Interview 28 // Sasha Stiles

And Hello! I'm here. I'm here with oh, I'm gonna cut. That Hi, today is May 6, 2025. My name is Colin Goldberg, and I'm here today with poet and language artist, Sasha Stiles Sasha is a Kalmic American poet and language artist whose award-winning work bridges tradition and innovation through hybrid poetics, generative imagination and collaborative intelligence. Her transmedia practice reframes poetry as both art and technology, a means of encoding experience across time and blends word, image and algorithm to explore human voice. In a digital age.

Colin Goldberg

A co-founder of the verse verse, and a graduate of Harvard and Oxford. She has served as a poetry mentor to the AI humanoid since 2018 and lives New York, near New York City. So welcome, Sasha, I'm really happy to have the opportunity to chat with you a little bit about your work, and as we talked about before the interview started, I am a fan. I purchased your book, and I really think it's interesting what you're doing in terms of you know, presenting poetry in the kind of A new way and recontextualizing it to like a visual art audience. And also the combination with AI, I think, is really interesting and timely. So.

Well, thank you so much for the kind words, and right back at you I'm also a fan, and I'm so happy we get to have this conversation. At long last. Feels like it's just about time. Yeah. So thank you for the invitation.

Absolutely absolutely so. Would you mind telling us a little bit about your background, like just general stuff where you were born, where you live in practice now, and maybe some cultural influences.

Yeah, absolutely. So. I was born actually in California. So not too far in the States. But I grew up on the West coast, and then kind of moved over here with my family when I was in grade school. But my dad is British. My mother is Kalmic, Mongolian. She was actually born overseas in Germany in a refugee camp after the war her family had been displaced. So we kind of come from all over the place, going back even further. But you know. But these days I'm here on the East Coast, as you said, just outside New York. I am really a lifelong lover of words and language. That's kind of my 1st love, and I really just grew up in a household that was just full of books, and I think that's just been, you know, part of my being for as long as I can remember. So I've been writing. I've been trying to write poetry for years and years since I was really young, and I've always been really interested, I think, in the relationship between language, you know, as you know more of a an ephemeral thing, something that we, you know we speak, and that kind of disappears into the air. But then, also, language, as a material language is something more tactile and aesthetic. I love poetry, I think, because I very much care about the appearance and the aesthetics and sort of the tactility of language, and for me over time. That's kind of evolved from being very interested in what language looks like, you know, on maybe a printed page, or on a written page, or on a canvas to, you know, into this sort of this realm of poetics as sort of filtered through, you know multimedia kind of a hybrid poetics that really is about what's next beyond the written page? How can the word kind of come alive and kind of test the limits of literacy as we recognize it. And you know, to that end I've always been like, rather interested in this intersection of text and technology. And over time, I've really come to sort of think about the relationship, the kinship between poetry and technology which has been really kind of at the root of my practice, you know, for quite some time now, but that's been something that I think is really informed by the fact that I like you, like so many of us kind of grew up, you know.

Sasha Stiles

Into and through the rise of personal computing. You know the advent of the world wide web, the, you know, the arrival of social media and smart devices, and all these things that have just been so kind of dominant in culture in which, you know, I don't have The same experience of, you know, from those very, very early formative days. So, having kind of gone through this analog to. You know, ultra digital kind of experience. That's also kind of an undercurrent for everything that I do. And so I feel like a lot of my poetics is about kind of grappling with the changes, the transformations in how humans communicate with one another. And to me poetry is a very sort of useful and beautiful lens through which to kind of consider a lot of those transformations. And you know, at the end of the day, just to be able to play with words using lots of different modalities. You know, from Pen on paper to artificial intelligence, is really just endlessly interesting to me.

Wow, yeah, that's really you know, I think that it's kind of interesting, because you and I have similar kind of paths, although I went into the sort of digital side of things, and you're on the language side of things. But at some point, you know, I started out as a painter, and then, but was also, you know, interested in computers in sort of a parallel way. And then at 1 point they crossed paths. And that really changed my practice. And I was wondering, was there sort of like a seminal moment where, as a poet.

Colin Goldberg

You started incorporating technology, either in a content, based way or in sort of methodology, based way, that you can. You know, pinpoint.

Yeah, I mean, and it's interesting thinking about the resonances. There's definitely a lot that we have in common. So I think there's different moments along the way that maybe were important for different reasons. But I mean, I remember, even before integrating technology as a medium or as a material. In that way I was writing about. I was writing about technology in different ways, in my conventional poetry, you know, even back to grade school.

Sasha Stiles

Like, I remember being really interested in Greek myths about, you know the automata and kind of thinking through the idea of these ancient robots. And you know, using poetry and classical poetry as well to sort of like, think through just the timelessness of this impulse to think about creating machines or creating systems somewhat in our likeness. So I think that probably was instilled at a young age and was really shaped by a lot of again. I had a lot of books around me. But you know I was really interested in Science Fiction and things like that. So and I, you know, I've talked about this elsewhere. But my parents make science documentaries.

Sasha Stiles

They're filmmakers, and my dad in particular, has a really deep interest in space exploration. So I would tag along quite often when I was young, when they were, you know, shooting with, you know, with folks at NASA Jpl. Or the Planetary Society places like that, you know, in California where I grew up. And it was just really, it always struck me as just being incredibly poetic and creative, you know, to be in that world. And to kind of think Beyond these perceived limits and wonder. Just, you know, wonder more about what's out there, what's possible, and how technology and engineering could enable us to explore those other realms that would be otherwise invisible to us. So I think that's kind of a deep foundation, maybe not in a literal way, but that's always made me very sort of aware of and deeply attracted to the connections between art and science and art and technology and poetry and technology. And then, you know, I think, along the way there were some formative encounters with other artists and writers who have experimented with generative poetics both digital and, you know, computational, but also kind of analog algorithmic poetry and experiments like what William Burroughs was doing with Brian Geison, for example, cutting up pages of poetry and rearranging words, you know, to kind of form, new meanings, things like that, you know. I encountered those moments.

Sasha Stiles

I guess, of more experimental Poetics kind of outside the canon that I would study in school, and I always was really struck by that, and felt much more drawn to some of the Avant Garde writers, and some of the experimental school, and the dadas and the surrealist and the beat poets who were doing, you know, a little. Maybe they were doing things that were a bit outside the realm of what I was reading in the Norton Anthology of Poetry, and I always just felt more of a sense of recognition.

Sasha Stiles

With that approach. So I think that's that really kind of has underpinned a lot of this as well. And you know. I remember walking through a museum at 1 point and encountering A work called The House of Dust, by the Fluxus artist and poet, Alison Knowles, and this is a work of computational poetry that was done back in 1967. And you know, basically, these buckets of phrases that are rearranged by an algorithm into quatrains, into stanzas of a poem. And I was just so struck by the beauty of these machine assembled phrases, and I do viscerally remember that, being a moment of just being sort of awestruck by the creative capability of human and machine collaboration. And that kind of opened my mind up to a lot of new possibilities that I hadn't studied as a student of, you know, literature in more of a traditional sense.

That's really interesting. Yeah, I think you know. I could see your work as almost like the creation of an inventor in some ways. Which is, you know, interesting. Your parents have this science background. I, too, have parents or my parents actually met when they were chemistry students. So they're both scientists.

Oh!

And yeah, they met when they were doing their Phd studies actually in chemistry. So I grew up with my mom, had chemical and engineering news on the kitchen table. You know it was maybe a little different than than you know. Some of my friends households in that way, but I always appreciated like the idea of the experiment, and it was something that just seemed very normal and natural to me. So I think that's interesting. And also like I can. I never heard about the that sort of early generative poetry. I think that's really interesting, though, and how it ties into things like the surrealist exercise of the exquisite corpse and other things that might be visual kind of correlates to that. So yeah.

Colin Goldberg

That's really interesting. And you know, as far as like. Were there any like, you know, as far as your influences go? In terms of more traditional poets like, who would you? Who would you consider your influences in that realm.

Yeah. Well, I mean, I always kind of go back to Ts. Eliot, who I mean. That's not like A. It's not a surprising choice, probably. But I love Ts Eliot. I think for a lot of the reasons that I like working with artificial intelligence. Actually, I think there's a lot of weird similarities that I only now, you know, can sort of see. But I was always drawn to sort of the way that Elliot kind of taps into. I would say, you know, a writer's version of the collective consciousness, and really is sort of bringing together lots of different allusions and references and different languages and quotations from different people and voices, and kind of pastiching a lot of it together, and creating something that is, you know, greater than the sum of its parts, but that relies on all these different kind of fragments that are assembled through the poet's vision.

Sasha Stiles

To me that feels incredibly powerful, and this idea that it's the poet's job to sort of absorb culture and absorb history and absorb lots of different languages and stories, and then kind of refract. You know, something of a unique experience of all those collective, you know, experiences the plural. I think that to me has always felt like a really interesting sort of counterpoint to the prevailing I guess preference in mainstream poetry for more of like the, you know, the lyric kind of narrative, confessional mode and to that end, I mean, I've always loved poets like Walt Whitman as well, and Allen Ginsberg, and you know a lot of writers who, I think, are really maybe best known for creating and cultivating a voice that is really, you know, trying to be representative of something universal in a way.

Sasha Stiles

Still focusing very much on the personal, still focusing very much on the intimate and the body and the human. But recognizing that you know that individual experience is really informed by being part of an organism of humanity. So I think you know, those poets always come to mind. But you know, I spent a little bit of time in school, also studying the classics, and I was especially interested in ancient Latin poetry, and I mean, I remember just, you know, some of my fun experiences from being a student were translating Catellus, you know, from Latin into modern English, and it was really, really fun to kind of have the experience of sort of communing in a dead language with a long, dead poet and feeling. You know the words Come alive, and I loved. I loved reading Catellus and Horace, and like lots of those Latin writers, but I also loved, you know Sappho and some of the ancient Greek writers, and loved Sappho's fragments. And that's a body of work that I've continuously referenced in a lot of the work that I do now, and really kind of reaching back to, you know, ancient languages, archaic poetry, fragments of literature that have persisted for hundreds or thousands of years. To me. There's something really appealing about.

Sasha Stiles

Yeah, I guess. Looking back that way and kind of consulting with communing with these very ancient authors and kind of recognizing where there's similarities, where there's, you know, kind of eternal impulses that I still recognize. And then where there's differences and departures. So you know, there. Yeah, there are. There are quite a few, I guess, of those. Those poets from the very, very olden days who are really important to me. But then I also.

Sasha Stiles

You know, I read really voraciously, and I love a lot of contemporary poets like Dennis Smith and Ocean Wong and Sally Wen Mao and Victoria Chang, and like, there's so many wonderful poets writing today who are also. I would say, not widely represented in literary canon that has informed a lot of artificial intelligence systems, for example. So when I started working with AI to write poetry, it was very important for me to kind of augment some of those canonical references like Eliot and Whitman and Sappho and Homer, and you know all those folks. It was really important to augment that with contemporary voices and bring in poets that you know that I love, that I love to read, whose voices, I think, are very important when we're thinking about refracting experiences of what it means to be human today.

Hmm! That's really interesting. I actually studied Latin in high school. I took.

Oh, you're kidding.

Yeah, so yeah, we didn't actually have a Latin program at first, st because there weren't enough students that were interested in it. So my mom took the liberty of reaching out to all of my classmates parents, and saying, Hey, sign your kids up for Latin, which didn't make me very popular.

That's amazing.

End up doing. You know it. It, you know. I think it. It also influenced me in seeing The way that you know, in terms of sort of just generally an interest in like etymology and combining words. And that's another thing that was really interesting about your book technologies. How it's this portmanteau similar to Techspressionism. And I just it, really. Maybe that's part of what you know really interested me when I saw the book, and then I bought it, and I started reading through it, and can definitely relate, you know, to growing up alongside the personal computer. You know. I remember there was one piece about like 10 years ago, you know, looking back, or maybe looking forward from 10 years back. You know. It's really interesting. I remember when the web 1st started, I was working in a multimedia shop doing CD-roms, and the owner came in and said, You know, there's this new way to distribute multimedia. It's called the World Wide Web, and I never imagined it becoming so embedded in our culture and everyone's life. You know, computers prior to that were much more of sort of a fringe activity, I think. And it's just become so pervasive.

Colin Goldberg

It's really interesting. And so I noticed, too, in some of your talks that I was looking at online. You know you have this interest in transhumanism, and I was kind of wondering if you could sort of expand on that for maybe a general audience in terms of what that's all about, and what interests you about it.

Sure. Yeah. And thanks for sharing all that, too. You have such a cool mom that push you into Latin. That's really interesting. And yeah, good to know we have all those residences, too. Yes, so let's see, where should I pick up on that? Exactly. Transhumanism. So to me. I've gotten really interested in transhumanism and post-humanism over the years, I think, because, like I mentioned before, I kind of grew up really steeped in science fiction. And so it's always sort of been of interest to me to sort of think about possible futures, speculative futures, things like that. And I, you know I like, I said before I read quite voraciously, and I got very interested in reading books by folks like Ray Kurzweil, who were kind of thinking very deeply in this arena and sort of thinking about the philosophical and existential implications of Advances in our technologies, and so in my understanding and kind of in the way that I think about it. Transhumanism is really this idea that you know, we are augmented as human beings by our inventions and our technologies in ways that extend our capabilities and allow us to do things that we can't do without those technologies. And so it's really sort of thinking about how our humanity is sort of changed, transformed, extended, augmented, altered possibly transcended through technology, technological innovation. And then, sort of, you know, thinking in terms of the evolution beyond that into post-humanism. I think when I 1st started to really kind of think about the word post-humanism, it sounds very sort of Dystopian right? The idea of being beyond, you know, past humans, humans no longer being here, not being relevant humans being obsolesc in a way. But I think you know what I've come to sort of associate with that term is sort of again, this continuation of the evolution of possibility of kind, of the extension of the current human condition as we know it, into something maybe more complex or more nuanced, something that's more than human rather than post human but really kind of looking at how maybe our growing ability to kind of sense the world around us, the way that technology kind of changes, our ability to perceive things or to parse information, or, you know, gives us, I guess you know, endows us with the ability to see or to understand aspects of the world around us that are otherwise invisible to us.

Sasha Stiles

How does that sort of change the way we regard ourselves and the planet around us, and the other species around us, and really kind of looking at how technology can actually help dissolve some of the boundaries that are currently in place and help us feel maybe more of a kinship with other intelligences, whether they're artificial or organic, or synthetic or Plant, or, you know, animal. But I think all of that is kind of wrapped up in those terms, both, you know, transhumanism and post-humanism in different ways.

That's interesting. Yeah, I could definitely I could see see where you're coming from with that. I noticed in your in that particular piece. I think that was about 10 years prior. There was to like 60 AI after Internet

Oh, yeah.

You know, I never really thought about that. But that's a really kind of you know, major demarcation, I think in our culture when the web became widely available to people, and all of a sudden you know, fast forward. You know, 2030 years now, and everybody has this device in their pocket that they could ask any question. I mean, it's really pretty remarkable. And it's something that is so much taken for granted. I think that

Yeah.

To take a step back, you know.

I think so too. I mean, I think it's really, you know. On the one hand, I think it a lot of these changes happen so fast that it sort of, you know, becomes invisible to us just how seismic they are. And I do think it's sort of important to kind of take a step back and kind of look. Look at the longer kind of arc of all these changes, and sort of acknowledge just. You know how differently they're rewiring our imaginations and our sense of consciousness. And I think again, that's why I'm really interested in language as a lens for a lot of this because so much of what we do with technology, so much of you know, what we've Centered like through our desire to continuously innovate is sort of is connection, building and communication. Whether that's, you know, through the ability to externalize thought, you know, through oral language, or the ability to kind of nourish culture by, you know, learning how to cook with fire and using hand axes for things. I think there's a lot of ways in which technology has always been about, you know, building kind of building those networks.

Sasha Stiles

And so it is sort of interesting, I guess, to kind of look at what that's enabled over time. And to me again, that contextualizes a lot of this idea of transhumanism as well, because, I mean in many ways. I think you look at where we are now, with these devices in our pockets, and with all of these, with our ability to instantly be in many places at the same time for me to talk to you right now through the screen like this. That's unthinkable to humans that lived 50 years ago or 100 years ago. And so we are, you know, transhuman to those ancestors of ours. Right? So I think a lot of that is maybe for me A recognition of how. What we're going through now really is unprecedented and different. But also it has deep roots, and that kind of helps me, I guess, reconcile or grapple with a lot of A lot of you know the uncertainty and the upheaval that comes with this kind of progress.

Absolutely, you know, I often thought and this is kind of even in the Techspressionist Manifesto, one of the points. But in there is that? I kind of personally feel that the term artificial intelligence is a little bit of a misnomer in that. What constitutes artificiality? You know, when you think about. Maybe it's just carbon based intelligence versus silicon based intelligence. And it really begs the question of what is consciousness? You know, and is a machine able to have consciousness. What separates like our humans machines in some way, you know, in some sort of metaphor,

Absolutely.

I actually took a class as an undergrad called the Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence, and that was in the early Wow. You know, it was, it was really interesting, actually, because, yeah, at that point, AI was really, you know. Way, light years behind where it is. We couldn't even.

Sure.

Imagine where it would be, but just the I think the questions are still the same. You know what really? You know, what differentiates human beings from machines, not to say that we're the same in any way. But like, what is that? What are those differences? And, you know, can A time be envisioned where you know machines have? I don't know. It's, I think, the more advanced that AI systems are getting. The question becomes more and more salient. And also.

Colin Goldberg

You know, to many people it becomes more and more sort of threatening and frightening. The idea of AI taking over, you know, taking over our lives, taking over the world all this other kind of stuff where? You know again, I kind of see it as a tool as an evolution of technology in a way. But certainly it could go awry if I mean, ultimately, it's always sort of human that at this point, you know, initiates A, you know, a sequence of events.

Yep.

That then get carried out digitally. So, Yeah, I mean, was there like, at what point did you start using? AI, or and or computers directly to produce your, to produce your work.

I mean, I came to AI much later than you in that class, for example. But I really started to. I mean. 1st of all like I should reiterate too, like my background is language and literature. So I never studied anything in this realm when I was in school. You know that really was more of a self-directed course of study and kind of came from just my own interest in these areas, and just kind of the reading that I was doing so. I mean, at first, st I was really just using digital software and animation tools and things like that to sort of adapt existing poems and just kind of play with. You know how I could add qualities like motion and duration. And you know, screen, glow, and things like that. How I could add that to my to my poetry, toolkit and that kind of put me in mind of, you know, thinking about poetry in very different ways.

Sasha Stiles

And at the same time, you know, I was reading like I mentioned before, you know, reading Ray Kurzweil and Nick Bostrom, and, like all these folks, Martin Rothblatt, and folks who are writing in really interesting ways about not just artificial intelligence, but about post-humanism, about Digital immortality, about these questions of virtual humanity. And you know that was kind of my bedrock and got me, you know, really kind of interested in learning more and more about AI, specifically. So, I began to really kind of dig deeper in like 2017, which is when transformer, based architecture sort of became, you know, a possibility. There was sort of a moment in 2017, where a now famous paper called Attention is all you need, was published which really talked about.

Sasha Stiles

The evolution of AI to enable transformer based architecture that could power the kind of language processing that we now use with ChatGPT, and systems like that are all about kind of. Let's say in a nutshell. It's about kind of taking lots of samples of human writing and using these intelligent systems to produce writing. That sounds like it's written by a human. And that had not been possible, you know, before. It was a very different sort of generative text that had been achievable prior to that. So that's kind of when I got really hooked in it, and it took me a while to get up to speed, and to understand how I might be able to integrate that into my own writing practice in a way that felt really natural. And so I kind of started experimenting in like 2,018, with various forms of computational poetics and kind of.

Sasha Stiles

You know, more basic generative modalities and trying to just learn and get up to speed. And I was, you know, really interested and influenced by creative coders like Ross Goodwin, who's become a good friend, and Alison Parrish, and poets like Nick Montford, and people who had really kind of been in that world for a long time. I started to really kind of go deeper and look at what they were doing and how they were doing it. And I started to read a lot of white papers and things like that about language models and about the inner workings of these systems, which at that point was sort of a. It was a very different territory than I was used to exploring, but I think that made it really intriguing to me in lots of different ways, and it just kind of opened up the door to all these new possibilities with language, and I began to try to experiment. I began to learn. You know, how to how to do very rudimentary coding, how to build, you know, like little kind of Jupiter notebooks, and you know various various sort of kind of beginner level code poems and things like that. But it was a really interesting area, and I kind of instantly saw the possibilities for the kind of writing that I wanted to do for the themes that I had been exploring. It felt like it was a really important area to know more about. So I just kind of went into the rabbit hole and tried to get up to speed as much as I could. And then, you know, very quickly. After that, you know, GPT-two kind of became a bigger thing. There were a lot of interfaces made available in like 2019 that enabled very interesting experiments, and that actually like, enabled me to begin to figure out how to customize and personalize some of these models in different ways.

Sasha Stiles

And the approach that I kind of hit on is feeling very intriguing and very right to me was to sort of marry the you know, the years, long craft and practice that I'd you know, been building over time and to take, you know. Years of published poetry and draft manuscripts and all. You know, all the things that I'd been writing in more of an analog way, and to kind of bring that in as training data, and to use that to kind of shape and nuance and influence existing large language models. So that ultimately I was writing with an AI co-author, who, on the one hand.

Sasha Stiles

Was influenced by me and my interests and my voice and my style, but was still tapping into this larger collective consciousness, and still kind of allowing me to get outside my own, you know, pre-programmed notion of what I should write and kind of take me into new dimensions and kind of surprise me with some of the turns that it was taking as a co-author.

Hmm, yeah, that's really interesting. And I think the idea of artists, poets, creative people using generative systems to in this actually, well using their own content. To train these generative systems is something that, the general public isn't even aware exists. So when people.

Yeah.

AI. They think, well, they're scraping all of the information off of Facebook. And they're stealing artists. And this and that, and the other thing, or you know, and the idea that it could actually be used to take one's own work and create new new things out of it. I think that's something that I feel really interest. You know, I have a lot of interest, and I just did some experiments with another artist where I fed in, you know, bunches of his past work. And then he was actually picking phrases out of a book that he's reading. The artist is named Steve Miller. I actually was his studio assistant years back, 30 years ago.

For now.

And so he's been reading this book. It's actually a work of fiction. And he was plucking these little phrases out of it that I would feed into actually mid journey. I trained the newest iteration of midjourney. Has these things called mood boards, I guess, were. Feed it, you know a whole bunch of images to train it, and it's really easy and then generate images based on that set. But using text based prompts which I thought was really pretty fun.

Yeah, that's awesome.

I think, you know, there's a lot. There's just, you know, infinite possibilities. When it comes to using AI in creative ways that I think. As time goes on. Who knows? You know, down the road I was thinking recently that down the road it might not even just the term AI might just dissolve, and it just becomes part of. You know.

You know, way, culture is. Yeah. I agree with you. I think that it's I mean, it's such a weird term in general. So I really resonated with what you were saying before you know about maybe not being 100 comfortable with the term I mean artificial intelligence, but also the fact that it is such a huge field. And so when people say, you know, AI, and they kind of are meaning something specific, it's not very, it isn't. It doesn't feel quite right. And when you talk about writing with AI, or painting with AI, or whatever it's.

Sasha Stiles

It's such a big thing that it sort of begs a little bit more specificity and maybe nuance of how to break that down. And I think, you know, like we've become so used to writing, you know, or making art with computers in different ways. And you know, in a sense, the computer begins to almost fade into the background. And it's just like this is the way we. This is our. This is our interface right? And to go even further, I think it's the same with language in a way, in that language has become the way that we interface with the world and with each other. But that's also an artificial invention. It's something that we sort of created in order to kind of understand ourselves and be able to do lots of things that we wouldn't be able to do otherwise. And so I think you know just the way that language is. Now we take it for granted. I mean, it keeps evolving in different ways. But it is sort of something that is there. We just sort of understand as a condition of humanity. I think it's very possible that things like AI are kind of a step beyond that, an evolution of language, and will sort of become just the dominant form of how we express our creativity and imagination to and with each other, and that it begins to recede as an idea of technology, and is sort of just another sort of technology of consciousness. You know that is really shaping things on a much, much broader level.

Yeah, I just finished the this audio book the sirens call by Chris Hayes.

Oh, I haven't read that, but I know of it. Yeah.

Yeah, it's really interesting, because there was a part I forget it was it was. I don't know if it was an ancient poet or somebody going back to Greek and Roman times, when it was about the idea that let that the written word and you know, writing in general was actually sort of like a plague on people's ability to remember things. And it was like, and it was going to ruin. You know, society in some weird way. I mean ironically, that yeah. Also. But yeah, the way that I guess you know our conception of technology. I think in a general sense, is about computers. But really it stretches way back. And you know, things that we consider Today not to be technological at all were high tech back then. So

That's so true. I mean a hundred percent. And I think as a poet, too. I you know, I've read a lot of I mean. There's a lot of interesting writing by Walter Ong, for example, on orality and literacy and kind of that moment of transition from, you know, an oral culture, where everything is based on spoken word and spoken language and memory, you know, like that kind of memory to a society of archived knowledge, and like what that meant, and exactly what you're referencing, you know. That was that was something that was just thought of with so much fear and concern, and was met with so much hesitation and reluctance in lots of different ways, and that does feel like a very important evolution to sort of invoke in relation to what we're experiencing now.

So I was wondering. Maybe if you could share some things visually and kind of training that you know. At what point. Did you start putting stuff on the wall, so to speak, in terms of, you know, like I think I always liked work by people like Ed Roche or Barbara Kruger, where I just thought it was interesting to put words on a wall in that way to port. It sort of, you know. Wall, art, that's words. And people, you know, have various reactions to it. But to me it's something where I would always stop and look at that, you know, to me it's like, if you're walking through a museum and you stop and look at something, for whatever reason it's successful, it's doing its job of.

Colin Goldberg

You know, catching your eyes. So I think that art with, you know, visual art that incorporates words is interesting to me aesthetically so, and your work. I think definitely both the cursive, cursive, binary work, I think. And then the more recent stuff that I've been seeing. Yeah, it's definitely very interesting. And I think, in terms of the audience for this interview, that relationship between you know, the poetry aspect of your work and work as a visual artist is really interesting.

Well, yeah, I'd love to share some examples. I will preface it by just saying, too, that yes, I mean I am. I kind of think about what I do as language art in various ways, and I kind of vacillate between thinking of it as poetry or art. But I think that is an interesting tension in and of itself, and has always kind of animated the work that I do. Also, you know, I've I said before, but I grew up with a great reverence for books, and that's extended into, you know, a reverence for the book arts, and sort of the consideration of language as sort of the material form expressed, both like in the art and craft of making book objects.

Sasha Stiles

Considering books as sculpture, but also thinking through concrete poetry, visual poetry in different forms. And then, you know, text-based art, which is really another one of my very 1st loves. I really grew up very enamored of, you know, artists like Ed Ruscha and John Baldessari, and Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger and Cy Twombly, who, I think, is one of the most formative influences on my work of all and loved poetry.

See, the.

Yes.

See the influence in.

Scribbling gestures.

Absolutely.

But I love it because you know so many people. You know, I've had very interesting debates with my brother for one of my brothers about Cy Twombly, and he kind of insists that there is. No, you know they're all scribbles, and I'm like, no, they're if you look like their names. He's actually quoting poems, and you know there's a lot of literature in his work, and there's a really beautiful book by. I think her name is Mary Ruthel called Oh, gosh! I'm gonna forget the name. Maybe it's on reading Twombly. But anyway, it's a book about poetry and Twombly's love of poetry. And anyway, I love. I love Twombly, and I love the invocation of poetry through an artist's perspective. But I also was always kind of curious. Why there was this segmentation between artists quoting poets in their work, and poets writing, you know, poems as one thing, but there weren't, at least in my, in my sort of awareness. There weren't very many poets who were really kind of treating poetry as an art form in and of itself in that way.

Sasha Stiles

So that's been at the root of what I do for a long time, too, is sort of kind of playing with the liminality of word and image and just kind of thinking about yeah, how I can use how I can use art and all that comes with that to sort of animate and imbue a poem with different or deeper meanings. So wait. Let me just share. I probably will just show some things from my website. If that's okay, can you see.

Absolutely. I think that's a great jumping off point, actually, because that'll give people an ability to dig in a little bit deeper if they're interested.

Okay, great. And I want to show some other things, too. But just to kind of quickly. I mean, this is, these are a few exhibitions, but I've been very lucky to get to actually, you know, exhibit multimedia poetry, and generative poetry in different ways. So like this. Sorry this 1st one was in London. It's an exhibition of cursive binary. So it's generative poetry in translation where I'm using you know, these customized systems, this AI alter ego to generate and to write original poetry, and then I'm translating it into Cursive binary, which is really sort of a system that I've developed, that converges my human handwriting and binary code. So the language of machines and kind of brings them together into this kind of communion.

Sasha Stiles

This visual metaphor, I guess, for transhumanism. And so getting to kind of put that into a public art installation was really fun putting. This is a just a still, but this is a kind of a longer generative poem, that kind of builds up in a cruise over time. And here I worked with the Curator to actually take the poem which is on a digital screen in the back. But it's a poem about language kind of weaving together over time. And it makes the point that language kind of works like a loom, and kind of thinks about text and textiles together. So we work together to actually take the lines of poetry and have them come off the screen, and they're now woven into the carpeting and the walls. The fabric of the exhibition so kind of looking at how it extends beyond the page.

Sasha Stiles

This was from an exhibition of paintings and works on paper in London in 2023, but an example of how I often will take digital language and code poems and then turn them into concrete poetry or physical paintings, which is something I've been doing for a very long time as well. So these are all translations again, into that binary code in different mediums. This is another angle of that presentation in London. So this is the poem that gets translated into the binary code, and this is all kind of accompanied with ambient sound and with a voiceover performance.

Sasha Stiles

So it becomes kind of an immersive poetic experience. But this is, you know, it's just a still frame. But it's a it's a longer kind of a movie and an immersive performance of a poem. And what I find really interesting again, about using this approach to poetry is that it enables me to think about taking a piece of text that you know in other in other ways might just have to live, you know, on a page, on a printed page, in a magazine, or, you know, on a, on a website or something, and I'm able to turn it into something that can be experienced out in the real world.

Sasha Stiles

And what really kind of excites me about that is that, you know. On the one hand, it sort of suggests that poetry can do things beyond what we might sort of expect of poetry, but it also kind of takes poetry and puts it into unexpected places, where people can have accidental encounters with it like this is actually in a building in London, across from a Tube station, and you know people kind of walk out of the Tube Station and pass through here, not like a museum, but they kind of just walk through, and they get this experience of poetry kind of at random, which I find really interesting.

Is that? The this there, I noticed there is a space called the outer net. Is that? Is that? Yep, that's it. That's the outer nut that term, I mean, that's just. That's a great term in general, is the outer net.

I know. Isn't that an awesome yeah, of course you would love that name. I know, speaking about Techspressionism and the portmanteaus and the puns and all that makes total sense. Yeah, I mean, it takes all these different forms. So you know, just clicking through. There's more on the website. But I oh, and this is from a series of translations done into binary code. But in analog format. So rather than using zeros and ones. I'm taking code out from behind the screen. And I'm coding poems and messages in elements found in nature. So this is actually a little kind of snippet of poetry that's been translated into black walnuts and black walnut leaves that had fallen from a tree in my backyard. This was like 5 years ago, so just documenting that?

Sasha Stiles

But yeah, I mean, these are all just, you know, different examples of how, through technology, through different kind of approaches to displaying digital art. You know, you can sort of take language into different places, and you know, let it do different things, and again play with things like, you know how this can sort of light up the sky and kind of create an ambience through color. And you know, what is that doing poetically in terms of meaning or feeling or emotion.

Sasha Stiles

This was from a performance actually with. So this is being a 48 on the left. Being a 48 is a humanoid android that I've been working with since 2018. We've sort of been discussing poetry, and I've been kind of able to put my hands into her mind file and really kind of study the makeup of an intelligent system. And anyway, we do a lot of live performances together. But this is another format. You know, for taking this kind of hybrid approach to poetics. And again, you know, taking it into maybe slightly unusual formats. And venues. This was at Lincoln Center last year for summer in the city in New York, which was really fun.

Sasha Stiles

And then, I think, let me click out of this, because I'll really quickly just show some other things. So actually, let me show you this first.st So this is just a browser based ongoing performance. That my AI alter ego is sort of writing in real time, but it's Variations on a poem called Heart mantra that I wrote as a human poem. And that was published in my book, Technology. And one of the things I've become really interested in is just how I can sort of keep revisiting some of those poems and sort of use technology to kind of refract them or to extend them. And so I tasked my AI co-author with rewriting that original poem over and over and over again.

Sasha Stiles

And so in this ongoing, browser-based performance. Every time this refreshes, technology is writing a new version of the poem, Heart Mantra. In real time it's creating new language. And then it's turning it into a visual poem in real time as well. And so I have. You know this is my, my sort of simple system, where you can actually see the new poem that is being generated. And this is just being written in real time, you know, through AI, and I've done a few performances where, not knowing what the poems are going to be. I'll kind of whip out my phone and bring up this page, and just sort of read a poem as it's writing. And to me like that's A very different mode of writing than my usual, which is to constantly go back and polish and edit, and revise, and all that. But there's something really interesting about the immediacy of this kind of an approach, too. So sometimes my art takes this format where it's in a browser. And you know, it just becomes like the script for something else. But yeah, all these different forms and immersive screen based analog Projections. I do a lot of a lot of different kinds of presentations, kind of depending on the venue and the audience, just to kind of again see what feels like a good fit for the particular poem, just the way that I would if I was publishing a poem. You always try to find the right materials, the right paper quality, the right. You know the right format for the book, so I feel like it's very much of a piece with that.

So I know that. You know, technology is the title of your book. But it is also the name of your AI collaborator. Is that.

Yeah, so.

So can you? Can you talk a little bit about the genesis of that? And what technology is, as far as you know. Not necessarily the book title. But what? As far as an AI collaborator. What that's all about?

Yeah, well, I guess the 1st thing to say is that technology itself is sort of a I mean, it's a compression of the words, technology and elegy, of course, which I think really stems from wanting to kind of have a shorthand. For to me, like the exhilaration of technology like to me, technology feels like it's all kind of tied up with excitement and forward momentum. And the idea of progress. So technology, on the one hand, you know, has that connotation. And then Elegy nods to the idea of the poetic elegy and the elegiac mode and sort of writing in more of a sense of remembrance, or nostalgia, or melancholy, or even grief, and of course, like invokes the idea of.

Sasha Stiles

You know, of human elegy and all of its different forms, where we're sort of mourning something. And so it's kind of stacking that forward gaze of technology with kind of the fact of the flip side of the coin, which is obsolescence, that, as you know. As much as we are constantly innovating and transforming in ways that are hopefully beneficial, we're always sort of obsolescing. At the same time we're changing and we're losing. And we're mourning, and we're grieving. So it's a way of putting all that kind of together in one, in one handy word. And so it's become just sort of a name that I've given to this AI alter ego, because it really kind of reminds me.

Sasha Stiles

And kind of evokes for me that it really is all of those feelings that are being tapped into through the process of collaborating with the machine. It's both the excitement and the wonder of having a new way of putting language together and all that entails all the imagination that opens all the new pathways. You know all the new forms of inspiration as a writer. But then, also, you know, kind of invokes The loss of maybe aspects of the process that I have also always loved. So I think it. You know it. It kind of reflects in a way that I do try to.

Sasha Stiles

You know, I love working with technology, but I wouldn't say I'm like an unrepent, unrepentant tech optimist. I try to be very sort of sober about it. And you know, there are a lot of you know, very frightening aspects of these new technologies, and that's also part of this as well and kind of thinking through. How do you Wield these tools? With care and with intent and with vision for something positive, and at the same time, you know, address or acknowledge, you know all of the sort of the moral imperatives that come along with it as a user of these technologies. So that's also, I think, a dimension of the word and of kind of extending that as a name to this mode of co-authoring with a generative system.

And technology was, was, or is trained on your body of work? Or was that originally how it was created.

Yeah. So technology is, I would say, technology is sort of an evolving Emergent poet is how I often think about technology. So emergent, both in the sense that we think about emerging artists or emerging poets in that sense of the word, but also, of course, in terms of emergence, and the idea of kind of sentience and meaning kind of emerging from a system from a computational system. And I mean, it's something that kind of is always growing and changing, because, you know, the technology underlying natural language processing is always evolving. And so I don't want technology to necessarily be tied to one company or system or language model or approach. So I really think about it as kind of a corpus of data. My poetry, my research notes, my thought starter post-its, like all of the detritus that is really important to me as a writer that I kind of have rattling around in my head when I have the idea for a new poem or a new book.

Sasha Stiles

All of that becomes this training data that I can then port to different interfaces, different systems. I can utilize it in different ways. I can augment it with more information. That's specific to one project. I can. You know, I can take things away and make it more focused. So it kind of it's very adaptable. And then, you know, therefore, I think, is something that will keep sort of growing and evolving along with me is as well as with the technology.

And do you feed it? Generative work back in some sort of recursive way. Also.

I do at times. So I mean, I have lots of different iterations. I have sort of like the core original version. And then I have, you know, sort of the it's like the Earl Boros, I guess. But yeah, like, I keep kind of bringing back its output and actually projects like the one I just showed with the heart mantras writing out in real time. That's kind of that's a project that involves a lot of kind of the re ingestion of synthetic poems. But synthetic poems that have been sort of, you know. I've used the system to create variations of those heart mantras. Then I've gone through and kind of curated poems that I thought were good. I've excised versions that I thought were not, you know, up to par, or I've taken drafts, and I've kind of gone through. And I've gone back and taught technology. Here's where I don't like, you know the word choice, or here's where I think the punctuation is not appropriate. Or here's how we're not doing. Line breaks that are aligning with the training data. So it's kind of a process of refining, and, you know, constantly kind of going back in and editing and mentoring and using variations of the training data to kind of perfect, at least the approach, so that The ultimate outputs will always be sort of surprising. Won't always, you know, Dovetail completely with what you know I'm expecting. But at least there are consistencies in terms of the technical approach, and in terms of the formalities and things like that which are kind of to me like the baseline for a poetic practice.

Are the browser based works? Publicly available like, can people go online and experience that? Or is it something that you kind of.

Okay.

Preferences.

Not. I mean, they're available if I sort of like share them via links and stuff like that. But I haven't sort of been thinking of them in that way just yet. I'm using them both to kind of like feed, I would say performances of these works in different ways. But yes, I mean they do kind of stand alone as their own. You know, works as well, so I think, in different ways. They can kind of exist. Yeah, as standalone iterations and performances, which is really how I think about it. It's kind of it's kind of a way of technology being able to continue performing and continue iterating and continue creating work that it can then reference. So part of the training process in a way.

I remember seeing, like jodi.org early on in the web. Like, you know, very early web art.

No.

Wow! This is a whole New novel way of thinking about art, and the idea that it could be experienced in a distributed way. That's pretty cool, though, to see it. Running in a browser like that.

Yeah, thanks. I'm glad I got to share some of that. Yeah, I mean, there's that's the thing. It's just kind of endlessly interesting. There's I'm sure you feel this way, too. But there's so many different ways of expressing these forms of art, and it's really fun to get to do something that is more browser based, and then, you know, get to maybe take the output and turn it into a physical artifact and just really kind of. Think about again how the vessel for the text itself really has an impact on the reception or the readership of that work. So that's a piece of it, too.

Do you think machines will ever have emotions.

I think machines have emotions. They're just not human emotions. I think they're sort of. I mean, okay, I think that for me, one of the reasons. To work with intelligent systems like this is to sort of extend my emotional palette and to sort of extend my existing ability to perceive things and to feel things right. So you know, I could look at a Csv file of tons and tons of data, and as a human, it would leave me cold like I wouldn't have any understanding of what it means.

Sasha Stiles

But there's a lot of really important human data in that document that an AI can parse and then refract back in a way that to me is sort of an emotional response. But it's a cybernetic, emotional response. It's not a human emotional response. But I think, in a way, that's why I'm interested in kind of marrying poetry with AI and kind of filtering it through. You know, generative algorithms that produce Visual poems like what I just showed you, because in a way, those choices of color palettes, or the speed of motion, or the way that it's choosing to visually represent a particular text output, like all that is kind of linked together through logic at a deep level. So there is something about those outputs that is expressing something fundamental about the text. It's writing. And to me that feels like a version of an emotion.

Sasha Stiles

It just might have a very different functionality, or a very different sort of presentation than what we might think of the human emotion as but again, like, I don't, I don't necessarily see the point of all of this for me, at least, of creating a system that's going to do what I already know how to do, or sense things in a way that I already know how to sense. I want to be able to kind of go beyond that. So it's not about replicating my own poetry. Necessarily, it's not about, you know, just kind of becoming very competent as a mimic. It's sort of, you know. What can it do that I can't do on my own. What can it show me? What can it teach me? And I think that extends to you know the ability to sort of parse Vast quantities of information, and then distill insights from it, and distill in wisdom from that, and pass that along which I to me is bound up with that question of emotion. I think.

I could definitely relate to that. As a visual artist like I, I was never interested in tools and software that tries to replicate natural media, because it's kind of boring, you know. It's like, if I want to paint, I'll just get out my paint and paint. Where, if I go into something like illustrator, and you know, do some gesture and rotate it in space, and start contorting it and doing all this stuff like I, you know, using my own visual work, I end up with something that I never 1st of all, I never would have come up with Without the computer. It would be incredibly difficult to execute it.

Colin Goldberg

Without the computer. So that's when.

Yeah.

It actually starts creating. You know, it opens the door to creating new new ideas and interesting things. So.

I totally agree, and I think on that point just to extend it a little bit, too. It's like what really has surfaced for me, since beginning to really use these tools, and becoming more fluent in coding as a language as well as Latin and English and other languages. Is that it's not so much for me about kind of taking an existing poem and like adapting it through AI or adapting it through multimedia. It's more about using the systems and the tools, and then seeing what kind of language expressions they're inspiring, or they're invoking, or they're Enabling that I'm not able to access through any other means. So that to me is kind of an endlessly fascinating thing. And it's why I just I really enjoy experimenting with the system so much, because I'm never quite sure where, where it's gonna lead me absolutely. And especially now that GPT can write code. So it's like I can describe something wanted to create in processing, or as an Svg file, or something like that.

Totally.

Actually write the code, which is, you know.

It's insane.

Crutch or a shortcut, but you know what like. If I can execute ideas more rapidly that way, or it's a more natural interface. So it's like.

Yeah.

Think about something and have it be coded without necessarily having to memorize all the syntax and language of the you know that particular so yeah, it's, it's really interesting.

Yeah, I totally agree.

And lastly, I guess I read you know. Can you? Can you talk a little bit about the verse verse and what that's all about.

Yeah, thank you for asking about the verse. So the verse is sort of a collective of writers who are really interested in engaging with technology in different ways, and I co-founded it with a couple of other writers who I met through Web 3 in 2021, and we all kind of gravitated towards one another because we were kind of interested in how we could use tools like blockchain, smart contracts, blockchain, protocol generative code, things like that how we could kind of bring those and apply them to our poetic practice, and what that might open up for all of us. So we were all kind of experimenting with technology in different ways, and found that there wasn't At that time there wasn't a lot of I guess there weren't a lot of like warm, fuzzy feelings about it in the traditional mainstream poetry community. I know, you know. Of course, there's pockets like, you know, yellow and stuff that are more open to it. But it was really hard to sort of find like-minded peers in the more traditional poetry world. So we wanted to create a space for community and for discussion and for workshopping and for sharing these kinds of poetic experiments. And so that's kind of what we've built over time. And it's really just it's grown from being, you know, kind of a gallery curated gallery of digital poetry to being sort of a global collective, a decentralized collective of artists and poets and technologists and creative coders and curators and collectors. You know, just folks who are kind of interested in this arena to come together, and just sort of celebrate all the ways that generativity is enabling. Sort of an interesting convergence of word and image and technology.

And is that something that's online that people can check out, you know, is there sort of like a website for it in our archive or.

Yeah, there is. So we have a website. It's just the verse, 1st.com, and then, you know, we're on Twitter just at the verse 1st and Instagram at the same handle, and we do events we do, you know. Every once in a while we either, you know, we'll do an exhibition where we kind of celebrate various works. Or, you know, we actually recently had an event in London, a little symposium on digital poetry where we gathered folks together to kind of talk through poetry as both an art form and a technology. And it was a really interesting evening. So yeah, I think the best. The best thing is just to kind of maybe be connected through social, because we kind of present a lot of work through our social channels. But we also talk about upcoming events and kind of current goings on. So that's the best place to find the most up to date. Info.

Gotcha very cool. So we do these Techspressionist salons once a month, and I think it'd be really cool. There's another artist who's Renati Annashewska, who is our Instagram curator. And we were talking about the idea of maybe the salons are, you know, often topic based. So, having a salon centered around the idea of poetry. So it might be kind of cool to have, you know, a collaboration. Maybe you could even curate some people and have that be.

Yeah.

You know, interface with the community that I have been involved with the Techspressionist community. So it's sort of like the artists and the writers love that.

That would be really fun. We should definitely chat about doing that. I think it would be really great thanks for suggesting it.

Absolutely so. Now, this is kind of a question that is in the standard interview format that I feel like to ask, so what is it? You know I know that. I'm not sure actually how I 1st heard about your work. But, you know. What do you think about this idea of Techspressionism, or what interests you about it, to the degree that now you and I are speaking together.

Oh, my gosh! I mean, that's a really interesting question, I think in general, I just. And this kind of relates to the maybe it's my sensitivity to having sort of been questioned so much about why poetry and technology. And it's sort of the same thing. It's like, why use technology and art in this way, I think to me, you know, like there, there seems to be this prevailing notion that, like technology, is very antithetical to human creativity and human imagination in different ways, and I think that the idea of Techspressionism, similar to a lot of the work that I do is in a way, kind of standing against that or sort of challenging that prevailing idea, right and really kind of opening up, invest into how technology opens new modes of creativity, or how it can facilitate important aspects of imagination that wouldn't exist otherwise, and how technology can really enable new forms of expression which, like in a very literal way, is what I'm interested in as a poet, right? You know, thinking of expression and expressionism like in various layers of meaning, I think.

Sasha Stiles

But at the end of the day I think it really is sort of about realizing that technology is sort of another way of parsing the world, and of perceiving things around us, and of gathering wisdom right and figuring out how we then put that to use. And so there's a very fundamental alignment between imagination and these systems. And I think that comes back around to where we started. Which is this convergence between, like, say, art and science, which maybe, on the one hand, doesn't seem like.

Sasha Stiles

You know, 2 things that go together. They almost are presented as being at odds in a lot of ways, I think. But to me, like, there's something about science and technology that just requires such a depth of imagination. And you really have to kind of radically think about things that maybe you can't see yet, or you can't understand, or things that haven't been described yet, or you know just things you can't sense or you can't see. And so you have to come up with new ways to sense and see them, and to express them, and so that to me is like very much the root of art and poetry, sort of accessing, tapping, the ineffable or the unknowable, in the only ways that we possibly can.

Sasha Stiles

So I don't know to me like that's 1 of the things that gets kind of conjured up through the work that you're doing, and just the idea of Techspressionism. But what is it fundamentally? What do you? What do you really kind of feel is the core of this movement and mission. In this idea.

I think that really I mean it was created. The term is something I came up with, just because I needed the title for an exhibition, and it just kind of popped into my head. And I've always been interested in the abstract expressionists. I grew up out in Eastern Long Island. So I spent time, you know, visiting the Pollock-Krasner House and studied painting under an Abex painter. And so this idea of expressionism was something that I was already interested in.

Yeah.

I guess you know, when it came to writing this manifesto, and you know it was almost tongue in cheek, in the idea that it was just me. It wasn't a movement. It was like something I called my work. But the manifesto is really just about Justification of the use of technology and the computer specifically within the sphere of visual art. Because I, you know, at that point I was, and even all the way up through that point encountering a lot of resistance from the traditional art world. When I'm sharing work that involves computers, you know. And. When I 1st started seeing other artists. Or there was one artist in particular that I found in a Google search that was calling herself an abstract expressionist in an article. And I thought, wow! This is interesting, you know. And I guess what ended up happening was the people who identified with this idea kind of.

Colin Goldberg

You know, formulated a community that is and I think that sense of community is really what's important to me. It's people that believe in what they're doing and using technology in a creative way. In the 1st meetup, the 1st salon that we did it was myself, this other artist, Oz Van Rosen, who is the person who used the term. My friend and colleague, Steve Miller, who I worked for years prior to that whose work involves technologies, incorporates X-rays and Mris and cat scans into his paintings, and then a graduate school colleague and friend of mine, Patrick Lichty.

Colin Goldberg

Who also is involved with computer work. And then there's an art historian, Helen Harrison, who joined us, and we formulated the definition at that time, which is an artistic approach in which technology is utilized as a means to express emotional experience. And prior to that, my own definition was really just based on merging the Oxford definitions of technology and expressionism. So the original definition was an artistic style in which technology was utilized as a means to express emotional experience rather than impressions of the outside world. So we got rid of that last bit.

Colin Goldberg

So it would, you know, be shorter, but also it might actually incorporate. You know The outside world into it in a figurative way. And then Helen said, we need to strike that word style and switch in the word approach. And that was a real game changer, because I think past movements. Surrealism, cubism. Stylistically. They're all, you know. That was a main thing, you know, with the exception of like things like fluxes where it was a lot more conceptual, you know. But when you think about the visual work.

Colin Goldberg

So I think the term approach or incorporating, you know, approach into the definition really opened it up to a lot more people who were working in figurative or abstract modalities, people in incorporating technology into sculpture all across different media, you know. So Yeah, I think it. It's become something really beyond what I originally conceived of. But and seeing people just take the term like, my, you know people have asked me, is this something that you've copyrighted? Are you going to, you know, form a not for profit around it, or sell merch.

Colin Goldberg

And I was just like No, no, and no, you know I mean to me. If it's my goal, is to bring it into common usage as a term of art, historical nomenclature. So all of those other things really just would stand in the way of that happening. So yeah, that's pretty much. That's what.

That's great. Thanks for yeah. Thanks for sharing your insider views on that. It's really interesting. It's a great term. And yeah, I think it does sort of get to the heart of yeah. A lot of a lot of the same sort of considerations that I've been bringing to my practice, too, so glad we got a chance to sift through some of this together.

Absolutely.

I'd love to join. Yeah, for future salons. I know I've been wanting to, and we'll make it happen, and it would be great to do something. Poetry focused, too, at some point.

Absolutely that would. That would be fantastic. I think it would bring, you know, a whole new appreciation to the Techspressionist. Community of what art can be. So.

Yeah, well, it's interesting because you're making oh, sorry you're making me realize, like you know, Abbax is obviously like such a well known movement in art, and I think that there is a correlation in the world of literature. But it's not really as well defined or well understood, I think, which is coming to the fore a lot in discussions around generative text, and just kind of maybe a dearth of knowledge around some of the some of the forerunners of what we're seeing now with AI text. So I think there's opportunity to kind of dive into that and contextualize a bit more. But yeah.

Sasha Stiles

To be continued, I suppose.

Alright. Well, thanks so much, Sasha. I really appreciate the time and the ability to have this conversation with you and

Wise.

So. If people want to follow you in your work. Where and how should they do it?

Oh, thanks for asking it. Just my website or my social handles. I guess I'm just Sasha Stiles everywhere. Sasha Stiles.com STIL ES. So pretty easy to find.

Awesome, alright.

It's been lovely chatting with you.

Likewise.

Thanks again for the invitation.

Absolutely. Thanks so much.

Thank you.