“From concrete poetry to Fluxus, there is a long history of artists using technology to transform language into a visual and experiential medium,” says Martha Joseph, associate curator in MoMA’s Department of Media and Performance.
Poet, AI researcher and artist Sasha Stiles carries this legacy into the 21st Century. From Technelegy (2021)—a first-of-its-kind poetry and art collection co-authored with a personalized AI model and praised by Ray Kurzweil—to award-winning projects such as “Cursive Binary” and “Repetae,” Stiles continually pushes the literature's boundaries.
Her installation A LIVING POEM will be on view at MoMA from September 10, 2025, through Spring 2026 in the Agnes Gund Garden Lobby. It features the collective dialogue of Stiles and her alter ego, Technelegy, an AI poet trained to emulate and reimagine Stiles’s voice. Inspired by text-based works in MoMA’s collection, Stiles and Technelegy’s infinite poem continuously rewrites itself every 60 minutes.
This recognition from the contemporary art world didn’t come overnight, as she recalls in a recent interview with the German art magazine Monopol: “I've been making art and writing my whole life. I still remember exactly how I sent my first poems - very naively - to my favorite magazines when I was 14 or 15 years old. My first rejection letter came from the "New Yorker." It was a printed letter with a small handwritten note at the end. I submitted "Technelegy" as a manuscript to many publishers, but it was repeatedly rejected. I tried many things. The vision of bringing poetry and technology together was neither popular nor relevant for a long time.
In February 2020, my first solo exhibition opened, shortly before the pandemic. This exhibition came about after many years in which I had tried to be taken seriously by a gallery or institution. During the pandemic, I had more time to engage with NFTs. Ultimately, it's as much about timing and cultural changes as anything else.”
In A LIVING POEM, Stiles examines how humans and machines can work together to push the boundaries of what language can do as something alive and performative. The generative poem moves fluidly between readable text and abstract forms, weaving together Stiles's own handwriting, various fonts, and binary code. Among the fonts she uses is Cursive Binary, her own invention that transforms strings of ones and zeros into flowing cursive script. Drawing on poetry's deep connection to spoken tradition, the project includes an hour-long audio component featuring spoken word and music that complements the visual work. This soundtrack, created by Stiles's studio partner Kris Bones, can be accessed on-site through a QR code.
