Chitchat with a Creator: Sasha Stiles
Meet Sasha Stiles: a first-generation Kalmyk-American poet, artist and AI researcher widely recognized as a pioneer of generative literature and language art.
Sasha Stiles is a first-generation Kalmyk-American poet, language artist, AI researcher widely recognized as a pioneer of algorithmic authorship and blockchain poetics. The author of TECHNELEGY and a co-founder of theVERSEverse, her honors include a Future Art Award, the Lumen Prize shortlist, and nominations for the Forward Prize, Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and she has been named one of the “Top Artists Shaping the Digital Art Scene.”
How did you hear about NFTs and start your journey?
I’d been writing digital poems, exploring AI language, and publishing in literary journals for years when CADAF curated my work into an art show; that’s how I got to know Elena Zavalev, Jess Conatser and Sofia Garcia, who remain some of my dearest friends in this space. They believed early on that poetry belongs in new media. Then, in late 2020, Jess commissioned me to write a poem for Virtual New Year’s Eve, a cutting-edge arts and cultural experience in collaboration with One Times Square, and I saw my verse on view in the metaverse for the first time, alongside works by many incredible digital and crypto artists. It really opened my eyes to the ways in which authorship and readership could be explored in synthetic realities and via the blockchain, even though there were hardly any writers in the space at that time. I did quite a bit of research and legwork getting set up with crypto wallets and was still contemplating where and how to begin minting my work, and grappling with the drawbacks of gas fees and environmental considerations, when I heard about the #Objkt4Objkt initiative on Hic et Nunc, a Tezos marketplace. The brilliant artist Aurece Vettier was one of the first to actively encourage my explorations on that platform, and I haven’t looked back.
MEMENTO MEMORIAE | SASHA STILES
2022
MP4 (with audio), 07:15 min
1080 x 1920 px
Edition of 1
How did the idea to create theVERSEverse come about? What's the mission of theVERSEverse?
There was a very small, fledgling group of writers on Tezos in early 2021, and we sort of gravitated toward one another. Kalen Iwamoto – one of the co-founders of theVERSEverse – started an official CryptoWriters community, and that was a pivotal milestone; I remember many threads and DM conversations with Kalen, Aurece Vettier, James Yu (co-founder of Sudowrite.com) and others about the need for a dedicated poetry hub, a place in web3 for avant-garde literary experiments and strength in numbers, and we were making plans to launch a next-gen zine of sorts. Then a bunch of us were invited to be part of artchick’s ETHERPOEMS Volume 2: Spoken Word, an on-chain project where we met fellow participant Ana Maria Caballero. It was clear we were all on a similar mission, to leverage technology to explore new poetic possibilities. I messaged Ana, who was also musing on an NFT poetry enterprise, we all put heads together, and now here we are. None of it would have been possible without Gisel Florez, our art advisor and a friend of Kalen’s, who helped us launch in November 2021, and without early collectors and supporters like Elsie Edicurial, Fanny Lakoubay, Wes Hazard, Sarah Moosvi, Aleksandra Art, Jesse Damiani, Michael Spalter, and Kevin Abosch, who understood our vision from day 1. Since then, we’ve continued to advocate for web3 as a game-changing innovation for writers, in that it enables us to imbue text – which is generally thought of as infinitely reproducible, able to be endlessly copied and transmitted – with the rarity and value of artwork, and frees us from a lot of the dictates and desires of the literary establishment.
Name one person you admire in the Web3 Space, and tell us why.
Too many to name, but this space is full of some of the most creative and inspired women I’ve ever met in my life. Micol Ap is a shining example of someone with transformative integrity, taste, and clarity of vision, but citing one person is the tip of the iceberg. Nothing in web3 happens without a team, a community, a cross-pollination of ideas and influences and intelligences.
What are a few things that are lacking in the Web3 space at the moment?
I wonder a lot about how to reconcile the positive contrarianism that is so integral to artistic innovation with the groupthink of web3, with its pros and cons. As much as the hive mind can enrich, it can also diffuse and dilute and delay and stymy the progress we want and need. Artists, or any leaders, really, need to stay true to themselves and their unique vision just as much as they need to grapple with external influences and inspiration, and that’s often an extremely tough balance to strike in web3.
Aside from crypto-related matters, what else are you interested in?
I have an abiding fascination with text-based art and typography, anything having to do with the material and aesthetic qualities of language – from visual and concrete poetry to font design and papermaking and bookbinding. My professional background is in communications and advertising – how incredibly concise assemblages of words and images evoke emotion and inspire action – and my favorite artists are text-based artists, creatives who consider letters and words themselves to be material, imagistic, aesthetically significant. I’m really inspired by artists like Jenny Holzer who understand how poetic language can become a consumer good, in positive ways; during the pandemic, one of the ways I kept myself occupied was by concepting an AI wellness brand, from products to taglines. At any rate, I’ve been creating my own stationery and logos and brand identities and typefaces and newsletters and signage since I was a kid, and projects like Cursive Binary are an expression of that lifelong passion. My affinity for the ars poetica, positioning poems as artworks, is rooted in an ancient belief that, to paraphrase Simonides of Keos (c. 556 – 468 BC), poems are paintings and paintings are poems, and I love to look at language and absorb its meaning aesthetically as much as I enjoy having a semantic understanding of those words.
Also, I love to sing, though not many people in web3 know that; I was heavily involved in musical theater for a chapter of my life, and spoken word and music are very important to my poetic practice, which is why I turned my book TECHNELEGY into an audiobook/album. By writing with multimedia tools, I’m exploring how haptic elements like music, voice, movement, color, glow and glitch can become part of the formal poetic vernacular, impacting the way a reader engages with a text.
*Follow Sasha Stiles on Twitter and Instagram.
