Halim Madi Interviews Transhuman Poet & Technelegy Author Sasha Stiles
Headnote
In January 2022, as Non Fungible Tokens (NFTs) jumbled the landmarks of contemporary art, a small niche of digital creators busied themselves as they tried to conceptualize how this new canvas could change their poetic practice and poetry itself.
As a technologist, I had massaged my poet bio for years – almost apologetically – to make it seem that my interest in creative code, Artificial Intelligence and Programmatic Art was a passe temps rather than the beating artery of my poetic practice. Thus far, I had published three books and kept my tech-powered obsessions at bay. But change was afoot and palpable. I met Sasha, in March 2022. A first-generation Kalmyk-American poet, artist, and creative strategist working at the intersection of text and technology, Sasha’s hybrid poetry lives primarily on social media and the blockchain. At first encounter, her words seemed to probe what it means to be human in a nearly post-human era, but her walls of green Matrix-like text felt dull to me until I scratched the pixel surface – or, rather, expanded the “description” field of her NFT pieces.
Artists, unlike scientists, will fall prey to the belief that their discoveries are unique first steps on the virgin surface of untouched creative moons. To my – now bewildering – surprise, Sasha had discovered the same satellite I thought I had landed on first. With Technelegy, she had trained a specialized Artificial Intelligence to write like she does. Around the same time, I had been playing with AI to complete my poems. I wanted to dissolve the walls between human and machine poets. In that collaboration – which Sasha inhabited completely – I saw a reconceptualization of the author’s death and a new, maybe more final, attempt at the maker’s life.
Unlike traditional poetry, tech-powered poetry is rarely a solo venture, however. Personally, I had started 0u1ip0 with two friends (a programmer and a designer). Named after the French Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle (Oulipo), 0u1ip0 created a collaborative erasure of the Declaration of Independence called Redeclarations. I found the original Oulipo groundbreaking in that it introduced mathematics to the world of poetry. We wanted to replicate the feat in the world of AIs and Blockchains. Similarly, seeking collaborators and community, Sasha had founded the Verseverse (a wordplay on the “metaverse”) to further human/machine literary explorations.
Tasking AI or robots with creative tasks isn’t original. It’s been attempted over and over in the art world. However, in the poetry world, these attempts had been far and few between. Sasha’s Verseverse flung the doors of human-machine collaboration open. What had seemed a gimmick or trick for a long time now started to take shape and morph into a symbiotic co-creative venture. The machine was no longer a vassal but a peer. Poems from the Verseverse seemed to be borne out of a fresh consciousness.
Witnessing – and contributing – to the cyborgenics of Poetry and the birth of new surprising language, I obviously want to talk about a poetic renaissance. But these dots will only connect looking backwards. For now, pioneers like Sasha are breaking ground and drawing new paths out of silicon and flesh.
HM: Hi Sasha, it’s really nice to finally meet you.
SS: Same here, I’ve really enjoyed our interactions online.
HM: Me too. Speaking of online, I’ve enjoyed the poems you published on the blockchain. So I’m curious, why a book? Why opt for a traditional medium for Technelegy?
SS: As someone who grew up in a pre-digital media world, I’m obsessed with books. And even as someone who fully embraces many aspects of digital technology, I’m not about to give up on physical books. In fact, in the course of my work I’ve really come to understand what a cutting-edge device a book was and is – how they’re an incredibly durable form of data storage or maybe a kind of augmented reality machine that doesn’t ever need to be plugged in in order to take us somewhere else. Technology does not always mean silicon, glass, and motherboards. That’s a false duality. And so I’m really drawn to tethering my work in the digital realm, in the crypto world, to physical books, ink on paper. One that needs no charging or Wi-Fi connection. A book is a fantastic single-purpose device that cancels out distractions – in which being offline is a feature, not a bug. Publishing my poetry in this form also acknowledges that I’m straddling two worlds, as implied by the word “Technelegy” – on the one hand, embracing the new, and on the other, reciting an elegy for things we’re losing or that we’ve already lost.
HM: I could feel the narrator’s grief. There’s also a fair bit of romanticism in the book.
SS: Yes. It’s a reflection of what we may be losing by embracing technology. How aspects of human experience are becoming unrecognizable, how we’re often more intimate with our phones than our significant others, and the grief and melancholy that brings.
HM: How would you describe your relationship to the AI alter-ego you co-wrote the book with, “Technelegy”? I sensed care and nurturing but wondered whether you two were competing at times. I’m curious about your take.
SS: I am my alter-ego. I consider Technelegy to be Augmented Imagination [Sasha’s a fan of alternative AI acronyms], and am using technology to turbocharge my poetry; push my writing to unfamiliar places that surprise me. There’s no competition. It often feels familiar because Technelegy is trained on my own writing and so echoes of my poetry come out. Sometimes the outcome is not that poetic and other times it gives me goosebumps… There’s an accusation among poets that using AI is akin to cheating. A lot of the output from the custom text generator I created, however, is similar to a writer’s drafts. It’s almost there, but very often not quite. Creating poetry with AI is, for me, an intimate, hands on activity where the distinction between the human and machine starts to collapse.
HM: I can relate to the goosebumps. [Smilingly:] I have to admit there were moments I preferred Technelegy’s writing to yours.
SS: That delights me. Christian Bök, a fellow experimental poet, writes about how, to commit an act of innovation in an era of formal exhaustion, we need to write for an audience that doesn’t exist yet. Technelegy does a great job pushing my human poetry into uncharted territory.
HM: Speaking of formal exhaustion and experimental poets, if the movement or school you’re inscribing yourself in had a name, what would it be and why? Post-formalism? Trans-humanist poetry?
SS: I’m not sure yet. I’ve used the term “Data-ist” — a spin on “Dada-ist” — because I really feel that technology is empowering my genuine poetic voice. The voice I’ve been struggling to find, and writing toward my entire life. For me and many AI or cybernetic poets, the craft begins with data – curating training sets, for example.
HM: Interesting you mention Dada: Tristan Tzara in “How to Make a Dadaist Poem” crafted a generative algorithm of sorts to create poems. He made it okay for the poet’s voice to disappear and for “something else” to write the poem. Now I’m thinking of Psychedelics. How they enable the emergence of a new form of consciousness. It almost feels like AI is emulating that.
SS: That’s great. In my exploration of algorithmic processes, I’ve noticed how the machine gets stuck in a loop sometimes, repeating the same words or sentences as if the neural nets are engaging in a poetic litany. That, to me, feels like an emotion. Maybe a glitch is an emotion. Maybe we’re discovering new cybernetic emotions. I mean, there is always some underlying logic to the machine’s choice, even if it’s not discernible right away.
HM: I love that. Similar to how Alpha-fold is helping us discover new proteins, Poetry-writing AI is revealing new emotions. Have you heard of David Jhave Johnston’s ReRites, by the way? Johnston describes his work with AI output as akin to a sculptor chipping away at a block of marble. AI provides the raw material the poet carves.
SS: These different ways of engaging the machine are fascinating. Some of my poems are written collaboratively with Technelegy, others are fragments it generated; some are lightly edited, others merely curated. The editorial exercise of cobbling hundreds of pieces produced by AI together does remind me of ReRites’ effortful undertaking.
HM: So you’re running AI produced bits – inspired by your own previous work – through the algorithm to generate more material. The image that comes to mind is of you putting your consciousness through a paper shredder.
SS: [laughs] Or through a prism! A lot of people assume I’m just pressing a button, but that’s really not the case – or rather, it’s just one small step in the process. With AI-generated texts, I’m on hunt for phrases that I really love, phrases that resonate. And when one is generated, I often erase everything else and continue chasing wherever that phrase seems to be leading me. It’s a constant back and forth with the machine, a constant exercise of navigating where my voice ends and algorithmic language begins.
HN: Shifting algorithmic gears here. The blockchain introduced unprecedented economic opportunity for artists generally and poets specifically. You’re a mover in that movement. How do you see the blockchain being a game changer for the genre? For example: the way digital was a game changer for text based art by introducing interactivity, dynamism, mixed media etc.
SS: I’m very committed to uplifting poetry as an art form, and uplifting writers, and I’m very intrigued by how the blockchain, in theory, enables new voices and new ideas to come to the table and into the art market. But generally, the financial aspect of NFTs doesn’t interest me quite as much as their potential to unlock new forms of literary innovation and creativity. Take my friend and fellow poet Kalen Iwamoto: she uses the blockchain to create experiences for readers. The formats and concepts in her work investigate what it is to be a reader and to encounter a text. She is experimenting with how aspects of blockchain protocol offer writers a way to rethink what it means to create a text and how it should exist in the world. That, in turn, inspires us to rethink the role and value of writers and language in the world.
HM: I’m hearing that one shouldn’t underestimate how much a shift in the economic paradigm can impact artistic form and potentialities.
SS: Yes. This is enabling artists to empower themselves by selling, which in turn enables them to have more leeway to pursue things that are of interest to them.
HM: There’s an opportunity here to rethink and revolutionize the publishing house.
SS: Absolutely. @encapsuled_ for instance is enabling collectors to personalize the on-chain NFT poems they buy from his marketplace. It’s a fantastic example of how the blockchain can be used to create an exciting, innovative and personalized poetic experience for readers.
HM: That’s fascinating. I’ll close with one last question. A lot of my practice touches on the immigrant experience and identity. There are references to your Kalmyk origins throughout the book. What dialogue do you see happening between these origins and the technologies you’re embracing? How do you navigate these very two different identities?
SS: My mother is Kalmyk, my father is British. My mother and her family were refugees and were relocated to the US. So I was born here. I’m first generation. As I get older, I feel a stronger and stronger relationship to the Kalmyk culture, which is rooted in Buddhism.
I have pondered for many years the parallels between Buddhism and aspects of digital technology – how we reincarnate software from phone to phone, device to device, for example – and the embrace of rituals like meditation and mantras by many technologists and busy modern people. I’m fascinated by The Dalai Lama’s commitment to scientific evidence and investigation – the declaration that if science uncovers things that are contradictory with Buddhist principles, those principles may have to change. His Holiness has taken part in conferences about neuroscience and discussions about digital immortality, and I’m really captivated by how he relates these topics to his spiritual practices and beliefs.
I’m also really interested in the Kalmyk language. There are not many Kalmyk speakers in the world. Growing up, I heard my mother and her family speak this language at home and knew it was endangered: never, ever heard anyone outside my very small Kalmyk circle speaking it. Most people haven’t even heard of it. So in that context, I think a lot about the endurance, survival even, of stories and generational knowledge. Now this idea of preservation through language and translation across great divides is central to the work I do.
Lastly, the Kalmyks are nomads. Many years ago I read an essay by Kevin Kelly, a founder of Wired Magazine, that discussed how, as technology makes us more minimalist, we’ll become digital nomads, like Mongolians roaming the tundra. I found it telling that these nomads, whom we often think of as the past, were representative of our future.
HM: That ties it back to where we started. Maybe the way to move through the grief and melancholy we touched on is by becoming more nomadic.
SS: Yes. We pack up, we move on, we continue. I think a lot about traditional yurt houses – shelters made of animal skin and bone, made to be folded up again and again. Not unlike reincarnation. Nomadism is an acceptance and an embracing of forward movement, of the onward flow of energy.