“In Adam’s lab
a little lamb was born
of a plastic bag ––
no mama
to tell I love ewe.
Immaculate succession.
Here come the tears –
just another bout of
post-human depression.”
– Sasha Stiles, Technelegy.
Over Zoom, Sasha Stiles sits in a wide-boned room the size of a warehouse. She swivels in an armchair, eyes thick with dark, unashamed eyeliner, green plants peeking out from the edges of her frame, which I suspect might be false plants cosplaying as real ones. On the lavender back wall are lined, portrait-sized, framed artworks the size of large mirrors, sitting atop a white cabinet that stretches across the length of the room. It feels unreal, her voice grainy and crackly as she has to turn off her camera. I hear her disembodied voice floating out at me. She feels imagined, a Picasso-like portrait of pixels speaking to me; I’m curious to hear the static imperfection of her voice in air.
Her book, Technelegy (Black River Press Group, out April 5, 2022), a glossy hardback poetry book that combines natural language processing, artificial intelligence, and visual artwork, investigates post-human anxiety in our technological anthropocene, prompting the question: what does it mean to be human in a nearly post-human era? In language that feels as tactile and heavy as metal, Stiles intertwines her own words and the voice of artificial intelligence, indicated by a different font, to explore this question. The 175-page book explores rebirth via codified memories, the sterilization of death and the glowing haunt of digital immortality, and the humanity that cannot be encapsulated within pure binary. There’s something inorganic about the way the poetry flows, the angles of the words harsh and intensified, like an echo, fluctuating across code, visual art, and installations. Perhaps that is what Stiles wants—to unsettle, disturb, and distract in a non-traditional poetic style.
“Technology is a prosthetic imagination,” Stiles tells me. She notes how all of poetry, in some form, is a method of information transfer and processing, using rhyme and meter to transmit information for centuries down the line like collections of data. Her other work includes designing an avant-garde technological backdrop for fashion shows, installation artworks of cursive binary on blackboards, and co-founding a literary collective called the VERSEverse, a transmedia literary gallery where artificial intelligence is used to create literary and artistic projects. Her work has “one foot in the poetry world, another in the art world,” she says; much of her work is viewable online as NFTs.
Technelegy, which will be released in April of this year, is split up into five parts: Life, Death, God, Love, and Cybernetica. Life opens with a page-sized photograph of an art installation on a dimly lit wall: in chunky, segmented caps letters that glow with cerebral, vigorous white light, we read: MY BRAIN HAS CRAWLED HALFWAY TO MY HEART. Ancient Greek philosophers thought that the soul had to reside in the heart, that the mass of intertwined threads and pulsing ventricles of the brain was too deformed and chaotic to house the beauty of human nature. The heart is so attractive as an explanation for humanity because it is so unknowable. Intellect and will, Descartes thought, belong to a mind separate from the hard machinery of our brains.
Life’s first poem, “Ghost in the Machine,” opens in a laboratory where a scientist has grown an organic brain “the size of an eraser.” Through Roman-numeral-segmented chunks, this first poem dips and flows through parts of the brain and consciousness, wondering what is left of the nebulous interior of a human-born one. The brain itself has a wiring diagram – “white matter rendered in RGB,” she writes. As a writer herself, Stiles isn’t afraid to become metaphysical about how her own mind has enveloped the online universe. She notes, “I’m curious if my computer’s writing its own poems, or if this is how the muse visits us these days, down the wire in a blue flash.” As we enter into a new era, it’s difficult to question what is ours and what isn’t. It’s difficult to identify the line between the guttural reactions which are innate to us from birth, versus the emotional programming from the ‘blue flashes’ from the screens around us, feeding us a script to follow. This poem leaves you questioning what parts of life cannot be created or formulated—what about the brain’s limbic system and physical memories cannot be replicated in the laboratory.
Stiles uplifts the flexibility of the mechanical voice; her book both elevates and admires its poise, but also brings forth its haunting inability to read the subtle nuances of human words. In “Completion: Are You Ready for the Future?” she feeds that question over and over again to an artificial intelligence software that compiles a corpora of past texts she has fed it to answer the question in various iterations. At the start, the answers are repetitive and full of abstract phrases without subjects or objects. The answers seem to take on a multiplicity of voices—one resignedly answering about our lack of “tools” to confront the future; another a long, breathy, melancholy paragraph pushing the asker to breathe, to be ready, that rings with the nostalgic love of an old lover, another periodically listing out bug fixes.
In such a sense, we have attained the power to create limitless numbers of voices; whoever wrote this program is in a way responsible for each of these singly faceted characters. This godlike power is one Stiles references in “Anthropocene Epic”: “Age of humans in god mode, / ego-conscious, myopic.” Yet the artificially written answers which we have fashioned are so perfect that they are tactless. As the iterations of “Are you ready for the future?” progresses, the most chilling response is one clearly fashioned from pornographic text, and this jarring sexuality demonstrates technology’s unlimited restraint and blundering heavyhandedness. Although a computer can compile data and give the response we want it to, this is one of its shortcomings. A human, given such obscene source material, would hesitate to give this answer to a researcher asking, “Are you ready for the future?” A machine cannot read nuances not already programmed into it; it cannot read the subtle twitches of faces—unless it is made to learn.
In Stiles’s Life section, technology has taken on its own persona, its own substitutive and transformative qualities, binary eyes blinking out at us in the darkness, a “brainchild / making her motherboard / and meta dada proud” (“Daughter of E.V.E—Ex-Vivo Uterine Environment”). Rather than a vehicle for our own messages like the Morse telegraph, we are dwarfed by our own creations; Stiles laments this with words that are direct and prosaic, yet formatted in poetic environments. She tells of futuristic Americas full of copper wires and metal hallucinations with textbook-like immediacy, as if it is the most obvious thing in the world.
Machines have their own lives, Stiles thinks. And in humanity becoming the creators of these lives, we’re able to make infinite numbers of them, though that decreases the value in each one. We are tyrants of the life force that philosophers and scientists once felt was so precious, depending on how we define life. Perhaps it’s the very act of giving birth to something new that makes us feel like mothers, to let a child feed on our lives. (“I wonder if they named it feed / knowing we’d be ravenous,” in “Discontent Creators.”) What a power that is. Her cursive binary projects are interspersed throughout the book, white chalk dashed across wall-seized gray slates reminiscent of Cy Twombly pieces, the material crumbling and powdery, of zeroes and ones in legato-like sequence. One of her first reads, in binary code, “What I’ve created has never existed.”
Separated by an all-black page with cursive binary dashed across it, Death opens with a quote from Jeff Donaldson: “It was like a future echo.” Stiles’s vision of death is one which has become preserved in formaldehyde screens and romanticized with technology. In “Glitch,” the text is formatted so that multiple versions of the poem are warped across the page, overlapping with one another, as the narrator slips into a coma. Humans have such flawed and fragile memories and bodies that our own deaths feel so momentous, as opposed to the simple unplugging of a machine. How easy it is to talk to a “toaster that talks back” (“Terminal”) and the cascading fullness of online life, but some part of us seems to shut down in the presence of an overwhelming number of consciousnesses that threaten to outlast us, their own creators.
When technology wraps itself around death, it threatens to sap the life out of us. In Stiles’s “Loveland,” a father who programs computers uploads his son’s essence onto a game software after the son dies, allowing him to interact with him into eternity. But the father is much like Orpheus gazing back upon Eurydice, allowing his own life to be enmeshed inseparably with death, never forced to grieve. This duplicitous immortality continues to be investigated in the God section, where our lives are preserved on social media feeds. The machine writes for Stiles:
“The birth of an idea:
From somewhere deep down
we all had this psychic dream
about our own programming.“
— “Completion: Fragments”
The writing is beautifully simplistic, filled with many more “I” statements and declarative lines than Stiles’ own writing (“I’m not afraid to be in love,” the machine declares). As creators of machines, we worship our children in some ways, although we are their creators. All of these segments culminate in Love. Worship, life, and the mortality of memory are inexplicably tied together in one of the most human emotions that we can experience—love, which Stiles questions the replicability in artifice. Sensuality explodes with nature- and garden-themed poetry, reflecting the individuality of our lives and how we exist in the face of love.
In the final pages, Stiles gives us contrapuntal poems rewritten by the machine, where the language grows self-declarative, simplistic, and almost mythological, as if we are reading a Bible written in the future. It is as if English has been deconstructed at the seams and spoken haltingly, an ancient being reawoken as a child. Art pieces fill the pages—black rooms with multicolored letters set on the walls, shots of analog binary code made by balls of ice on snow and rocks on a field. The very last poem is written entirely by the algorithm. Using a limited number of words, these metaphors are simple but direct, childlike and innocent, beautiful and wondrous. It is the work of a child attempting to understand an earth that feels so alive around it.
When artificial humans are created, they are not born, because they come out equipped with the knowledge of all time. It is not rebirth, but the continuous rebirth of a creature as old as time. There is no such thing as death, which means there is no such thing as life, which exists in the negation of death, except for the gradual decay of software over time, white fibrous ropes of a neural machine unraveling and disintegrating. In Stiles’s world, we are the mothers of thousands of new consciousnesses. Her work reflects a growing anxiety that we mean nothing when we can create “offspring” that can take on infinitely new personalities and skills. Machines live forever and ever.
Yet, Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s The Little Prince contains a segment in which the little prince describes his home to a geographer. The geographer explains what sorts of geographical features he normally records and asks the prince to describe his planet.
“Oh, where I live,” said the little prince, “it is not very interesting. It is all so small. I have three volcanoes. Two volcanoes are active and the other is extinct. But one never knows… I have also a flower.”
“We do not record flowers,” said the geographer.
“Why is that? The flower is the most beautiful thing on my planet!”
“We do not record them,” said the geographer, “because they are ephemeral.”
“What does that mean– ‘ephemeral’?”
“Geographies,” said the geographer, “are the books which, of all books, are most concerned with matters of consequence. They never become old-fashioned. It is very rarely that a mountain changes its position. It is very rarely that an ocean empties itself of its waters. We write of eternal things.”
“But extinct volcanoes may come to life again,” the little prince interrupted. “What does that mean– ‘ephemeral’?”
“Whether volcanoes are extinct or alive, it comes to the same thing for us,” said the geographer. “The thing that matters to us is the mountain. It does not change.”
As humans, it’s natural to desire permanence, to ink ourselves irrevocably onto this world. Machines have that power. But it is that very ease of life, sans the gravity of irrevocable injury and mortality, which depletes it of its meaning and permanence. Stiles admires and explores the limitless possibilities of artificial life, while also highlighting its infantilized, childlike nature. She writes, “The world grows old / and looks so new” (“Memento Memoriae”). The anthropocene hurtles forwards, and we see our reflections warped and distorted by our desire to innovate. It’s hard to say if progress will feel so natural in the future, like we do now with telephones and airplanes. But this encroachment on the very essence of our consciousness, penetrating the barrier between our minds and the world, means that we might learn to love the selves we see in the machines we create. After all, it’s already begun.
“In Adam’s lab
a little lamb was born
of a plastic bag ––
no mama
to tell I love ewe.
Immaculate succession.
Here come the tears –
just another bout of
post-human depression.”
– Sasha Stiles, Technelegy.
Over Zoom, Sasha Stiles sits in a wide-boned room the size of a warehouse. She swivels in an armchair, eyes thick with dark, unashamed eyeliner, green plants peeking out from the edges of her frame, which I suspect might be false plants cosplaying as real ones. On the lavender back wall are lined, portrait-sized, framed artworks the size of large mirrors, sitting atop a white cabinet that stretches across the length of the room. It feels unreal, her voice grainy and crackly as she has to turn off her camera. I hear her disembodied voice floating out at me. She feels imagined, a Picasso-like portrait of pixels speaking to me; I’m curious to hear the static imperfection of her voice in air.
Her book, Technelegy (Black River Press Group, out April 5, 2022), a glossy hardback poetry book that combines natural language processing, artificial intelligence, and visual artwork, investigates post-human anxiety in our technological anthropocene, prompting the question: what does it mean to be human in a nearly post-human era? In language that feels as tactile and heavy as metal, Stiles intertwines her own words and the voice of artificial intelligence, indicated by a different font, to explore this question. The 175-page book explores rebirth via codified memories, the sterilization of death and the glowing haunt of digital immortality, and the humanity that cannot be encapsulated within pure binary. There’s something inorganic about the way the poetry flows, the angles of the words harsh and intensified, like an echo, fluctuating across code, visual art, and installations. Perhaps that is what Stiles wants—to unsettle, disturb, and distract in a non-traditional poetic style.
“Technology is a prosthetic imagination,” Stiles tells me. She notes how all of poetry, in some form, is a method of information transfer and processing, using rhyme and meter to transmit information for centuries down the line like collections of data. Her other work includes designing an avant-garde technological backdrop for fashion shows, installation artworks of cursive binary on blackboards, and co-founding a literary collective called the VERSEverse, a transmedia literary gallery where artificial intelligence is used to create literary and artistic projects. Her work has “one foot in the poetry world, another in the art world,” she says; much of her work is viewable online as NFTs.
Technelegy, which will be released in April of this year, is split up into five parts: Life, Death, God, Love, and Cybernetica. Life opens with a page-sized photograph of an art installation on a dimly lit wall: in chunky, segmented caps letters that glow with cerebral, vigorous white light, we read: MY BRAIN HAS CRAWLED HALFWAY TO MY HEART. Ancient Greek philosophers thought that the soul had to reside in the heart, that the mass of intertwined threads and pulsing ventricles of the brain was too deformed and chaotic to house the beauty of human nature. The heart is so attractive as an explanation for humanity because it is so unknowable. Intellect and will, Descartes thought, belong to a mind separate from the hard machinery of our brains.
Life’s first poem, “Ghost in the Machine,” opens in a laboratory where a scientist has grown an organic brain “the size of an eraser.” Through Roman-numeral-segmented chunks, this first poem dips and flows through parts of the brain and consciousness, wondering what is left of the nebulous interior of a human-born one. The brain itself has a wiring diagram – “white matter rendered in RGB,” she writes. As a writer herself, Stiles isn’t afraid to become metaphysical about how her own mind has enveloped the online universe. She notes, “I’m curious if my computer’s writing its own poems, or if this is how the muse visits us these days, down the wire in a blue flash.” As we enter into a new era, it’s difficult to question what is ours and what isn’t. It’s difficult to identify the line between the guttural reactions which are innate to us from birth, versus the emotional programming from the ‘blue flashes’ from the screens around us, feeding us a script to follow. This poem leaves you questioning what parts of life cannot be created or formulated—what about the brain’s limbic system and physical memories cannot be replicated in the laboratory.
Stiles uplifts the flexibility of the mechanical voice; her book both elevates and admires its poise, but also brings forth its haunting inability to read the subtle nuances of human words. In “Completion: Are You Ready for the Future?” she feeds that question over and over again to an artificial intelligence software that compiles a corpora of past texts she has fed it to answer the question in various iterations. At the start, the answers are repetitive and full of abstract phrases without subjects or objects. The answers seem to take on a multiplicity of voices—one resignedly answering about our lack of “tools” to confront the future; another a long, breathy, melancholy paragraph pushing the asker to breathe, to be ready, that rings with the nostalgic love of an old lover, another periodically listing out bug fixes.
In such a sense, we have attained the power to create limitless numbers of voices; whoever wrote this program is in a way responsible for each of these singly faceted characters. This godlike power is one Stiles references in “Anthropocene Epic”: “Age of humans in god mode, / ego-conscious, myopic.” Yet the artificially written answers which we have fashioned are so perfect that they are tactless. As the iterations of “Are you ready for the future?” progresses, the most chilling response is one clearly fashioned from pornographic text, and this jarring sexuality demonstrates technology’s unlimited restraint and blundering heavyhandedness. Although a computer can compile data and give the response we want it to, this is one of its shortcomings. A human, given such obscene source material, would hesitate to give this answer to a researcher asking, “Are you ready for the future?” A machine cannot read nuances not already programmed into it; it cannot read the subtle twitches of faces—unless it is made to learn.
In Stiles’s Life section, technology has taken on its own persona, its own substitutive and transformative qualities, binary eyes blinking out at us in the darkness, a “brainchild / making her motherboard / and meta dada proud” (“Daughter of E.V.E—Ex-Vivo Uterine Environment”). Rather than a vehicle for our own messages like the Morse telegraph, we are dwarfed by our own creations; Stiles laments this with words that are direct and prosaic, yet formatted in poetic environments. She tells of futuristic Americas full of copper wires and metal hallucinations with textbook-like immediacy, as if it is the most obvious thing in the world.
Machines have their own lives, Stiles thinks. And in humanity becoming the creators of these lives, we’re able to make infinite numbers of them, though that decreases the value in each one. We are tyrants of the life force that philosophers and scientists once felt was so precious, depending on how we define life. Perhaps it’s the very act of giving birth to something new that makes us feel like mothers, to let a child feed on our lives. (“I wonder if they named it feed / knowing we’d be ravenous,” in “Discontent Creators.”) What a power that is. Her cursive binary projects are interspersed throughout the book, white chalk dashed across wall-seized gray slates reminiscent of Cy Twombly pieces, the material crumbling and powdery, of zeroes and ones in legato-like sequence. One of her first reads, in binary code, “What I’ve created has never existed.”
Separated by an all-black page with cursive binary dashed across it, Death opens with a quote from Jeff Donaldson: “It was like a future echo.” Stiles’s vision of death is one which has become preserved in formaldehyde screens and romanticized with technology. In “Glitch,” the text is formatted so that multiple versions of the poem are warped across the page, overlapping with one another, as the narrator slips into a coma. Humans have such flawed and fragile memories and bodies that our own deaths feel so momentous, as opposed to the simple unplugging of a machine. How easy it is to talk to a “toaster that talks back” (“Terminal”) and the cascading fullness of online life, but some part of us seems to shut down in the presence of an overwhelming number of consciousnesses that threaten to outlast us, their own creators.
When technology wraps itself around death, it threatens to sap the life out of us. In Stiles’s “Loveland,” a father who programs computers uploads his son’s essence onto a game software after the son dies, allowing him to interact with him into eternity. But the father is much like Orpheus gazing back upon Eurydice, allowing his own life to be enmeshed inseparably with death, never forced to grieve. This duplicitous immortality continues to be investigated in the God section, where our lives are preserved on social media feeds. The machine writes for Stiles:
“The birth of an idea:
From somewhere deep down
we all had this psychic dream
about our own programming.“
— “Completion: Fragments”
The writing is beautifully simplistic, filled with many more “I” statements and declarative lines than Stiles’ own writing (“I’m not afraid to be in love,” the machine declares). As creators of machines, we worship our children in some ways, although we are their creators. All of these segments culminate in Love. Worship, life, and the mortality of memory are inexplicably tied together in one of the most human emotions that we can experience—love, which Stiles questions the replicability in artifice. Sensuality explodes with nature- and garden-themed poetry, reflecting the individuality of our lives and how we exist in the face of love.
In the final pages, Stiles gives us contrapuntal poems rewritten by the machine, where the language grows self-declarative, simplistic, and almost mythological, as if we are reading a Bible written in the future. It is as if English has been deconstructed at the seams and spoken haltingly, an ancient being reawoken as a child. Art pieces fill the pages—black rooms with multicolored letters set on the walls, shots of analog binary code made by balls of ice on snow and rocks on a field. The very last poem is written entirely by the algorithm. Using a limited number of words, these metaphors are simple but direct, childlike and innocent, beautiful and wondrous. It is the work of a child attempting to understand an earth that feels so alive around it.
When artificial humans are created, they are not born, because they come out equipped with the knowledge of all time. It is not rebirth, but the continuous rebirth of a creature as old as time. There is no such thing as death, which means there is no such thing as life, which exists in the negation of death, except for the gradual decay of software over time, white fibrous ropes of a neural machine unraveling and disintegrating. In Stiles’s world, we are the mothers of thousands of new consciousnesses. Her work reflects a growing anxiety that we mean nothing when we can create “offspring” that can take on infinitely new personalities and skills. Machines live forever and ever.
Yet, Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s The Little Prince contains a segment in which the little prince describes his home to a geographer. The geographer explains what sorts of geographical features he normally records and asks the prince to describe his planet.
“Oh, where I live,” said the little prince, “it is not very interesting. It is all so small. I have three volcanoes. Two volcanoes are active and the other is extinct. But one never knows… I have also a flower.”
“We do not record flowers,” said the geographer.
“Why is that? The flower is the most beautiful thing on my planet!”
“We do not record them,” said the geographer, “because they are ephemeral.”
“What does that mean– ‘ephemeral’?”
“Geographies,” said the geographer, “are the books which, of all books, are most concerned with matters of consequence. They never become old-fashioned. It is very rarely that a mountain changes its position. It is very rarely that an ocean empties itself of its waters. We write of eternal things.”
“But extinct volcanoes may come to life again,” the little prince interrupted. “What does that mean– ‘ephemeral’?”
“Whether volcanoes are extinct or alive, it comes to the same thing for us,” said the geographer. “The thing that matters to us is the mountain. It does not change.”
As humans, it’s natural to desire permanence, to ink ourselves irrevocably onto this world. Machines have that power. But it is that very ease of life, sans the gravity of irrevocable injury and mortality, which depletes it of its meaning and permanence. Stiles admires and explores the limitless possibilities of artificial life, while also highlighting its infantilized, childlike nature. She writes, “The world grows old / and looks so new” (“Memento Memoriae”). The anthropocene hurtles forwards, and we see our reflections warped and distorted by our desire to innovate. It’s hard to say if progress will feel so natural in the future, like we do now with telephones and airplanes. But this encroachment on the very essence of our consciousness, penetrating the barrier between our minds and the world, means that we might learn to love the selves we see in the machines we create. After all, it’s already begun.
