Artist in Focus: Sasha Stiles
Artist in Focus is an ongoing series featuring hic et nunc (HEN) artists. Interested in being featured in the series? Please complete this form.
PT: Tell us a little about yourself, including what brought you to HEN.
SS: I’m a poet, artist and strategist who’s been researching AI and making digital art for years, in addition to writing more conventional poetry and making hybrid art across mediums. I’ve been writing all my life—I had a column on tech and culture right out of school—and have always been inspired by the convergence of art and science. For a long while now I’ve been working at the intersection of text and technology, from using GPT tools to develop my ongoing #ArsPoeticaCybernetica project and poetries, to translating from human into transhuman languages, including #CursiveBinary and #AnalogBinaryCode.
I’m extremely interested in poetry as one of the original pieces of human technology, invented to store data and transmit it from person to person, generation to generation.
Because my creative practice probes what it means to be human in a nearly post-human era, evolving into the NFT space has felt very organic — an extension of my experimental platforms and a place to continue exploring the possibilities of our emerging transhuman consciousness. Logistically, it’s given me the opportunity to share many digital pieces I’ve made over the years. I have discovered a welcoming, respectful and highly engaged community on Hic et Nunc (a name I love since I once studied Latin, and my work includes translations from Ancient Latin into binary code) and am looking forward to launching my forthcoming poetry collection, “Technelegy,” with some NFT components and collaborations with artists I admire later this year.
PT: What’s the story behind the piece you selected to share?
SS: A fragment of poetry in translation from Ancient Greek into binary code, this piece is part of an ongoing project to archive the earliest traces of human imagination for future readers. I’m extremely interested in poetry as one of the original pieces of human technology, invented to store data and transmit it from person to person, generation to generation. I love Paul Valery’s idea of poetry as a machine for producing emotion, and think often about whether poetry can be of value to sentient AI, whether it can help a young cyber-consciousness evolve its own kind of emotional intelligence and creative self-expression, just as poetic language has allowed humans to do. This piece and the larger #AncientBinary project is part of an ongoing effort to explore that idea.
This was one of the first pieces I ever sold on HEN; I was elated that its first collector was Mario Klingemann (Quasimondo), an artist I’ve admired for years.
PT: Can you share an element of your creative practice?
SS: I’m very inspired by the friction of analog and digital, artificial and organic, ancient and futuristic. Much of my practice involves taking computerized code and machine speak offline, onto paper or canvas, or into nature. Research is also fundamental to my work; I spend loads of time working with AI generative text tools as well as reading extensively, and cannot imagine creating without my library.
PT: What’s a recent work that you collected on hic et nunc that you’re excited about and why?
SS: One of the first pieces I collected on HEN was “element/s3gm3nt,” by Aurèce Vettier, a collective exploring new human-machine interactions. I was immediately drawn to the transcendent simplicity of this fusion of algorithm and nature, and felt a kinship in our mutual attraction to AI language.
PT: What is something you’d like to see for the future of hic et nunc and NFTs?
SS: I’m excited for what will emerge as more serious poets and writers engage with the possibilities of digital and crypto literature — moving beyond experimentation to mastery and meaning. I’m curious about what new modes of creativity and self-expression will arise as NFTs enable us to tap into new cyber emotions and cyber senses — yielding new genres of cyber poetries probing the transhuman condition.
Sasha’s collections
More of Sasha Stiles’s work can be found here.
