like Decentraland and Cryptovoxel have expanded the audience for contemporary verse far beyond the bounds of traditional anthologies and literary salons. Since 2018, Stiles has served as a poetry mentor to BINA48, the humanoid android developed by Hanson Robotics, pushing the boundaries of what it means to co-create with non-human intelligence. In 2021, she co-founded the VERSEverse, a digital poetry gallery and metaverse collective that hosts avatar-led poetry slams and sells tokenized verse, generative textworks, and animated “Textblocks” through platforms such as SuperRare. Guided by a deep engagement with ars poetica and the traditions of text-based visual art, Stiles and her collaborators treat poetry as both literary object and fine art. TheVERSEverse homepage makes this ethos explicit: “A poem = a work of art.” In 2022, she became the first writer to present AI-assisted literary works at a major contemporary art auction house, when Christie’s sold her NFT poem COMPLETION: When It’s Just You—a landmark moment for digital poetics. Stiles has since become a sought-after speaker on the commercial and conceptual potentials of NFTs in literature, appearing across platforms such as Art Basel, Art Forum, Gucci, Design Wanted, and Cool Hunting, as well as institutions like the Brooklyn Museum and The Washington Post. At the Beall Center’s Computational Poetics exhibition, her work was shown alongside luminaries Nam June Paik and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, positioning her firmly within the lineage of conceptual and media art. Through September 21, 2025, her poetic explorations of machine consciousness are on view in The World Through AI, the sprawling survey at Paris’s Jeu de Paume, which brings together works from 2016 to the present that ask how we perceive the world through the lens—or mind—of artificial intelligence. We caught up with Sasha Stiles in Paris to talk about language, legacy, and the future of poetic machines.

Alexander Burenkov: How did your fascination with language begin?

Sasha Stiles: Even before my work with AI, I was deeply immersed in writing—essays, book reviews, general creative nonfiction—but above all, poetry. It’s always been poetry. Language was never just a tool for communication; it was something material, sculptural, even architectural. I’ve long been drawn to its intersections with art, especially in the context of text-based and conceptual practices. There’s so much more possibility than simply printing words on paper, there are plenty of different media that expand the boundaries of expression. We have an expanding field of media that allows for new forms of expression—language can be spatial, performative, digital, or biological. I’ve been influenced by a wide lineage of experimental and visual poets—concrete and asemic writers, the Dadaists, Surrealists, Fluxus artists, Beat poets, Oulipo... voices that resisted the flatness of conventional textual delivery and sought to render language in more dimensional, dynamic ways. That’s why I was especially excited about the generative writing section of The World Through AI at Jeu de Paume—it felt like a thoughtful continuation of that tradition.

AB: Some of your most compelling works are not obviously technological—like “Plant Intelligence,” a site-specific technobiological poem composed from walnuts and leaves laid out in binary grids beneath the tree that produced them. Your Analog Binary Code experiments evoke Vera Molnar’s algorithmic meditations on the physical world. Can you speak to that?

SS: Absolutely. These pieces are poems in their own right—just expressed through organic matter instead of ink or pixels. I think of them as translations: from digital to analog, from code to material. Many of these installations are ephemeral, made with found or perishable natural elements. They explore encoded language through a tactile lens and reflect my interest in the liminal space between digital and physical, between software and soil. I’m very inspired by artists like Kate Crawford, particularly her collaboration with Vladan Joler on Anatomy of an AI System: An Anatomical Case Study of the Amazon Echo as an Artificial Intelligence System Made of Labor, which maps the material and human infrastructures behind seemingly invisible technologies. That piece was a standout at Jeu de Paume. It underscores how easy it is to forget that AI has a body—it exists in servers, wires, minerals, mines, labor. My own work often attempts a similar move: to re-materialize the virtual, to surface the invisible scaffolding of digital systems. I’m interested in the hidden architectures of technology—and in re-grounding those systems in sensory, tangible forms. In that sense, I’ve always felt a kinship with Agnes Denes and Nam June Paik—artists who collapsed binaries between word and image, data and art. Paik’s use of footage from the Apollo space missions and space telescopes, his translation of images into numbers—it all echoes in my own experiments. Like him, I’m fascinated by how code can be transcribed into something tactile, even emotional. That’s where my Cursive Binary pieces come in—handwritten 0s and 1s in looping, semi-asemic script, almost like a Cy Twombly drawing reimagined for the post-digital age.

AB: The Bauhaus artist and art theorist Johann Itten is your another cultural hero?

SS: Of course, I’ve long admired Johannes Itten—not only for his contributions to color theory, but for how his ideas function like a programming language for visual harmony. His work inspired me to consider how machines perceive color, especially now that we have systems capable of identifying and naming millions of shades. A EYE is a 12-part generative poem cycle created in homage to Itten’s principles, and it was released as the Kunstmuseum Bern’s first-ever NFT—a poetic code rendered as digital artifact. For me, this project speaks to the poetic potential of machine perception. What does it mean to write for an AI, or withone? How can an algorithm become a co-poet? These are the kinds of questions that keep guiding me—and that I hope continue to expand the boundaries of what we mean when we talk about literature, art, and code.

AB: You have done quite a bit of performance work in physical spaces, where interactive screens with poetry are activated by the movement of performers' dance, but online your poems take primarily the form of static digital stills or multimedia videos accompanied by spoken word or an electronic soundtrack, reminiscent in form of the once futuristic running credits of The Matrix or the paintings of the classic Ed Ruscha, who inscribed words into the American landscape. You employ algorithmic manipulation of AI-generated verse written in handwritten binary script to create semi-asemic visual poems. Much of your poetry takes the form of “cursive binary code,” a handwritten script reminiscent of Cy Twombly’s style, consisting only of 0s and 1s, but written in human handwriting. You have also displayed Cursive Binary in both gallery settings and public interventions, including Times Square. They echo media calligraffiti —a style of urban poetic activism found in Egypt and the Middle East. Does calligraphy play a major role in your practice?

SS: Definitely. It’s such a beautiful confluence of art and text, right? Calligraphy is where language becomes reverent. It’s not just functional; it’s sacred, gestural, performative. I find something profoundly moving in the physical act of writing, especially when using tools like calligraphy brushes or water pens. The moment ink touches paper and begins to form a shape—that’s a generative act of its own, distinct from typing or coding. I’ve spent years studying calligraphy through both historical and experimental lenses, collecting tools and researching ancient scripts. In my Binary Code series, I sometimes even make my own ink from natural sources—black walnuts are a favorite, especially because I had trees growing near my studio. There’s a kind of ritual in harvesting these elements and using them to produce something that engages directly with digital systems. That fusion of the organic and the encoded is central to my practice. I also think a lot about repetition—how minimalist constraints can become meditative, almost monastic. Writing entire poems using only 0s and 1s evokes both Buddhist mantra and binary logic. It becomes a kind of techno-scripture, referencing not only religious texts and medieval scrolls, but also the gestural abstraction of artists like Twombly, Roman Opalka, and others who saw handwriting as both mark and meaning.

AB: Repetitivity is a throughline in your work—almost a philosophy in itself. In your REPETAE series, you explore how meaning accrues through iterative processes, both poetic and algorithmic. The project evokes a kind of hypnotic recursion—one that resonates with the rhythmic trance states of whirling dervishes, as well as with the recursive logic of machine learning models. What drew you to this mode of thinking?

SS: There’s definitely an element of mindfulness at play. I’ve written quite a bit about breath—about inhaling and exhaling not just as bodily rhythms, but as metaphors for interface, for the voice, for mediation itself. In that sense, repetition becomes a form of presence. When I was young, visiting temples with my parents, I was always struck by the act of counting prayer beads—repeating mantras in a way that mirrors the act of writing, of coding, of scribing. There’s something deeply meditative and spiritual about getting lost in that kind of flow. Especially now, when the world feels perpetually overstimulated, there’s a kind of quiet power in turning one’s attention to something so elemental. In REPETAE, I was also inspired by Herbert W. Franke’s Oszillogramme project and his explorations of recursive generativity. The series attempts to trace how emotion—something seemingly ineffable—can emerge from the structured repetition and disruption of patterns. That rhythm, that recursive loop, feels like the heartbeat of poetry, but also the logic of code. And when those cycles are interrupted or shifted slightly, it creates space for affect, for meaning to surface. It's an algorithmic poetics of becoming.

AB: This idea of structure and precision—down to the punctuation mark—feels not only poetic, but computational. You've said before that poetry is, in a sense, a kind of proto-NFT: mutable, precious, and uniquely encrypted.

SS: Exactly. I often say: poetry is a code. It always has been. What we think of as “poetic devices”—rhyme, meter, repetition, alliteration—were essentially algorithms, mnemonic technologies designed to preserve knowledge in the pre-literate world. They weren’t just aesthetic flourishes; they were functional patterns, tools for memory and transmission. Poetry was the original blockchain: every word, every line, every stanza mattered. Change a single element—swap a word, replace a dash with a semicolon—and you’ve altered not just the meaning, but the magic. That’s why I think it’s so important to resist binary narratives: poetry vs. code, art vs. tech, soul vs. system. Those dichotomies flatten a much more nuanced truth. To me, technology doesn’t dehumanize; it extends. We tend to view virtual reality, augmented reality, and the metaverse as somehow artificial or less authentic than “real life”—but they’re actually the latest in a long evolution of tools that help us simulate, imagine, empathize, and extend our human experience.

AB: So in your view, the metaverse isn’t the death of humanity—it’s a poetic augmentation of it.

SS: Exactly. Just like poetry transports us across space and time, allows us to inhabit other identities, virtual and augmented realities perform a similar function. They’re not a detour away from humanity—they’re a continuation of our impulse to represent, reflect, and reimagine. The human imagination has always been our most powerful interface. I think we’re now in a place where poetry—especially digital poetry—can act as a bridge between ancient and emergent ways of being. Not nostalgic, not utopian, but something else entirely: a speculative code for feeling, remembering, and maybe even becoming.

AB: In your practice, the formal experimentation with automated literary creation—what poetry becomes in the age of neural nets—is inextricably linked to something more personal: the preservation of the Kalmyk language. Part of the Mongolic language family and distinct from the Oirat spoken in parts of Western China and Mongolia, Kalmyk is critically endangered, spoken fluently by fewer than 100,000 people worldwide. For you, this engagement is not only about linguistic survival—it's about reconnecting with ancestral memory through speculative poetics.

SS: The Kalmyk language is deeply tied to centuries-old oral, musical, and dance traditions—yet it exists almost entirely outside the scope of contemporary digitization. You won’t find it in Google Translate or indexed in large language models. And that absence, that digital silence, is itself a powerful prompt. In many of my recent works—like Four Core Texts: Humanifesto and Other Poems (MakersPlace, 2023)—I explore multilinguality as a form of resistance and reclamation, weaving Kalmyk, English, and sometimes Mongolian (used provisionally when Kalmyk is unavailable) into poetic systems that echo both code and chant. As a conceptual extension of this work, I’ve been collaborating with my mother on analog translations—handmade, iterative, often incomplete—from English into Kalmyk. The long-term vision is to record these poems and fragments as part of a living Kalmyk technelegy—a digital archive of ancestral language rendered through voice, sound, code, and memory. I'm not a native speaker. My access to Kalmyk is mediated—through my mother, through archives, through memory. She was born in a refugee camp in postwar Germany, the child of displaced Kalmyks who never returned to their homeland. My father is British; my parents eventually settled in Pennsylvania. Growing up, I witnessed my mother’s deep connection to her Kalmyk identity, sustained through relatives in Elista and a tight-knit diaspora community in Philadelphia and New Jersey—arguably the largest Kalmyk enclave in the U.S., with around 3,000 people. That community built temples, told stories, preserved ritual. It was a way of resisting erasure, of maintaining continuity despite fragmentation. What fascinates me is the idea that ancient and futuristic knowledge systems aren’t in opposition—they’re mirror codes, often asking the same questions in different syntax. There’s something profoundly relevant about oral tradition in our age of neural networks and latent space. Information doesn’t exist on a strict timeline—it floats, it loops. Past and future collapse into one another, into the now. The Kalmyk worldview, steeped in folklore and collective memory, taught me early on to revere voice, to see language as a sonic technology—a means of encoding experience across time. That reverence is everywhere in my work. I’m drawn to the engineering embedded in oral cultures—the structural precision of stories designed to survive transmission, to be remembered and re-told. These “outdated” technologies of the spoken word are in fact proto-multimodal systems, early architectures of data preservation. They mirror what we now call audio AI, performative metadata, or intergenerational scripting. For me, bringing Kalmyk into dialogue with emerging tools is not about nostalgia—it’s about continuity. It’s about mapping forgotten grammars onto the future.

AB: What are you working on right now?

SS: Lately, I’ve been immersed in the Epic of Jangar—the traditional oral epic (tuuli) of the Mongols, performed by singers known as Jangarchi. Long considered unique to the Kalmyk tradition, it’s now understood to be a vital shared thread among the Oirat communities across Mongolia, China, and Russia. The Epic of Jangar holds the same mytho-cultural weight for Mongolian identity as the Epic of Gilgamesh does for Mesopotamia—a foundational narrative, carried through generations by voice, breath, and memory. And yet, it remains largely inaccessible outside its native languages: only one rudimentary and inadequate translation exists in English. For the past few years, I’ve been circling around this epic—drawn not just to its content, but to its form: nonlinear, fragmentary, alive in performance. I’ve been in long, layered conversations with my mother about how better translations might emerge, not just linguistically but emotionally—translations attuned to dialect, tone, rhythm. It's one of the reasons I continue to work with AI and language technologies: not to automate tradition, but to find new ways to amplify it. The challenge is profound. Many Kalmyk and Oirat dialects are invisible to the tools we use—uncaptured in corpora, untrained in models. So I’ve been exploring how we might design new frameworks for linguistic nuance: models that can accommodate tonal slippage, syntactic ornament, semantic intuition. It’s a kind of speculative philology—a way of thinking with and through technology, rather than simply applying it. For me, it’s about cultivating an organic relationship to digital systems—one that doesn’t flatten knowledge, but roots it. Too often, technologies are shaped by corporate epistemologies, especially in the U.S., where the focus tends to be efficiency, productivity, monetization. But bringing other voices—ancestral, peripheral, poetic—into that system opens up new ways of knowing. It decentralizes the machinery of meaning-making. This work is still in its earliest form. I don’t yet know where it will lead. But translation—in all its senses—remains central to what I do. Whether it’s between languages, between human and machine, between the oral and the digital, translation is the generative site where poetry, memory, and technology converge.