By @JustinWetch

When Sasha Stiles was six years old, her father took her comet-chasing. They drove out looking for Halley's Comet on one of its orbital returns, the two of them staring up at a sky that was, for a few hours, the most important thing in the world. This was normal for them. Her idea of fun with her dad was going to Griffith Observatory to look at the stars, or tagging along to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, sitting in corners while grown-ups discussed orbital mechanics and the origins of the universe.

Her parents are documentary filmmakers. When Sasha was born, they were working on the series Cosmos with Carl Sagan. They shot at places like JPL and The Planetary Society, and when they traveled for long shoots, sometimes weeks at a time, Sasha made them handmade books, folding pieces of paper together and drawing stories of what they might be doing in far-flung locations. At the family computer, she designed geometric shapes and borders inMacPaint, making stationery she could then write on by hand. Computational design on one side, her own handwriting on the other. They read Shakespeare and William Blake to her when she was young. Later she went through her father's college books, finding his annotated copies of Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot and Ted Hughes' Crow, reading those poets first through his notes in the margins.

"In a way, I always knew that I would end up working with language," she says. "That I knew."

Both of Sasha's parents are immigrants. She was the first person in her family born in America. Her father is British. Her mother is Kalmyk Mongolian, born in a refugee camp in Germany after World War II, having never actually lived in Kalmykia proper. Kalmykia is a small republic in Russia shaped by the Mongolic heritage of the Kalmyk people, situated right at the threshold between Europe and Asia. It is widely considered the only predominantly Buddhist area in all of Europe.

She grew up immersed in the family stories, hearing the Kalmyk language through her maternal family. She recognizes it, finds it deeply familiar, but doesn't really speak it. Her mother is fluent. Sasha has almost no occasion to encounter it anywhere else.

The dialect is endangered, part of an oral tradition, an oral folklore, an oral culture. This is a fact that haunts her work. When AI systems train on written text, what happens to the languages that were never written down? "What does that mean in terms of preservation," she asks, "in a world in which all our archives really rely on written data and inscribed information? What does that mean for oral data?"

She remembers her grandparents' house, their shrines and relics, things she found beautiful and mysterious as a child. The family wasn't super religious, but certain rituals came forward at weddings and temple visits, moments where Buddhism asserted itself. She's always been drawn to the Dalai Lama's fascination with speculative technology, his willingness to entertain questions like whether downloading yourself into a computer would count as reincarnation. Those thought experiments found their way into her first book. Buddhism became a lens for what she calls "techno-spirituality," a way of thinking about the places where virtual selves dovetail with ideas of reincarnation and where the threshold between analog and digital starts to feel ancient rather than new.

"I feel at once very protective of my heritage and identity," she says, "but I also feel sort of removed from it."

The tension between those two things fuels almost everything.

Before Sasha ever touched AI, she was writing about machines. In school she wrote poems about Greek automata, about Hephaestus, the god who forged robotic creatures. As a kid she read Philip K. Dick and Arthur Clarke and Madeleine L'Engle and Ursula K. Le Guin, the kind of science fiction you'd expect from someone raised in the orbit of Carl Sagan. As a graduate student in England, she wrote a monthly magazine column. The editor asked what she wanted to write about. The whole column ended up being about her relationship to technology.

She was reading Ray Kurzweil and Nick Bostrom and Ellen Ullman and Donna Haraway, thinkers fixated on where humanity might be headed, and through that research she became aware of what was happening in AI. Technology and language had been twin obsessions for decades. She just hadn't found the place where they converged.

"I've been writing about making art about technology for decades," she says. "The stuff that I'm doing now is really like the latest chapter in this evolving exploration of what it means to be human in an increasingly more than human age."

In 2017, Sasha read a paper that changed the direction of her work. "Attention Is All You Need," published by a team at Google, introduced the transformer architecture underpinning systems like ChatGPT. She found it the way she found most things, by being, in her words, "this nerd who just wanted to read Wired and Ars Technica in my spare time."

What struck her was not the engineering. It was the implication.

"This is technology, but it's actually language," she says. "AI is all rooted in language. This is a system that's based in text data and words."

For someone who had spent her entire life at the intersection of language and technology, this was the intersection itself. She had no first-hand experience with AI before that moment. She dove in.

The way she works with AI sounds nothing like the usual artist-and-tool relationship. She calls it collaborating with an alter ego. She builds customized prompt architectures and system infrastructures that reflect her writing practice, her philosophical concerns, then plugs into what she describes as a wider collective consciousness. The feeling, she says, is the same as reading T.S. Eliot and sensing "the voice of all the ancient poets, and the voice of Shakespeare and all these other languages and stories and ideas, just lurking under the surface." That polyphonic quality is what keeps her coming back.

"I feel that I'm interfacing with myself," she says, "but through a refractive lens."

Sasha describes poetry as humanity's oldest information technology, and she means it literally. "Poetry didn't start as an art form," she says. "It actually started as data storage; in a time when inheritance depended entirely on embodied memory, poetry was a survival tool." Before written language existed, humans needed some way of preserving not just concrete information but emotions, feelings, memories. Meter, rhyme, repetition: these were storage protocols before they were literary devices.

This is the framework she brings to everything. She talks about something called the Gutenberg Parenthesis, and the idea that we're living in the late era of literacy, still associating language with something inscribed on a surface, even when that surface is digital. But what happens when language doesn't sit still on a page? When poems exist in infinite variations simultaneously, refracted through neural networks? She's not interested in translating written language into new digital formats. She wants to discover the native tongue of these new forms. "What kind of genres, what kind of forms do they invite us to imagine?" she asks. "Or what might they require that's different than anything we might be able to imagine so far?"

She carries the weight of what goes wrong, too. One of the refrains in her MoMA piece is "Do no harm," a collision of the Hippocratic Oath and the laws of robotics. She describes having "very conflicted feelings about AI," wanting to be able to experiment "both because I find it really creatively liberating and exhilarating, and because it is allowing me to say things and do things with my imagination that I couldn't do without AI. But then also to understand that we're already seeing very real-world consequences of what happens when these technologies are unleashed in ways that are not ethically sound."

She is not naive about any of this. She is choosing to stay in the tension.

Right now, Sasha has a piece installed at MoMA in New York, a living poem in the lobby, generated and regenerating. It will live at moma.org in perpetuity. She's building a generative artist book as companion to the show, each copy its own fine art print encapsulating timestamped artifacts from the work, a book that is also an edition, meant to be taken home and held.

Last year she was part of a permanent installation at Google's Gradient Canopy building alongside Refik Anadol and Trevor Paglen. She collaborated with Art Basel and ICONIC to create the official poster for Art Basel in Basel, a generative poem on the world's largest art fair. She won the Lumen Prize for Literature and Poetry, the first time the award had been given in that category. Her book, Technelegy, came out in paperback.

The kid who sat in corners at NASA JPL while her parents worked on Cosmos now makes work that lives on the walls of MoMA. Somewhere in that arc is the whole argument she's been making her entire life, about what the technology of language does to consciousness, about how the impulse to articulate something inside you and shape it so it survives you is the same impulse whether you're stitching together a handmade book or generating a poem through a neural network.

"How does technology make us more human?" she asks. "Long ago, we invented this technology that made it possible for us to articulate ourselves to ourselves, and to express things that were otherwise unknowable to us."

She means poetry. She also means everything that comes after.

Sasha credits the people who helped her find the path: Elena Zavelev, Sofia Garcia, and Jess Conatser, curators she met around 2019 through the Contemporary and Digital Art Fair, who in different ways helped her figure out where she was headed. Nicole Sales Giles, formerly of Christie's, a friend and champion who constantly goes to bat for her. And Martha Joseph and Madeleine Pierpont at MoMA, whose belief in her work, whose willingness to see what she's doing and say it has a place, has been one of the most meaningful things in her career.

Artists inspiring her lately: @WenNew_Atelier and their poem machines, @christianbok, who dares to attempt the impossible on a regular basis, and Ayoung Kim, whose work she got to know in new ways during a recent trip to Seoul.

For future Weekly Dose episodes, Sasha recommends Nathaniel Stern, Auriea Harvey, and Linda Dounia.