TECHNELEGY | by Sasha Stiles

With digital immortality making headlines, stories about robot companions going viral, and crypto upending reality as we know it, it's time to ask: what does it mean to be human in a nearly post-human era? This highly anticipated debut from poet, artist and AI researcher Sasha Stiles captures both the thrill and peril of our intimate relationship with technology, fusing the zero-one rhythms of binary code with the pulse of elegiac couplets in a hybrid text unlike any ever written. Both groundbreaking and heartbreaking, the collection weaves together masterful human verse with captivating language experiments by the author's AI alter ego, alongside full-color photos of Stiles' critically acclaimed art. An urgent investigation of the human condition in a time of profound change, TECHNELEGY is a transhuman manifesto with poetic soul -- and, in the words of leading futurist Martine Rothblatt, "an instant techno-classic."

The future of human and machines, and the future of the virtual environment is unravelling fast. Human and machine poetry, a language of shimmering light and sound. Sasha's beautiful poetry evokes the experience of an intimate social gathering, with views on life that make me feel I'm there. Who can pass on that? This is a great read.

Hardcover, 176 pages with full-color images. 8.5 x 10 inches.
Published by Black Spring Press Group (UK 2021, US 2022).

About the Author

Sasha Stiles is first-generation Kalmyk-American poet, language artist, and AI researcher working at the nexus of text and technology, known for her pioneering experiments with generative literature and blockchain poetics. Her practice refracts heritage and tradition through disruptive explorations of creativity and consciousness, probing the role of human voice in a machine age.​

Having collaborated with artificial intelligence since 2018, Stiles’ insights and innovations have earned her a place among the most influential contributors to our global discourse about the future of art, technology, and humanity. From the hybrid collection Technelegy (2021), co-authored with a personalized AI-powered text generator and praised by Ray Kurzweil, to award-winning projects such as “Cursive Binary” and “Repetae,” her groundbreaking work considers poetry as both art form and technology – an ancient and enduring data system that encodes human experience across space and time. Through seamless integration of text, transmedia art, and creative technologies like machine learning and blockchain, Stiles situates AI within the broader continuum of linguistic innovations that have always rewritten what it means to be human.

Stiles’ work has been honored by the Prix Ars Electronica, Lumen Prize, Optimism AI Prize, and the Future.Art.Awards; featured by MoMA, Artforum, Christie’s, NPR, the Washington Post, and Poets & Writers; and presented at numerous venues worldwide, including Lincoln Center, the V&A, Art Basel, Art Dubai, Art Cologne, SCOPE, Kunsthalle Zurich, Zagreb's Museum of Contemporary Art, Outernet London, Krasl Art Center, and the billboards of Tokyo's Shibuya Crossing. Stiles partners selectively with such global brands as Gucci and Bang & Olufsen.

A graduate of Harvard and Oxford, co-founder of experimental literary collective theVERSEverse, and longtime poetry mentor to humanoid android BINA48, Stiles lives near New York City with her husband and studio partner, Kris Bones.