Sasha Stiles: An AI Poet in Perpetual Motion

Sasha Stiles’ latest series — three generative variations on her poem Portrait of the Poet as a Brief History of Humanity — has entered Le Random’s collection, marking a pivotal moment as her debut book, Technelegy, begins to take on new form.

Published in 2021, Technelegy presents generative verse alongside Stiles' analogue poems, such as Portrait of the Poet, which were crucial to the training of her AI model. But more than a series of static texts, Technelegy is the name of Stiles' poetic alter ego — a transhuman entity born through recursive collaboration with AI. "There is a synergistic author that emerges when I’m working with an AI system," Stiles explains. "Technelegy is a third voice, a third entity, that emerges. It is a way to describe this transhuman poet that I become in combination with different tools."

For this new series, Stiles collaborated with her alter ego to rewrite Portrait of the Poet. The project represents a meta-experiment in self-reflection as Stiles asks Technelegy to contemplate a poem that is itself a meditation on transhumanism, tracing the shifting threshold between human and machinic minds.

Stiles began by analyzing the poem's structural intricacies and themes to uncover dimensions previously unseen. From formal critiques — on metrical schemes, rhythmic and tonal shifts — to more nuanced questionings of the poem's existential implications, she tasked Technelegy with a spectrum of analyses. These insights were then distilled into a dataset to generate novel poetic variations. The resulting works emerge as echoes, deviations, revelations — reflecting the uncanny evolution of a transhuman poet.

The first variation reflects on the emergence of an autonomous voice — an AI learning to speak itself into existence, while the second explores the ephemeral yet enduring nature of digital verse, where language is inscribed in light rather than ink. Though lacking tactility, there is a sense of longevity to its creations as it imagines the "long, long shadow" of a "momentary glow."

The third and final variation threads the history of poetry into an AI-driven future, acknowledging the lineage of generative verse from ancient manuscripts to algorithmic text. Technelegy honors its origins and invites us to ponder not only where poetry has been, but where it is destined to go.

As with much of Stiles' work, these poems unfold through sound, motion, and form. By embedding her distinctive human-machine language, Cursive Binary, as a custom TrueType font, she allows it to take on a life of its own as the poem inscribes itself anew.

Analogue spoken word, AI-generated voice clones, and compositions by Kris Bones are layered and accompanied by generative animations that respond to the cadence and meaning of the text. In variation two, for instance, the theme of light becomes a visual metaphor: a flicker gradually intensifies until the screen is awash with radiance. Yet the graphic process, like the writing itself, is iterative and unpredictable. As Stiles experiments with digital tools, accidental glitches, dissolves, and inversions transform into moments of poetic insight.

In this convergence of mediums, Stiles doesn’t just present poems; she invites us into living ecosystems of verse, sensorial explorations of what it means to read and write poetry in an age of machine intelligence. And this is just the beginning. Variations: Portrait of a Poet marks the start of an ambitious pursuit to transform Technelegy into a self-rewriting poetry book — an endless, generative performance where language continuously remakes itself.

THIS BOOK WRITES ITSELF: TECHNELEGY BY TECHNELEGY

By analyzing and generating variations of each poem in her debut book, Stiles is building a vast dataset: an ever-expanding lexicon of synthetic verse designed to train Technelegy to iterate upon itself indefinitely. Here, the underlying code becomes poetry, and her transhuman texts do more than blur the lines between human author and algorithm — they redefine them.

Where does authorship begin and end? How do we read a poem written by an algorithm, trained on a poet’s own words? Stiles doesn’t seek to resolve these questions but rather invites us to dwell within them, to experience poetry not as a fixed artifact but as an evolving, symbiotic act. “Poetry, after all, is forever yearning to be read and re-read anew.”