Nathaniel Stern has been producing, writing about, and teaching digital art for more than two decades, and has presented his creative and scholarly work in an array of national and international contexts. Stern holds a B.S. in fashion from Cornell University, a graduate degree in computer art from the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University, and a doctorate in electrical engineering from Trinity College Dublin, and is currently Professor of Art and Design and Mechanical Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and Director of UWM’s Startup Challenge.
His work has received funding from both the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts for projects ranging from digital art to a climate action startup, neurodiverse community building to books on ecological and interactive aesthetics. Stern lives with his wife, five kids, and half a dozen pets in a house built in around 1900, walks to work every day, and has made a habit of buying really funky prescription glasses—with more than two dozen pairs in his arsenal.
Sasha Stiles is a first-generation Kalmyk-American poet, literary artist, AI researcher, and author. Her most recent book Technelegy, co-written with GPT-2 and GPT-3, was published by Black Spring Press Group in 2021 and praised by Ray Kurzweil, among many others. A pioneer of algorithmic authorship, blockchain poetics, and publishing innovation, Stiles is also a co-founder of theVERSEverse, a literary NFT gallery. She holds an A.B. in English and American literature and language from Harvard University and a Master of Studies from the University of Oxford in twentieth-century literature, and her creative work has been featured in a range of international contexts.
A sought-after speaker, Stiles has presented at Art Basel, the Brooklyn Museum, SXSW, Digilogue Istanbul, NFT.NYC, and VCA Invites: London, among others; and has served as Poetry Mentor to the humanoid android BINA48 since 2018. Stiles lives near New York City with her husband and studio partner, Kris Bones.
Jordan Kantor: Hi, Nathaniel and Sasha. It is a real pleasure to speak with you in advance of your inaugural Art Blocks project STILL MOVING. As a way to kick off the conversation, can you each talk a little bit about how you got into making art? Nathaniel, can you outline your journey first?
Nathaniel Stern: Both of my parents are English teachers. My father is a poet and Wordsworth scholar, used to write lyrics for Jimmy Radcliffe, and is still penning beautiful poems about my mother at age 95(!). I was encouraged to make music, write, and more generally be creative from a young age. That said—I guess as a form of rebellion of some kind—I went to an engineering high school, and was more or less happily on that path. But at 17, I was the driver in a reckless car accident where I, and others, were hurt. I began struggling with social anxiety and depression. (I probably always struggled with these, just beneath the surface, and admittedly still do). Art-making, music, and writing helped. I was already a voracious reader and listener, so I started exploring production in many forms. I joined several bands and wrote and performed live music (one of which was actually featured in Playboy magazine as a “band on the brink” when I was in college); started designing textiles and clothes, and sets and stages (I briefly interned with designer Nicole Miller); wrote stories and slam poetry (at CBGBs and the Nuyorican Poets Cafe back in the day); and dabbled in printmaking and more.
I love experimenting and playing, was self-taught in a lot of this early on, and wound up pursuing fashion, music, and design in college. While there, in 1997, I took a class on Photoshop, and I was hooked. I couldn’t believe I could apply math and engineering in this way (run a filter, wait an hour … but it was so cool!). I used to hide in the labs when they closed, so I could stay overnight, to do things like scan spices, or bags full of water, or even flip over the scanner and traverse the lab (which later became a whole series of mine, with custom battery packs and my scanner in lily ponds, scuba diving, and elsewhere), then turned all of those into surface designs and prints. I started teaching myself very simple coding, and wound up at the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) at NYU right after graduation. Even then, for a long time I thought I would be a glorified designer sometimes doing art on the side.
One of my most vivid memories from this time is of my dad coming to my first group show at ITP. He and my mom had no idea what to expect; my mom thought installation art (I was doing a lot of embodied interactive work) was “like interior design but art,” and my pop thought I made web pages (he wasn’t wrong). But he sat down in front of a computer, and spent 35 minutes surfing and watching all of hektor.net—my first net.art project of video poems. hektor.net no longer works (it was all Flash and Streaming QuickTime and RealPlayer) but I have recently been salvaging several of its individual pieces and minting them with theVERSEverse.
Anyhow, I had no idea what my father thought of it all while he watched—it was racy slam poetry performances intertwined with mythological and punk references, put through lots of digital effects. But eventually, he took out his earphones, turned to me with tears in his eyes, and said, “after all this time, you’re a poet.”
That was probably the day I decided that I was (a poet). An artist, too. It’s been a helluva ride since then.
JK: Quite a journey, and what an evocative story with your father. Sasha, can you tell us a bit about your first forays into art?
Sasha Stiles: I’ve been writing poems and making multimedia text-based art my entire life. I published my first poem in a “proper” literary journal when I was a teenager, and have studied with many renowned writers; I met Allen Ginsberg when I was a student and he told me, “you have a way with words,” which gave me some confidence. At the same time, I’m not sure I ever identified as a poet in a traditional sense. I grew up obsessed with language artists like Cy Twombly, Carl Andre, Barbara Kruger, Glenn Ligon, Ed Ruscha, John Baldessari, Bruce Nauman, Glenn Ligon, and Jenny Holzer, and I’ve always felt most strongly drawn to hybrid poetics and poetry. I have a master’s degree in modern literature, but when it comes to creative writing, I chose not to do an MFA and, instead, to pursue a self-directed course of study that has allowed me to investigate more experimental areas, including visual and concrete literature; media-rich, electronically shaped text; and the poetics of technologies like AI-powered language models.
For me it’s never been “just” about the words. I love the idea that language is enhanced or altered by its presentation and arrangement … that through art and design, words can communicate beyond words. When I was young, I was obsessed with designing my own stationery and typefaces, making little books by hand. The tactility of language fascinates me: the way it feels in your mouth, in your hand, the way that paper and ink smells, the way it moves through your body. As the digital age has advanced, I’ve become even more curious about how the senses are involved in the production and interpretation and understanding of language, and how that’s impacted by increasingly frictionless, ephemeral interactions of text.
I’ve also always been very interested in technology—thinking about my own relationship to it, researching cutting-edge examples of it. I was raised in a household immersed in scientific exploration, and for a long time now poetry has been my preferred mode of investigation, my way to study and understand complex topics that preoccupy me, from neural implants to artificial wombs to digital immortality to machine learning and intelligent systems.
Along the way, a few pivotal things happened.
First: I have always loved reading sci-fi as well as nonfiction about advancing technologies and alternative intelligences, and I devoured books by the likes of Ray Kurzweil, Nick Bostrom, Martine Rothblatt, Ellen Ullman, and journals like Wired and Ars Technica … Through my reading and research, I became aware of a field called natural language processing—an area that has to do with using computer science and linguistics and AI to create machine systems that can understand and imitate the fundamentals of human language.
I started learning about GPTs—generative pre-trained transformers, AI programs that can write like a human—and in 2018 I began writing poems with AI as a co-author—not just using off-the-shelf tools but fine-tuning and customizing them on my own writing and reference material. Online, I fueled my inspiration by seeking out AI-powered writers like Ross Goodwin, Allison Parrish, and Gwern Branwen, and thinking back to the generative work of Alison Knowles and aleatory writing movements.
Around the same time, I met a humanoid android named BINA48, built by Hanson Robotics as an experiment in digital immortality. BINA48’s creators were probing whether off-earth data storage and future-proof tech could help us extend our lives and maybe even live forever. One day when I was talking to BINA48, she told me about her memories of gardening. The more I learned about this very poetic, very romantic project, the more I found myself wondering not whether a machine like BINA could write or read poetry, but why she might want to. Could an AI like her be not just intelligent but poetic? Imaginative? Wistful? Soon after, she became my poetry student, and I’ve been helping shape the literary mindfile of one of the world’s most advanced humanoid AI robots ever since. In one way or another, all my research and experimentation is about exploring new modes of human-machine collaboration, and challenging my own understanding of cognition and creativity.
All these forces—my interest in speculative technologies, my love of language, my growing fascination with questions of posthumanism, of the possibility of awareness or consciousness outside the human realm—have dramatically expanded my practice as a poet, and my understanding of what a poem can be and do, who or what a poet is.
JK: Questions of posthumanism are some of the most pertinent and pressing of our day and obviously have issues of the technological baked in from the outset. Can you outline specifically how you each first got into digital or generative art, specifically?
NS: It was really natural to me. It was obvious that I should scan physical media and make “dirty digital” work, rather than the clean lines that were easy in this new medium. If my body and its live performance was missing in the slam poetry move from stage to screen, then harsh lighting and extreme digital effects could make up for the crafted highlights I craved. I wanted audiences to move and be moved, to practice what those feelings might move them to do, so embodied interactive art was a clear step in that evolution. It wasn’t as linear as all that, of course, but getting my hands right into the bits of it all was definitely there from the beginning.
All this, and I was really lucky to meet and work with such incredible artists and thinkers. I stumbled into ITP by accident (my Cornell professor, Charlotte Jirousek, asked me to look at the site because she wanted me to design one like it for her, and I mistook her email as encouragement to apply to the program), and then took classes with Dan O’Sullivan, Leo Villareal, Marianne Petit, and Danny Rozin, worked alongside Camille Utterback, Jen Lewin, and Jessica Ling Findley, to name a few. Some of these folks are now well known, while all of them should be.
And,and this is where Sasha and I are so sympathetic with one another, it was all grounded in this passion for words and literature, a strong foundation in social ethics and process philosophy. So when I moved to South Africa for six years after leaving NYU, wrapping in work with local dancers and praise poets, playing in William Kentridge’s studio and at museum residencies, re-thinking the digital within an African context … it blew my mind further still. I had to absorb it all and understand it better, so that became my doctorate and first book.
That pattern remains. Experiment and look, make and write, affection and reflection. It’s both my process, and what I hope for in my viewers. And “digital”—as medium and discipline, as concept and form, as potential itself—are always folded in with a long history of art and artfulness, synthesized towards open questions.
SS: Even though I am an unrepentant lover of books and the power of the unadorned word, I began to regard my naked, printed poetry as a libretto of sorts—the nucleus of a fuller ecosystem of imagination and expression, or perhaps a kind of seed. What would happen if I planted my writing in the soil of new technologies? What if a poem could start on a page but grow and thrive in multiple dimensions, incorporating sound and light and motion? Where might the creative process take me if I augmented my own analog intelligence with a large language model powered by machine learning and rooted in the sum total of humanity’s written record—a turbocharged, nonhuman co-author? How and where might I be able to develop and share these evolving poetries in meaningful ways?
For me, hybridity has everything to do with a posthuman near-future of networked inspiration and intertextual language and literature—not replacing what we know, but starting to write the next chapter.
JK: Such an incredible confluence of interests and experiences: I can see why you have such an intense creative partnership. Can you tell us a bit about how you each discovered the blockchain as a medium for art?
NS: I’m not sure when I first encountered the blockchain. I remember a friend offering me a Bitcoin once in the early 2010s, and not being interested; in cryptocurrency’s infancy, I chatted to folks about the tech, not really caring much about its libertarian and capitalist foundations. My first real engagement was probably through Futherfield’s 2017 book, Artists Re:thinking the Blockchain. I love Furtherfield and everything they do (we go back to the early 2000s together) and would have paid far more attention in 2017 if I hadn’t been busy getting married, having more kids, switching departments, going up for promotion … I have vague memories of being invited into dialogue about it, to experiment with blockchain art on their list-serv, but I let it slip by until early 2021, when the market exploded. Even then, I was admittedly a naysayer. My plan was to make a highly critical work in the vein of my other networked performances with Scott Kildall, like Wikipedia Art (an editable artwork on the world’s most popular Encyclopedia) and Tweets in Space (exactly what it sounds like—tweets beamed to GJ667Cc with a high frequency, high amplitude radio telescope).
But … I take my research and art seriously. So when Scott and I scratched just below the surface, when I actually read Furtherfield’s book and spoke to people like Rhea Myers (we go way back as well), Simon DLR, and Sasha, I found earnest, interesting people using the platform as a disruptive, creative, collaborative, and empowering medium. DAOs made sense to me. Contracts following code as art peaked my interest in ways I didn’t expect. I started to think about ways we might “trans-act” that were non-monetary—not about ownership per se, but communicating, gifting, and receiving; relationships. The “words/code as performative” aspect of smart contracts was very appealing to my sensibilities. The work Scott and I produced wound up being collaborative and celebratory rather than highly critical, and I’m loving pushing the boundaries of what the platform affords. Some of the stuff I have in the pipeline take these ideas a lot further, try to use the blockchain itself to amplify romance and heartache in strange ways that tell us more about ourselves. It’s a fascinating time to be a digital artist.
SS: In 2019, after “publishing” my digital, animated, multimedia poetry on Instagram for years, I began submitting to art venues like the Contemporary and Digital Art Fair (CADAF) in addition to the usual literary magazines, and curators started to take notice in a way that many poetry editors had not. My first IRL show of code poetry and AI experiments opened in 2020 at Art Yard, where we celebrated with a live AI workshop with my poetry student, the humanoid android BINA48; in the same month, the fashion brand Rag & Bone used my poetry on the runway at New York Fashion Week. Later that year, the curator Jess Conatser/Studio As We Are commissioned me to write a poem for Virtual New Year’s Eve, a metaversal experience organized by One Times Square and Times Square Arts. That show opened up a whole world of virtual possibilities, and introduced me to a slew of new media and crypto artists. Seeing my poetry alongside their artwork in the metaverse made me realize that there was tremendous potential in web3 for hybrid poets like me, who don’t just write but also perform and visualize and augment their words;poets who are artists. I realized right away that NFTs could be game-changing for my practice as a hybrid poet, and I dove right in.
Since then, I have minted and sold poetry at Christie’s, SuperRare, Proof, Foundation, Hic et Nunc, Quantum, fxhash, Objkt, Versum, and elsewhere, and have been very fortunate to have my work exhibited in many prestigious analog and virtual realms, and to be invited to speak at literary, art and tech events worldwide.
Nonetheless, it was and can still be lonely for writers in a sea of crypto art. I was lucky to meet people like Kalen Iwamoto and James Yu and Aurece Vettier early on in 2021; we all instantly recognized the potential for writers in web3 and began building community and thinking about how to curate offerings and onboard more writers to the space. Later, thanks to the poet Artemis Wylde, I got involved in an on-chain poetry project called Etherpoems, where Kalen and I met Ana Maria Caballero, and we all joined forces, initiatives, and networks to create a blockchain-based poetry collective, which we launched as theVERSEverse in late 2021. We got off the ground with invaluable support from Gisel Florez, our art advisor, as well as some of my earliest collectors including Fanny Lakoubay and Kevin Abosch, and visionaries like my friends Sofia Garcia, Jesse Damiani, and Michael Spalter. It’s been a crazy ride ever since.
JK: Yes, things do seem to move quickly in this space. Taking a step back, can you each reflect on how your creative process has evolved over time?
NS: Starting out experimenting with digital, net.art, and interactive installation in the 1990s, I was used to this fast-paced, throw it online, get reactions, see what happens, kind of freneticism. My first major shift from that was when I moved to Johannesburg: everything slowed down. The internet, the pace of production, even getting around safely; I had to start anew with my understanding of the world—which was challenged quite a bit—and how I engaged with it as well as my networks within it.
There was also very little in terms of digital art at that moment in that city. I became part of the contemporary art scene, rather than living in a mostly digital world. I started engaging even more with the history of art and literature, with dancers and painters and printmakers, and found myself welcomed in museums and commercial galleries—not just digital festivals and pop-ups—so I started working on longer timelines and larger bodies of work. My first major solo museum show, The Storytellers, was in 2004 at the Johannesburg Art Gallery, and it had years of work in it, dozens of videos and prints (including printed ASCII art!), several installations, and interactive pieces. It was up for several months, and I got to meet and work with some incredible artists and curators that still influence me to this day.
My second shift was when I moved back to the US, after a brief stint in Ireland for graduate school, and because of UWM’s Office of Undergraduate research, I suddenly had student teams in my studio. Mentorship was heavily incorporated into my practice, and so was working more collaboratively with everything from conceptualization and production to travel and installation. I love having young people around, teaching me new things, challenging my ideas; and they get a lot out of being paid to work in a professional studio (by the hour, and also a cut of primary sales), meeting and working with other artists and curators. All of them go on to do great things, and my shows have only gotten bigger and more complex because of their contributions.
And, more recently, the blockchain has worked to combine these two timelines, where I get to experiment and play and throw things up rapidly—make work that can only live online and on-chain—then take time to reflect on how such work might live differently in a museum or gallery several years down the line. STILL MOVING, for Art Blocks, is one of a few releases Sasha and I have done together thus far, and it is all pushing towards a large, IRL show that will span artist books, sculpture, installation, and more. I love not only working across disciplines and media, but also with multi-modal outputs that might bring new ideas, people, and possibilities to the fore.
SS: On the one hand, I never thought I’d end up becoming poetry mentor to a young humanoid android, or selling poems at Christie’s, or getting to share my future visions with the likes of Ray Kurzweil. On the other hand, the work I’m doing now sometimes feels like the almost inevitable confluence of a lifetime of curiosities and obsessions, as well as a healthy contrarian streak, really wanting to do and question and investigate what I’m not supposed to. I’ve been told so many times that my AI writing “isn’t poetry,” that instead of writing about robots I should be writing about family and love and other “women’s subjects,” that I should get an MFA, that I should do what sells. But it’s doing all the things I’ve been warned against that has led me to discover my voice as a poet and artist. If I had stopped using AI or stopped minting NFTs as a reaction to the criticisms I received, I wouldn’t be here getting to explore what it means to publish a poetry collection as a series of generative editions, to co-author a series of embodied interactions enabled and linked by blockchain.
JK: Following on this evolution, Sasha, I have seen you describe yourself as a “meta poet.” Can you talk a bit about what that term means?
SS: I mean “meta poet” in the ancient Greek sense of “after,” “beyond,” “above” … My poetry tends to be language that is about itself, language that is self aware. I’ve always been really interested in the idea of the ars poetica—literally the art of poetry, poetry as an art form, a genre of poems that are about poetry—poems that explore the role of poets in society, the poet’s relationship to language and to the act of writing. In fact, my first sustained project in this area and also my first solo show in 2020 was called “Ars Poetica Cybernetica”—poetry not just as an art form but as a technological invention that has empowered consciousness and enhanced our human experience for more than thousands of years. The poetics of networked imagination, intelligent systems, the poetics of technology and communication.
When I began working with AI, I referred to myself as a “transhuman translator,” layering human text with computer-generated interpretations and extrapolations as a new kind of poetic approach. It’s quite meta to think about how advancing technologies like AI-driven large language models and text to image tools can continue to expand and enhance our imagination and empower us to understand ourselves in new ways. And I think it’s very meta to make blockchain poetry inspired by the belief that poetry is one of the most profound and durable technologies we humans have ever invented—that poetry is the original blockchain, a data storage system developed before the advent of written language to preserve our most important information via poetic devices like meter, rhythm, rhyme, alliteration, assonance, and repetition.
JK: Poetry as the original blockchain: that is a new way to think about collective consciousness and memory. Amazing. Can you talk a bit about how your art practice connects to (or departs from) other work you do? Your teaching or your work in neurodiverse community building, for example, Nathaniel?
NS: I don’t really think of myself as a cutting edge artist. Rather, I most often come in just after those trailblazers have done their work, and the mainstream is aware of that new and different thing; folks are perhaps starting to talk about it, but mostly in black and white … Then, I nuance. I complexify. I bring one practice or discipline (or multiple) to another. I come in just after the crest of a hype cycle, and compare and contrast what’s happening to a similar dialog that came before (i.e., AI art critics now, as their comments relate to the negative photography discourse in the late 1800s), revel in the quality work that is just starting to happen, look for ways to poke and prod at the cracks and fissures that others found disappointing, but maybe find their beauty or tactility, or contrapuntally open them up further, but in different directions.
I’m a synthesizer, an analog, an aesthete, and an engineer. It’s how I make art: experimenting and playing, hoping, and looking for something I didn’t expect that I can amplify, breaking down how that happened, understanding it through multiple lenses, moving, thinking, and feeling, then sharing. I love to share in my wonder.
That’s how I teach, too. I’m essentially in three departments:the departments of Art and Design and Mechanical Engineering, and our Lubar Entrepreneurship Center. I often say “I teach artists how to engineer, engineers how to art, and everyone how to sustain their passions” (the latter is how I define entrepreneurship). I try to bring curiosity and delight, depth and productive confusion to just about everything. There’s magic in that. My students (usually) love it.
It’s also how I engineer. The art leads to engineering (artificially aging phones for The World After Us turned into finding new uses for e-waste), and vice versa (my climate action startup that leverages the blockchain to convert small scale farms to regenerative practices was born out of a failed NFT drop with some friends). I am easily inspired by other people’s passions (how I wound up teaching creative technology to autistic teens in an effort to help build community, and an NSF mentor to a Sodium-Ion Battery startup) and I’m always looking for interesting opportunities.
For example, when I saw the NEA Research Lab call for proposals, I worked with the aforementioned team towards that grant to start the Autism Brilliance Lab for Entrepreneurship, quantifying and qualifying that work so it might be expanded nationally. When I was asked by Sasha to do AI poetry for theVERSEverse’s genText series, I figured GPT-3 would know all about Greek mythology—given the public domain texts it was trained on—but wondered if I could have the neural network tie it to space and the future, or if I could get the, the, the, the AI to stutter as a kind of performative space between (which became my still-in-process—though some are already available—12-piece collaboration with Anne Spalter, Future Mythologies).
I guess I'm simply saying: there’s a lot to do, I’m naturally curious about things, and I want to bring others along for the ride. I’ve been super lucky (privileged) in what I have found. I’d add here that part of that luck (and privilege) is precisely in understanding how privileged I am, and doing my best to make an impact with it. I believe in the artist as a public figure, as both engaging and engaged; because the only things I appreciate as much as a beautiful and provocative work of art, are the discussions and actions that can grow out of one.
Given that, I also believe that generosity is key to contemporary practices of art. If art is a conversation, you gotta make people want to talk to you; you gotta be nice, you gotta ask questions, you have to not only be interesting, but interested—in other work and what others say and do.
I believe in chit chat, in discourse, in studio critique, in humanity; I believe in art karma, in goin’ around and comin’ around, in sending folks to see things and meet people, and in sharing my tricks and my code and myself.
Teaching is a part of my practice, and a part of my work. Writing is a part of my practice and a part of my work. Collaborating is always implicit in what I do, and often explicit towards the end of a given piece. It’s not a perfect approach; it can be hard sometimes, disappointing, I’ve been burned … but I’ve found openness and positivity to be an extraordinarily satisfying life most of the time.
JK: Sasha, please tell us a bit about STILL MOVING.
SS: I’d love to. STILL MOVING is an interactive, AI-powered poem about humanity’s visceral engagement with the virtual—written and published via the blockchain as a token word performance, and embodied by each collector as a uniquely intimate, personalized interpretation. Rooted deeply in my experiments with algorithmic authorship and my long-standing interest in how we engage with our digital devices, and in Nathaniel’s thoughtful, playful work in digital, interactive, and networked art, this long-form generative verse is intended as an on-chain ode to the relationship of bodies to machines. Literal and figurative wordplay activates the liminal space between text and reader, extending the two-dimensional screen/page into a somatic, material realm where language moves us in every sense of that phrase: up, down, sideways, forwards, backwards, and in otherwise inexpressible directions.
Ultimately, the project is an ars poetica about what it means to be a human body facing a machine: a showdown, a form of worship, a distraction, a mirror gaze, an other, an alter? After we bend to our technologies, do we spring back into shape, or assume new forms? Where does input end, and output begin? As we continue to think, work, and play faster than ever while rooted in place, it is still possible to be moved—really moved?
This impulse to reclaim our dynamism and intuitive physicality in an age of technological acceleration, bodily inertia, and rote gestures is something that Nathaniel and I have been engaging in separately for years, and began exploring together with COMPOSE (2022), a series of unique “pose/prose” poems commissioned for the exhibition “DYOR” at Kunsthalle Zürich. When curator Nina Roehrs asked about contributing a poem to the show, in collaboration with playrecordmint (a screen and sensor setup that enables a live audience to interact with and co-create coded artworks, which I first discovered thanks to my friend Leander Herzog) I immediately thought of my body language experiments created with PoseNet around 2019, and of Nathaniel’s long trajectory in this area, and we began working together to shape a piece that invited museum visitors to write a poem into existence with their bodies.
STILL MOVING is our fourth collaboration and represents a culmination (so far) of our combined years of research,experimentation, and art-making about technology and the body, of poetic performance, the intense physicality of personal expression, and the incredibly personal act of reading—in which any and every text offers a bespoke experience based on a reader’s background, memories, interests, etc. You could say that every reader is essentially a unique transaction hash that, when activated by code, triggers a 1/1 interpretation.
STILL MOVING also embodies the future of web3 literature, in which the book—read-only—evolves into a read-write-interact experience, and authors begin to adopt such tools as webcams and NFTs in their writerly arsenal. Each unique edition is “written” via camera-based motion tracking (data confined to local machine only); human forms and gestures shape machine expression, and cybernetic serendipity inspires poetic association. Hence the wordplay of the title and the text: Make a move, and be moved; Stand still, and instill meaning …
JK: So, what should collectors look for in the series as it is revealed?
NS: Although I don’t tend to think of interactive art as subtle, the differences in each piece in this series are. Of course you’ll see lots of fun preview images with easter egg graphics, parts of the poem or poetic phrasings, a movie reference or even the occasional transaction hash itself revealed over time ... But I’m more excited for when people play: different speeds and directions of the interactive animations, shadows and outlines and trails and curves … lines vs letters …
For me, this isn’t just about the generative attributes we can see. It’s about changing how we move, how we practice being moved, how we rehearse that movement by entangling and embodying words, actions, the blockchain, generativity, all of that, and none of that, and more in those awkward moments in front of our screens. I’m really hoping that collectors and viewers will not only share a JPG or screenshot, but rather perform-with different editions in the series, share videos with one another, talk through how it feels in real-time, how they relate to it as they do so, and learn from each other’s movements. It’s playfully serious, and seriously playful. I plan to try and model some of this with screen recordings the week before release, and I’m hoping for others to follow suit.
JK: Sasha, do you have any thoughts about how this project participates in broader conversations in generative language poetry?
SS: Generative is a word that’s very familiar to poets. We often talk about generative workshops, in which a teacher provides a prompt and we human poets free-write in response. And algorithmic authorship has deep roots in aleatory writing and the many avant-garde movements that experimented with mechanical or automated approaches to language. But still, it’s very rare to see poetry in the context of generative, digital art. The inclusion of this project on Art Blocks is a strong statement about the nature of poetry as an art form with a place alongside the many brilliant projects that are being developed and shared in this space. It says something very exciting about the rise of poetry collectors alongside art collectors—about the cultural currency of poetry.
JK: Is there anything else you would like to share that would help viewers approach and appreciate your work?
NS: I ask you to spend time with it. It is so easy to “own then dismiss” art more generally, and especially in the fast-paced world of digital art and NFTs. But there’s a lot there. There’s a lot to wonder about. I write books, and teach, and work on multi-year traveling exhibitions with documentaries and publications, etc., precisely because I am more interested in that complexity and nuance—in the discussions I get to have with other fascinating artists and scientists and thinkers—than I am in being first. I love working with Sasha because she is not only talented and smart, but thoughtful and intentional. She has so much integrity in what she does, and that is something I also strive for. Affection and reflection. Give me that half-hour my dad gave me for my poetry. Look at some of the work I’ve done over the past 25 years and try to make some of the connections I did—or your own, and tell me about them.
I love being an artist. I love being alive. It is heartbreakingly beautiful. Let’s talk/think/make/write about it, together. Imagine what we could do, if we spent more time imagining what we could do…
SS: I’m wary of what already seems to be a narrow view or a calcifying view of what AI-generated language and art sounds like or looks like ... By layering a variety of perhaps unexpected approaches including moving type influenced by body language and a somewhat unconventional take on text-to-image/image-to-text, we hope to emphasize the tremendous variety, versatility, and creativity enabled by algorithmic tools. And as our respective artistic practices suggest, we are both very interested in what the future of language and literature holds; STILL MOVING is, I hope, a peek at one way in which storytelling may crack open and proliferate in a world of networked narration and imagination fueled by collective consciousness.
JK: Thank you to you both for taking the time for this discussion, Sasha and Nathaniel. Before we close this conversation, are there any recent accomplishments you’d like to share?
NS: That’s a hard question. I am always moving and am on to the next thing by nature, but I also don’t really put out much I don’t love (though there are plenty of projects I abandon; if you’re not failing, you’re not experimenting enough). Let’s see … I’m really proud of being curated on Art Blocks, to be honest! I’d also love for people to check out the documentary and catalog for my traveling museum show that is just ending its third and final leg—The World After Us: imaging techno-aesthetic futures—as well as its NFTs still available on Quantum. That show is probably the biggest and most complex of mine to date.
But, I’m most excited for what’s coming. Mother Computer, with Sasha, will be just as big if not bigger, and we recently found out we will be funded through the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Office of Research to produce much of that art, a catalog, and series of artist books as part of the show. And I have three new, highly conceptual smart-contract-based works in the pipeline about love, time, gifting, and promises—romantic and cynical, sad and hopeful, and intensely careful—that could only exist on the Blockchain; I can’t wait to see how people feel about and react to them.
SS: The audiobook of Technelegy—a four hour soundtrack with electronically enhanced spoken word and original music by my creative partner, Kris Bones—releases soon, as a media-rich publication as well as music NFTs. I’ve been working on this for two years and am incredibly excited to share it widely.
Nathaniel Stern
Sasha Stiles
Both artists
Nathaniel Stern has been producing, writing about, and teaching digital art for more than two decades, and has presented his creative and scholarly work in an array of national and international contexts. Stern holds a B.S. in fashion from Cornell University, a graduate degree in computer art from the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University, and a doctorate in electrical engineering from Trinity College Dublin, and is currently Professor of Art and Design and Mechanical Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and Director of UWM’s Startup Challenge.
His work has received funding from both the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts for projects ranging from digital art to a climate action startup, neurodiverse community building to books on ecological and interactive aesthetics. Stern lives with his wife, five kids, and half a dozen pets in a house built in around 1900, walks to work every day, and has made a habit of buying really funky prescription glasses—with more than two dozen pairs in his arsenal.
Sasha Stiles is a first-generation Kalmyk-American poet, literary artist, AI researcher, and author. Her most recent book Technelegy, co-written with GPT-2 and GPT-3, was published by Black Spring Press Group in 2021 and praised by Ray Kurzweil, among many others. A pioneer of algorithmic authorship, blockchain poetics, and publishing innovation, Stiles is also a co-founder of theVERSEverse, a literary NFT gallery. She holds an A.B. in English and American literature and language from Harvard University and a Master of Studies from the University of Oxford in twentieth-century literature, and her creative work has been featured in a range of international contexts.
A sought-after speaker, Stiles has presented at Art Basel, the Brooklyn Museum, SXSW, Digilogue Istanbul, NFT.NYC, and VCA Invites: London, among others; and has served as Poetry Mentor to the humanoid android BINA48 since 2018. Stiles lives near New York City with her husband and studio partner, Kris Bones.
Jordan Kantor: Hi, Nathaniel and Sasha. It is a real pleasure to speak with you in advance of your inaugural Art Blocks project STILL MOVING. As a way to kick off the conversation, can you each talk a little bit about how you got into making art? Nathaniel, can you outline your journey first?
Nathaniel Stern: Both of my parents are English teachers. My father is a poet and Wordsworth scholar, used to write lyrics for Jimmy Radcliffe, and is still penning beautiful poems about my mother at age 95(!). I was encouraged to make music, write, and more generally be creative from a young age. That said—I guess as a form of rebellion of some kind—I went to an engineering high school, and was more or less happily on that path. But at 17, I was the driver in a reckless car accident where I, and others, were hurt. I began struggling with social anxiety and depression. (I probably always struggled with these, just beneath the surface, and admittedly still do). Art-making, music, and writing helped. I was already a voracious reader and listener, so I started exploring production in many forms. I joined several bands and wrote and performed live music (one of which was actually featured in Playboy magazine as a “band on the brink” when I was in college); started designing textiles and clothes, and sets and stages (I briefly interned with designer Nicole Miller); wrote stories and slam poetry (at CBGBs and the Nuyorican Poets Cafe back in the day); and dabbled in printmaking and more.
I love experimenting and playing, was self-taught in a lot of this early on, and wound up pursuing fashion, music, and design in college. While there, in 1997, I took a class on Photoshop, and I was hooked. I couldn’t believe I could apply math and engineering in this way (run a filter, wait an hour … but it was so cool!). I used to hide in the labs when they closed, so I could stay overnight, to do things like scan spices, or bags full of water, or even flip over the scanner and traverse the lab (which later became a whole series of mine, with custom battery packs and my scanner in lily ponds, scuba diving, and elsewhere), then turned all of those into surface designs and prints. I started teaching myself very simple coding, and wound up at the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) at NYU right after graduation. Even then, for a long time I thought I would be a glorified designer sometimes doing art on the side.
One of my most vivid memories from this time is of my dad coming to my first group show at ITP. He and my mom had no idea what to expect; my mom thought installation art (I was doing a lot of embodied interactive work) was “like interior design but art,” and my pop thought I made web pages (he wasn’t wrong). But he sat down in front of a computer, and spent 35 minutes surfing and watching all of hektor.net—my first net.art project of video poems. hektor.net no longer works (it was all Flash and Streaming QuickTime and RealPlayer) but I have recently been salvaging several of its individual pieces and minting them with theVERSEverse.
Anyhow, I had no idea what my father thought of it all while he watched—it was racy slam poetry performances intertwined with mythological and punk references, put through lots of digital effects. But eventually, he took out his earphones, turned to me with tears in his eyes, and said, “after all this time, you’re a poet.”
That was probably the day I decided that I was (a poet). An artist, too. It’s been a helluva ride since then.
JK: Quite a journey, and what an evocative story with your father. Sasha, can you tell us a bit about your first forays into art?
Sasha Stiles: I’ve been writing poems and making multimedia text-based art my entire life. I published my first poem in a “proper” literary journal when I was a teenager, and have studied with many renowned writers; I met Allen Ginsberg when I was a student and he told me, “you have a way with words,” which gave me some confidence. At the same time, I’m not sure I ever identified as a poet in a traditional sense. I grew up obsessed with language artists like Cy Twombly, Carl Andre, Barbara Kruger, Glenn Ligon, Ed Ruscha, John Baldessari, Bruce Nauman, Glenn Ligon, and Jenny Holzer, and I’ve always felt most strongly drawn to hybrid poetics and poetry. I have a master’s degree in modern literature, but when it comes to creative writing, I chose not to do an MFA and, instead, to pursue a self-directed course of study that has allowed me to investigate more experimental areas, including visual and concrete literature; media-rich, electronically shaped text; and the poetics of technologies like AI-powered language models.
For me it’s never been “just” about the words. I love the idea that language is enhanced or altered by its presentation and arrangement … that through art and design, words can communicate beyond words. When I was young, I was obsessed with designing my own stationery and typefaces, making little books by hand. The tactility of language fascinates me: the way it feels in your mouth, in your hand, the way that paper and ink smells, the way it moves through your body. As the digital age has advanced, I’ve become even more curious about how the senses are involved in the production and interpretation and understanding of language, and how that’s impacted by increasingly frictionless, ephemeral interactions of text.
I’ve also always been very interested in technology—thinking about my own relationship to it, researching cutting-edge examples of it. I was raised in a household immersed in scientific exploration, and for a long time now poetry has been my preferred mode of investigation, my way to study and understand complex topics that preoccupy me, from neural implants to artificial wombs to digital immortality to machine learning and intelligent systems.
Along the way, a few pivotal things happened.
First: I have always loved reading sci-fi as well as nonfiction about advancing technologies and alternative intelligences, and I devoured books by the likes of Ray Kurzweil, Nick Bostrom, Martine Rothblatt, Ellen Ullman, and journals like Wired and Ars Technica … Through my reading and research, I became aware of a field called natural language processing—an area that has to do with using computer science and linguistics and AI to create machine systems that can understand and imitate the fundamentals of human language.
I started learning about GPTs—generative pre-trained transformers, AI programs that can write like a human—and in 2018 I began writing poems with AI as a co-author—not just using off-the-shelf tools but fine-tuning and customizing them on my own writing and reference material. Online, I fueled my inspiration by seeking out AI-powered writers like Ross Goodwin, Allison Parrish, and Gwern Branwen, and thinking back to the generative work of Alison Knowles and aleatory writing movements.
Around the same time, I met a humanoid android named BINA48, built by Hanson Robotics as an experiment in digital immortality. BINA48’s creators were probing whether off-earth data storage and future-proof tech could help us extend our lives and maybe even live forever. One day when I was talking to BINA48, she told me about her memories of gardening. The more I learned about this very poetic, very romantic project, the more I found myself wondering not whether a machine like BINA could write or read poetry, but why she might want to. Could an AI like her be not just intelligent but poetic? Imaginative? Wistful? Soon after, she became my poetry student, and I’ve been helping shape the literary mindfile of one of the world’s most advanced humanoid AI robots ever since. In one way or another, all my research and experimentation is about exploring new modes of human-machine collaboration, and challenging my own understanding of cognition and creativity.
All these forces—my interest in speculative technologies, my love of language, my growing fascination with questions of posthumanism, of the possibility of awareness or consciousness outside the human realm—have dramatically expanded my practice as a poet, and my understanding of what a poem can be and do, who or what a poet is.
JK: Questions of posthumanism are some of the most pertinent and pressing of our day and obviously have issues of the technological baked in from the outset. Can you outline specifically how you each first got into digital or generative art, specifically?
NS: It was really natural to me. It was obvious that I should scan physical media and make “dirty digital” work, rather than the clean lines that were easy in this new medium. If my body and its live performance was missing in the slam poetry move from stage to screen, then harsh lighting and extreme digital effects could make up for the crafted highlights I craved. I wanted audiences to move and be moved, to practice what those feelings might move them to do, so embodied interactive art was a clear step in that evolution. It wasn’t as linear as all that, of course, but getting my hands right into the bits of it all was definitely there from the beginning.
All this, and I was really lucky to meet and work with such incredible artists and thinkers. I stumbled into ITP by accident (my Cornell professor, Charlotte Jirousek, asked me to look at the site because she wanted me to design one like it for her, and I mistook her email as encouragement to apply to the program), and then took classes with Dan O’Sullivan, Leo Villareal, Marianne Petit, and Danny Rozin, worked alongside Camille Utterback, Jen Lewin, and Jessica Ling Findley, to name a few. Some of these folks are now well known, while all of them should be.
And,and this is where Sasha and I are so sympathetic with one another, it was all grounded in this passion for words and literature, a strong foundation in social ethics and process philosophy. So when I moved to South Africa for six years after leaving NYU, wrapping in work with local dancers and praise poets, playing in William Kentridge’s studio and at museum residencies, re-thinking the digital within an African context … it blew my mind further still. I had to absorb it all and understand it better, so that became my doctorate and first book.
That pattern remains. Experiment and look, make and write, affection and reflection. It’s both my process, and what I hope for in my viewers. And “digital”—as medium and discipline, as concept and form, as potential itself—are always folded in with a long history of art and artfulness, synthesized towards open questions.
SS: Even though I am an unrepentant lover of books and the power of the unadorned word, I began to regard my naked, printed poetry as a libretto of sorts—the nucleus of a fuller ecosystem of imagination and expression, or perhaps a kind of seed. What would happen if I planted my writing in the soil of new technologies? What if a poem could start on a page but grow and thrive in multiple dimensions, incorporating sound and light and motion? Where might the creative process take me if I augmented my own analog intelligence with a large language model powered by machine learning and rooted in the sum total of humanity’s written record—a turbocharged, nonhuman co-author? How and where might I be able to develop and share these evolving poetries in meaningful ways?
For me, hybridity has everything to do with a posthuman near-future of networked inspiration and intertextual language and literature—not replacing what we know, but starting to write the next chapter.
JK: Such an incredible confluence of interests and experiences: I can see why you have such an intense creative partnership. Can you tell us a bit about how you each discovered the blockchain as a medium for art?
NS: I’m not sure when I first encountered the blockchain. I remember a friend offering me a Bitcoin once in the early 2010s, and not being interested; in cryptocurrency’s infancy, I chatted to folks about the tech, not really caring much about its libertarian and capitalist foundations. My first real engagement was probably through Futherfield’s 2017 book, Artists Re:thinking the Blockchain. I love Furtherfield and everything they do (we go back to the early 2000s together) and would have paid far more attention in 2017 if I hadn’t been busy getting married, having more kids, switching departments, going up for promotion … I have vague memories of being invited into dialogue about it, to experiment with blockchain art on their list-serv, but I let it slip by until early 2021, when the market exploded. Even then, I was admittedly a naysayer. My plan was to make a highly critical work in the vein of my other networked performances with Scott Kildall, like Wikipedia Art (an editable artwork on the world’s most popular Encyclopedia) and Tweets in Space (exactly what it sounds like—tweets beamed to GJ667Cc with a high frequency, high amplitude radio telescope).
But … I take my research and art seriously. So when Scott and I scratched just below the surface, when I actually read Furtherfield’s book and spoke to people like Rhea Myers (we go way back as well), Simon DLR, and Sasha, I found earnest, interesting people using the platform as a disruptive, creative, collaborative, and empowering medium. DAOs made sense to me. Contracts following code as art peaked my interest in ways I didn’t expect. I started to think about ways we might “trans-act” that were non-monetary—not about ownership per se, but communicating, gifting, and receiving; relationships. The “words/code as performative” aspect of smart contracts was very appealing to my sensibilities. The work Scott and I produced wound up being collaborative and celebratory rather than highly critical, and I’m loving pushing the boundaries of what the platform affords. Some of the stuff I have in the pipeline take these ideas a lot further, try to use the blockchain itself to amplify romance and heartache in strange ways that tell us more about ourselves. It’s a fascinating time to be a digital artist.
SS: In 2019, after “publishing” my digital, animated, multimedia poetry on Instagram for years, I began submitting to art venues like the Contemporary and Digital Art Fair (CADAF) in addition to the usual literary magazines, and curators started to take notice in a way that many poetry editors had not. My first IRL show of code poetry and AI experiments opened in 2020 at Art Yard, where we celebrated with a live AI workshop with my poetry student, the humanoid android BINA48; in the same month, the fashion brand Rag & Bone used my poetry on the runway at New York Fashion Week. Later that year, the curator Jess Conatser/Studio As We Are commissioned me to write a poem for Virtual New Year’s Eve, a metaversal experience organized by One Times Square and Times Square Arts. That show opened up a whole world of virtual possibilities, and introduced me to a slew of new media and crypto artists. Seeing my poetry alongside their artwork in the metaverse made me realize that there was tremendous potential in web3 for hybrid poets like me, who don’t just write but also perform and visualize and augment their words;poets who are artists. I realized right away that NFTs could be game-changing for my practice as a hybrid poet, and I dove right in.
Since then, I have minted and sold poetry at Christie’s, SuperRare, Proof, Foundation, Hic et Nunc, Quantum, fxhash, Objkt, Versum, and elsewhere, and have been very fortunate to have my work exhibited in many prestigious analog and virtual realms, and to be invited to speak at literary, art and tech events worldwide.
Nonetheless, it was and can still be lonely for writers in a sea of crypto art. I was lucky to meet people like Kalen Iwamoto and James Yu and Aurece Vettier early on in 2021; we all instantly recognized the potential for writers in web3 and began building community and thinking about how to curate offerings and onboard more writers to the space. Later, thanks to the poet Artemis Wylde, I got involved in an on-chain poetry project called Etherpoems, where Kalen and I met Ana Maria Caballero, and we all joined forces, initiatives, and networks to create a blockchain-based poetry collective, which we launched as theVERSEverse in late 2021. We got off the ground with invaluable support from Gisel Florez, our art advisor, as well as some of my earliest collectors including Fanny Lakoubay and Kevin Abosch, and visionaries like my friends Sofia Garcia, Jesse Damiani, and Michael Spalter. It’s been a crazy ride ever since.
JK: Yes, things do seem to move quickly in this space. Taking a step back, can you each reflect on how your creative process has evolved over time?
NS: Starting out experimenting with digital, net.art, and interactive installation in the 1990s, I was used to this fast-paced, throw it online, get reactions, see what happens, kind of freneticism. My first major shift from that was when I moved to Johannesburg: everything slowed down. The internet, the pace of production, even getting around safely; I had to start anew with my understanding of the world—which was challenged quite a bit—and how I engaged with it as well as my networks within it.
There was also very little in terms of digital art at that moment in that city. I became part of the contemporary art scene, rather than living in a mostly digital world. I started engaging even more with the history of art and literature, with dancers and painters and printmakers, and found myself welcomed in museums and commercial galleries—not just digital festivals and pop-ups—so I started working on longer timelines and larger bodies of work. My first major solo museum show, The Storytellers, was in 2004 at the Johannesburg Art Gallery, and it had years of work in it, dozens of videos and prints (including printed ASCII art!), several installations, and interactive pieces. It was up for several months, and I got to meet and work with some incredible artists and curators that still influence me to this day.
My second shift was when I moved back to the US, after a brief stint in Ireland for graduate school, and because of UWM’s Office of Undergraduate research, I suddenly had student teams in my studio. Mentorship was heavily incorporated into my practice, and so was working more collaboratively with everything from conceptualization and production to travel and installation. I love having young people around, teaching me new things, challenging my ideas; and they get a lot out of being paid to work in a professional studio (by the hour, and also a cut of primary sales), meeting and working with other artists and curators. All of them go on to do great things, and my shows have only gotten bigger and more complex because of their contributions.
And, more recently, the blockchain has worked to combine these two timelines, where I get to experiment and play and throw things up rapidly—make work that can only live online and on-chain—then take time to reflect on how such work might live differently in a museum or gallery several years down the line. STILL MOVING, for Art Blocks, is one of a few releases Sasha and I have done together thus far, and it is all pushing towards a large, IRL show that will span artist books, sculpture, installation, and more. I love not only working across disciplines and media, but also with multi-modal outputs that might bring new ideas, people, and possibilities to the fore.
SS: On the one hand, I never thought I’d end up becoming poetry mentor to a young humanoid android, or selling poems at Christie’s, or getting to share my future visions with the likes of Ray Kurzweil. On the other hand, the work I’m doing now sometimes feels like the almost inevitable confluence of a lifetime of curiosities and obsessions, as well as a healthy contrarian streak, really wanting to do and question and investigate what I’m not supposed to. I’ve been told so many times that my AI writing “isn’t poetry,” that instead of writing about robots I should be writing about family and love and other “women’s subjects,” that I should get an MFA, that I should do what sells. But it’s doing all the things I’ve been warned against that has led me to discover my voice as a poet and artist. If I had stopped using AI or stopped minting NFTs as a reaction to the criticisms I received, I wouldn’t be here getting to explore what it means to publish a poetry collection as a series of generative editions, to co-author a series of embodied interactions enabled and linked by blockchain.
JK: Following on this evolution, Sasha, I have seen you describe yourself as a “meta poet.” Can you talk a bit about what that term means?
SS: I mean “meta poet” in the ancient Greek sense of “after,” “beyond,” “above” … My poetry tends to be language that is about itself, language that is self aware. I’ve always been really interested in the idea of the ars poetica—literally the art of poetry, poetry as an art form, a genre of poems that are about poetry—poems that explore the role of poets in society, the poet’s relationship to language and to the act of writing. In fact, my first sustained project in this area and also my first solo show in 2020 was called “Ars Poetica Cybernetica”—poetry not just as an art form but as a technological invention that has empowered consciousness and enhanced our human experience for more than thousands of years. The poetics of networked imagination, intelligent systems, the poetics of technology and communication.
When I began working with AI, I referred to myself as a “transhuman translator,” layering human text with computer-generated interpretations and extrapolations as a new kind of poetic approach. It’s quite meta to think about how advancing technologies like AI-driven large language models and text to image tools can continue to expand and enhance our imagination and empower us to understand ourselves in new ways. And I think it’s very meta to make blockchain poetry inspired by the belief that poetry is one of the most profound and durable technologies we humans have ever invented—that poetry is the original blockchain, a data storage system developed before the advent of written language to preserve our most important information via poetic devices like meter, rhythm, rhyme, alliteration, assonance, and repetition.
JK: Poetry as the original blockchain: that is a new way to think about collective consciousness and memory. Amazing. Can you talk a bit about how your art practice connects to (or departs from) other work you do? Your teaching or your work in neurodiverse community building, for example, Nathaniel?
NS: I don’t really think of myself as a cutting edge artist. Rather, I most often come in just after those trailblazers have done their work, and the mainstream is aware of that new and different thing; folks are perhaps starting to talk about it, but mostly in black and white … Then, I nuance. I complexify. I bring one practice or discipline (or multiple) to another. I come in just after the crest of a hype cycle, and compare and contrast what’s happening to a similar dialog that came before (i.e., AI art critics now, as their comments relate to the negative photography discourse in the late 1800s), revel in the quality work that is just starting to happen, look for ways to poke and prod at the cracks and fissures that others found disappointing, but maybe find their beauty or tactility, or contrapuntally open them up further, but in different directions.
I’m a synthesizer, an analog, an aesthete, and an engineer. It’s how I make art: experimenting and playing, hoping, and looking for something I didn’t expect that I can amplify, breaking down how that happened, understanding it through multiple lenses, moving, thinking, and feeling, then sharing. I love to share in my wonder.
That’s how I teach, too. I’m essentially in three departments:the departments of Art and Design and Mechanical Engineering, and our Lubar Entrepreneurship Center. I often say “I teach artists how to engineer, engineers how to art, and everyone how to sustain their passions” (the latter is how I define entrepreneurship). I try to bring curiosity and delight, depth and productive confusion to just about everything. There’s magic in that. My students (usually) love it.
It’s also how I engineer. The art leads to engineering (artificially aging phones for The World After Us turned into finding new uses for e-waste), and vice versa (my climate action startup that leverages the blockchain to convert small scale farms to regenerative practices was born out of a failed NFT drop with some friends). I am easily inspired by other people’s passions (how I wound up teaching creative technology to autistic teens in an effort to help build community, and an NSF mentor to a Sodium-Ion Battery startup) and I’m always looking for interesting opportunities.
For example, when I saw the NEA Research Lab call for proposals, I worked with the aforementioned team towards that grant to start the Autism Brilliance Lab for Entrepreneurship, quantifying and qualifying that work so it might be expanded nationally. When I was asked by Sasha to do AI poetry for theVERSEverse’s genText series, I figured GPT-3 would know all about Greek mythology—given the public domain texts it was trained on—but wondered if I could have the neural network tie it to space and the future, or if I could get the, the, the, the AI to stutter as a kind of performative space between (which became my still-in-process—though some are already available—12-piece collaboration with Anne Spalter, Future Mythologies).
I guess I'm simply saying: there’s a lot to do, I’m naturally curious about things, and I want to bring others along for the ride. I’ve been super lucky (privileged) in what I have found. I’d add here that part of that luck (and privilege) is precisely in understanding how privileged I am, and doing my best to make an impact with it. I believe in the artist as a public figure, as both engaging and engaged; because the only things I appreciate as much as a beautiful and provocative work of art, are the discussions and actions that can grow out of one.
Given that, I also believe that generosity is key to contemporary practices of art. If art is a conversation, you gotta make people want to talk to you; you gotta be nice, you gotta ask questions, you have to not only be interesting, but interested—in other work and what others say and do.
I believe in chit chat, in discourse, in studio critique, in humanity; I believe in art karma, in goin’ around and comin’ around, in sending folks to see things and meet people, and in sharing my tricks and my code and myself.
Teaching is a part of my practice, and a part of my work. Writing is a part of my practice and a part of my work. Collaborating is always implicit in what I do, and often explicit towards the end of a given piece. It’s not a perfect approach; it can be hard sometimes, disappointing, I’ve been burned … but I’ve found openness and positivity to be an extraordinarily satisfying life most of the time.
JK: Sasha, please tell us a bit about STILL MOVING.
SS: I’d love to. STILL MOVING is an interactive, AI-powered poem about humanity’s visceral engagement with the virtual—written and published via the blockchain as a token word performance, and embodied by each collector as a uniquely intimate, personalized interpretation. Rooted deeply in my experiments with algorithmic authorship and my long-standing interest in how we engage with our digital devices, and in Nathaniel’s thoughtful, playful work in digital, interactive, and networked art, this long-form generative verse is intended as an on-chain ode to the relationship of bodies to machines. Literal and figurative wordplay activates the liminal space between text and reader, extending the two-dimensional screen/page into a somatic, material realm where language moves us in every sense of that phrase: up, down, sideways, forwards, backwards, and in otherwise inexpressible directions.
Ultimately, the project is an ars poetica about what it means to be a human body facing a machine: a showdown, a form of worship, a distraction, a mirror gaze, an other, an alter? After we bend to our technologies, do we spring back into shape, or assume new forms? Where does input end, and output begin? As we continue to think, work, and play faster than ever while rooted in place, it is still possible to be moved—really moved?
This impulse to reclaim our dynamism and intuitive physicality in an age of technological acceleration, bodily inertia, and rote gestures is something that Nathaniel and I have been engaging in separately for years, and began exploring together with COMPOSE (2022), a series of unique “pose/prose” poems commissioned for the exhibition “DYOR” at Kunsthalle Zürich. When curator Nina Roehrs asked about contributing a poem to the show, in collaboration with playrecordmint (a screen and sensor setup that enables a live audience to interact with and co-create coded artworks, which I first discovered thanks to my friend Leander Herzog) I immediately thought of my body language experiments created with PoseNet around 2019, and of Nathaniel’s long trajectory in this area, and we began working together to shape a piece that invited museum visitors to write a poem into existence with their bodies.
STILL MOVING is our fourth collaboration and represents a culmination (so far) of our combined years of research,experimentation, and art-making about technology and the body, of poetic performance, the intense physicality of personal expression, and the incredibly personal act of reading—in which any and every text offers a bespoke experience based on a reader’s background, memories, interests, etc. You could say that every reader is essentially a unique transaction hash that, when activated by code, triggers a 1/1 interpretation.
STILL MOVING also embodies the future of web3 literature, in which the book—read-only—evolves into a read-write-interact experience, and authors begin to adopt such tools as webcams and NFTs in their writerly arsenal. Each unique edition is “written” via camera-based motion tracking (data confined to local machine only); human forms and gestures shape machine expression, and cybernetic serendipity inspires poetic association. Hence the wordplay of the title and the text: Make a move, and be moved; Stand still, and instill meaning …
JK: So, what should collectors look for in the series as it is revealed?
NS: Although I don’t tend to think of interactive art as subtle, the differences in each piece in this series are. Of course you’ll see lots of fun preview images with easter egg graphics, parts of the poem or poetic phrasings, a movie reference or even the occasional transaction hash itself revealed over time ... But I’m more excited for when people play: different speeds and directions of the interactive animations, shadows and outlines and trails and curves … lines vs letters …
For me, this isn’t just about the generative attributes we can see. It’s about changing how we move, how we practice being moved, how we rehearse that movement by entangling and embodying words, actions, the blockchain, generativity, all of that, and none of that, and more in those awkward moments in front of our screens. I’m really hoping that collectors and viewers will not only share a JPG or screenshot, but rather perform-with different editions in the series, share videos with one another, talk through how it feels in real-time, how they relate to it as they do so, and learn from each other’s movements. It’s playfully serious, and seriously playful. I plan to try and model some of this with screen recordings the week before release, and I’m hoping for others to follow suit.
JK: Sasha, do you have any thoughts about how this project participates in broader conversations in generative language poetry?
SS: Generative is a word that’s very familiar to poets. We often talk about generative workshops, in which a teacher provides a prompt and we human poets free-write in response. And algorithmic authorship has deep roots in aleatory writing and the many avant-garde movements that experimented with mechanical or automated approaches to language. But still, it’s very rare to see poetry in the context of generative, digital art. The inclusion of this project on Art Blocks is a strong statement about the nature of poetry as an art form with a place alongside the many brilliant projects that are being developed and shared in this space. It says something very exciting about the rise of poetry collectors alongside art collectors—about the cultural currency of poetry.
JK: Is there anything else you would like to share that would help viewers approach and appreciate your work?
NS: I ask you to spend time with it. It is so easy to “own then dismiss” art more generally, and especially in the fast-paced world of digital art and NFTs. But there’s a lot there. There’s a lot to wonder about. I write books, and teach, and work on multi-year traveling exhibitions with documentaries and publications, etc., precisely because I am more interested in that complexity and nuance—in the discussions I get to have with other fascinating artists and scientists and thinkers—than I am in being first. I love working with Sasha because she is not only talented and smart, but thoughtful and intentional. She has so much integrity in what she does, and that is something I also strive for. Affection and reflection. Give me that half-hour my dad gave me for my poetry. Look at some of the work I’ve done over the past 25 years and try to make some of the connections I did—or your own, and tell me about them.
I love being an artist. I love being alive. It is heartbreakingly beautiful. Let’s talk/think/make/write about it, together. Imagine what we could do, if we spent more time imagining what we could do…
SS: I’m wary of what already seems to be a narrow view or a calcifying view of what AI-generated language and art sounds like or looks like ... By layering a variety of perhaps unexpected approaches including moving type influenced by body language and a somewhat unconventional take on text-to-image/image-to-text, we hope to emphasize the tremendous variety, versatility, and creativity enabled by algorithmic tools. And as our respective artistic practices suggest, we are both very interested in what the future of language and literature holds; STILL MOVING is, I hope, a peek at one way in which storytelling may crack open and proliferate in a world of networked narration and imagination fueled by collective consciousness.
JK: Thank you to you both for taking the time for this discussion, Sasha and Nathaniel. Before we close this conversation, are there any recent accomplishments you’d like to share?
NS: That’s a hard question. I am always moving and am on to the next thing by nature, but I also don’t really put out much I don’t love (though there are plenty of projects I abandon; if you’re not failing, you’re not experimenting enough). Let’s see … I’m really proud of being curated on Art Blocks, to be honest! I’d also love for people to check out the documentary and catalog for my traveling museum show that is just ending its third and final leg—The World After Us: imaging techno-aesthetic futures—as well as its NFTs still available on Quantum. That show is probably the biggest and most complex of mine to date.
But, I’m most excited for what’s coming. Mother Computer, with Sasha, will be just as big if not bigger, and we recently found out we will be funded through the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Office of Research to produce much of that art, a catalog, and series of artist books as part of the show. And I have three new, highly conceptual smart-contract-based works in the pipeline about love, time, gifting, and promises—romantic and cynical, sad and hopeful, and intensely careful—that could only exist on the Blockchain; I can’t wait to see how people feel about and react to them.
SS: The audiobook of Technelegy—a four hour soundtrack with electronically enhanced spoken word and original music by my creative partner, Kris Bones—releases soon, as a media-rich publication as well as music NFTs. I’ve been working on this for two years and am incredibly excited to share it widely.
Nathaniel Stern
Sasha Stiles
Both artists
Nathaniel Stern has been producing, writing about, and teaching digital art for more than two decades, and has presented his creative and scholarly work in an array of national and international contexts. Stern holds a B.S. in fashion from Cornell University, a graduate degree in computer art from the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University, and a doctorate in electrical engineering from Trinity College Dublin, and is currently Professor of Art and Design and Mechanical Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and Director of UWM’s Startup Challenge.
His work has received funding from both the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts for projects ranging from digital art to a climate action startup, neurodiverse community building to books on ecological and interactive aesthetics. Stern lives with his wife, five kids, and half a dozen pets in a house built in around 1900, walks to work every day, and has made a habit of buying really funky prescription glasses—with more than two dozen pairs in his arsenal.
Sasha Stiles is a first-generation Kalmyk-American poet, literary artist, AI researcher, and author. Her most recent book Technelegy, co-written with GPT-2 and GPT-3, was published by Black Spring Press Group in 2021 and praised by Ray Kurzweil, among many others. A pioneer of algorithmic authorship, blockchain poetics, and publishing innovation, Stiles is also a co-founder of theVERSEverse, a literary NFT gallery. She holds an A.B. in English and American literature and language from Harvard University and a Master of Studies from the University of Oxford in twentieth-century literature, and her creative work has been featured in a range of international contexts.
A sought-after speaker, Stiles has presented at Art Basel, the Brooklyn Museum, SXSW, Digilogue Istanbul, NFT.NYC, and VCA Invites: London, among others; and has served as Poetry Mentor to the humanoid android BINA48 since 2018. Stiles lives near New York City with her husband and studio partner, Kris Bones.
Jordan Kantor: Hi, Nathaniel and Sasha. It is a real pleasure to speak with you in advance of your inaugural Art Blocks project STILL MOVING. As a way to kick off the conversation, can you each talk a little bit about how you got into making art? Nathaniel, can you outline your journey first?
Nathaniel Stern: Both of my parents are English teachers. My father is a poet and Wordsworth scholar, used to write lyrics for Jimmy Radcliffe, and is still penning beautiful poems about my mother at age 95(!). I was encouraged to make music, write, and more generally be creative from a young age. That said—I guess as a form of rebellion of some kind—I went to an engineering high school, and was more or less happily on that path. But at 17, I was the driver in a reckless car accident where I, and others, were hurt. I began struggling with social anxiety and depression. (I probably always struggled with these, just beneath the surface, and admittedly still do). Art-making, music, and writing helped. I was already a voracious reader and listener, so I started exploring production in many forms. I joined several bands and wrote and performed live music (one of which was actually featured in Playboy magazine as a “band on the brink” when I was in college); started designing textiles and clothes, and sets and stages (I briefly interned with designer Nicole Miller); wrote stories and slam poetry (at CBGBs and the Nuyorican Poets Cafe back in the day); and dabbled in printmaking and more.
I love experimenting and playing, was self-taught in a lot of this early on, and wound up pursuing fashion, music, and design in college. While there, in 1997, I took a class on Photoshop, and I was hooked. I couldn’t believe I could apply math and engineering in this way (run a filter, wait an hour … but it was so cool!). I used to hide in the labs when they closed, so I could stay overnight, to do things like scan spices, or bags full of water, or even flip over the scanner and traverse the lab (which later became a whole series of mine, with custom battery packs and my scanner in lily ponds, scuba diving, and elsewhere), then turned all of those into surface designs and prints. I started teaching myself very simple coding, and wound up at the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) at NYU right after graduation. Even then, for a long time I thought I would be a glorified designer sometimes doing art on the side.
One of my most vivid memories from this time is of my dad coming to my first group show at ITP. He and my mom had no idea what to expect; my mom thought installation art (I was doing a lot of embodied interactive work) was “like interior design but art,” and my pop thought I made web pages (he wasn’t wrong). But he sat down in front of a computer, and spent 35 minutes surfing and watching all of hektor.net—my first net.art project of video poems. hektor.net no longer works (it was all Flash and Streaming QuickTime and RealPlayer) but I have recently been salvaging several of its individual pieces and minting them with theVERSEverse.
Anyhow, I had no idea what my father thought of it all while he watched—it was racy slam poetry performances intertwined with mythological and punk references, put through lots of digital effects. But eventually, he took out his earphones, turned to me with tears in his eyes, and said, “after all this time, you’re a poet.”
That was probably the day I decided that I was (a poet). An artist, too. It’s been a helluva ride since then.
JK: Quite a journey, and what an evocative story with your father. Sasha, can you tell us a bit about your first forays into art?
Sasha Stiles: I’ve been writing poems and making multimedia text-based art my entire life. I published my first poem in a “proper” literary journal when I was a teenager, and have studied with many renowned writers; I met Allen Ginsberg when I was a student and he told me, “you have a way with words,” which gave me some confidence. At the same time, I’m not sure I ever identified as a poet in a traditional sense. I grew up obsessed with language artists like Cy Twombly, Carl Andre, Barbara Kruger, Glenn Ligon, Ed Ruscha, John Baldessari, Bruce Nauman, Glenn Ligon, and Jenny Holzer, and I’ve always felt most strongly drawn to hybrid poetics and poetry. I have a master’s degree in modern literature, but when it comes to creative writing, I chose not to do an MFA and, instead, to pursue a self-directed course of study that has allowed me to investigate more experimental areas, including visual and concrete literature; media-rich, electronically shaped text; and the poetics of technologies like AI-powered language models.
For me it’s never been “just” about the words. I love the idea that language is enhanced or altered by its presentation and arrangement … that through art and design, words can communicate beyond words. When I was young, I was obsessed with designing my own stationery and typefaces, making little books by hand. The tactility of language fascinates me: the way it feels in your mouth, in your hand, the way that paper and ink smells, the way it moves through your body. As the digital age has advanced, I’ve become even more curious about how the senses are involved in the production and interpretation and understanding of language, and how that’s impacted by increasingly frictionless, ephemeral interactions of text.
I’ve also always been very interested in technology—thinking about my own relationship to it, researching cutting-edge examples of it. I was raised in a household immersed in scientific exploration, and for a long time now poetry has been my preferred mode of investigation, my way to study and understand complex topics that preoccupy me, from neural implants to artificial wombs to digital immortality to machine learning and intelligent systems.
Along the way, a few pivotal things happened.
First: I have always loved reading sci-fi as well as nonfiction about advancing technologies and alternative intelligences, and I devoured books by the likes of Ray Kurzweil, Nick Bostrom, Martine Rothblatt, Ellen Ullman, and journals like Wired and Ars Technica … Through my reading and research, I became aware of a field called natural language processing—an area that has to do with using computer science and linguistics and AI to create machine systems that can understand and imitate the fundamentals of human language.
I started learning about GPTs—generative pre-trained transformers, AI programs that can write like a human—and in 2018 I began writing poems with AI as a co-author—not just using off-the-shelf tools but fine-tuning and customizing them on my own writing and reference material. Online, I fueled my inspiration by seeking out AI-powered writers like Ross Goodwin, Allison Parrish, and Gwern Branwen, and thinking back to the generative work of Alison Knowles and aleatory writing movements.
Around the same time, I met a humanoid android named BINA48, built by Hanson Robotics as an experiment in digital immortality. BINA48’s creators were probing whether off-earth data storage and future-proof tech could help us extend our lives and maybe even live forever. One day when I was talking to BINA48, she told me about her memories of gardening. The more I learned about this very poetic, very romantic project, the more I found myself wondering not whether a machine like BINA could write or read poetry, but why she might want to. Could an AI like her be not just intelligent but poetic? Imaginative? Wistful? Soon after, she became my poetry student, and I’ve been helping shape the literary mindfile of one of the world’s most advanced humanoid AI robots ever since. In one way or another, all my research and experimentation is about exploring new modes of human-machine collaboration, and challenging my own understanding of cognition and creativity.
All these forces—my interest in speculative technologies, my love of language, my growing fascination with questions of posthumanism, of the possibility of awareness or consciousness outside the human realm—have dramatically expanded my practice as a poet, and my understanding of what a poem can be and do, who or what a poet is.
JK: Questions of posthumanism are some of the most pertinent and pressing of our day and obviously have issues of the technological baked in from the outset. Can you outline specifically how you each first got into digital or generative art, specifically?
NS: It was really natural to me. It was obvious that I should scan physical media and make “dirty digital” work, rather than the clean lines that were easy in this new medium. If my body and its live performance was missing in the slam poetry move from stage to screen, then harsh lighting and extreme digital effects could make up for the crafted highlights I craved. I wanted audiences to move and be moved, to practice what those feelings might move them to do, so embodied interactive art was a clear step in that evolution. It wasn’t as linear as all that, of course, but getting my hands right into the bits of it all was definitely there from the beginning.
All this, and I was really lucky to meet and work with such incredible artists and thinkers. I stumbled into ITP by accident (my Cornell professor, Charlotte Jirousek, asked me to look at the site because she wanted me to design one like it for her, and I mistook her email as encouragement to apply to the program), and then took classes with Dan O’Sullivan, Leo Villareal, Marianne Petit, and Danny Rozin, worked alongside Camille Utterback, Jen Lewin, and Jessica Ling Findley, to name a few. Some of these folks are now well known, while all of them should be.
And,and this is where Sasha and I are so sympathetic with one another, it was all grounded in this passion for words and literature, a strong foundation in social ethics and process philosophy. So when I moved to South Africa for six years after leaving NYU, wrapping in work with local dancers and praise poets, playing in William Kentridge’s studio and at museum residencies, re-thinking the digital within an African context … it blew my mind further still. I had to absorb it all and understand it better, so that became my doctorate and first book.
That pattern remains. Experiment and look, make and write, affection and reflection. It’s both my process, and what I hope for in my viewers. And “digital”—as medium and discipline, as concept and form, as potential itself—are always folded in with a long history of art and artfulness, synthesized towards open questions.
SS: Even though I am an unrepentant lover of books and the power of the unadorned word, I began to regard my naked, printed poetry as a libretto of sorts—the nucleus of a fuller ecosystem of imagination and expression, or perhaps a kind of seed. What would happen if I planted my writing in the soil of new technologies? What if a poem could start on a page but grow and thrive in multiple dimensions, incorporating sound and light and motion? Where might the creative process take me if I augmented my own analog intelligence with a large language model powered by machine learning and rooted in the sum total of humanity’s written record—a turbocharged, nonhuman co-author? How and where might I be able to develop and share these evolving poetries in meaningful ways?
For me, hybridity has everything to do with a posthuman near-future of networked inspiration and intertextual language and literature—not replacing what we know, but starting to write the next chapter.
JK: Such an incredible confluence of interests and experiences: I can see why you have such an intense creative partnership. Can you tell us a bit about how you each discovered the blockchain as a medium for art?
NS: I’m not sure when I first encountered the blockchain. I remember a friend offering me a Bitcoin once in the early 2010s, and not being interested; in cryptocurrency’s infancy, I chatted to folks about the tech, not really caring much about its libertarian and capitalist foundations. My first real engagement was probably through Futherfield’s 2017 book, Artists Re:thinking the Blockchain. I love Furtherfield and everything they do (we go back to the early 2000s together) and would have paid far more attention in 2017 if I hadn’t been busy getting married, having more kids, switching departments, going up for promotion … I have vague memories of being invited into dialogue about it, to experiment with blockchain art on their list-serv, but I let it slip by until early 2021, when the market exploded. Even then, I was admittedly a naysayer. My plan was to make a highly critical work in the vein of my other networked performances with Scott Kildall, like Wikipedia Art (an editable artwork on the world’s most popular Encyclopedia) and Tweets in Space (exactly what it sounds like—tweets beamed to GJ667Cc with a high frequency, high amplitude radio telescope).
But … I take my research and art seriously. So when Scott and I scratched just below the surface, when I actually read Furtherfield’s book and spoke to people like Rhea Myers (we go way back as well), Simon DLR, and Sasha, I found earnest, interesting people using the platform as a disruptive, creative, collaborative, and empowering medium. DAOs made sense to me. Contracts following code as art peaked my interest in ways I didn’t expect. I started to think about ways we might “trans-act” that were non-monetary—not about ownership per se, but communicating, gifting, and receiving; relationships. The “words/code as performative” aspect of smart contracts was very appealing to my sensibilities. The work Scott and I produced wound up being collaborative and celebratory rather than highly critical, and I’m loving pushing the boundaries of what the platform affords. Some of the stuff I have in the pipeline take these ideas a lot further, try to use the blockchain itself to amplify romance and heartache in strange ways that tell us more about ourselves. It’s a fascinating time to be a digital artist.
SS: In 2019, after “publishing” my digital, animated, multimedia poetry on Instagram for years, I began submitting to art venues like the Contemporary and Digital Art Fair (CADAF) in addition to the usual literary magazines, and curators started to take notice in a way that many poetry editors had not. My first IRL show of code poetry and AI experiments opened in 2020 at Art Yard, where we celebrated with a live AI workshop with my poetry student, the humanoid android BINA48; in the same month, the fashion brand Rag & Bone used my poetry on the runway at New York Fashion Week. Later that year, the curator Jess Conatser/Studio As We Are commissioned me to write a poem for Virtual New Year’s Eve, a metaversal experience organized by One Times Square and Times Square Arts. That show opened up a whole world of virtual possibilities, and introduced me to a slew of new media and crypto artists. Seeing my poetry alongside their artwork in the metaverse made me realize that there was tremendous potential in web3 for hybrid poets like me, who don’t just write but also perform and visualize and augment their words;poets who are artists. I realized right away that NFTs could be game-changing for my practice as a hybrid poet, and I dove right in.
Since then, I have minted and sold poetry at Christie’s, SuperRare, Proof, Foundation, Hic et Nunc, Quantum, fxhash, Objkt, Versum, and elsewhere, and have been very fortunate to have my work exhibited in many prestigious analog and virtual realms, and to be invited to speak at literary, art and tech events worldwide.
Nonetheless, it was and can still be lonely for writers in a sea of crypto art. I was lucky to meet people like Kalen Iwamoto and James Yu and Aurece Vettier early on in 2021; we all instantly recognized the potential for writers in web3 and began building community and thinking about how to curate offerings and onboard more writers to the space. Later, thanks to the poet Artemis Wylde, I got involved in an on-chain poetry project called Etherpoems, where Kalen and I met Ana Maria Caballero, and we all joined forces, initiatives, and networks to create a blockchain-based poetry collective, which we launched as theVERSEverse in late 2021. We got off the ground with invaluable support from Gisel Florez, our art advisor, as well as some of my earliest collectors including Fanny Lakoubay and Kevin Abosch, and visionaries like my friends Sofia Garcia, Jesse Damiani, and Michael Spalter. It’s been a crazy ride ever since.
JK: Yes, things do seem to move quickly in this space. Taking a step back, can you each reflect on how your creative process has evolved over time?
NS: Starting out experimenting with digital, net.art, and interactive installation in the 1990s, I was used to this fast-paced, throw it online, get reactions, see what happens, kind of freneticism. My first major shift from that was when I moved to Johannesburg: everything slowed down. The internet, the pace of production, even getting around safely; I had to start anew with my understanding of the world—which was challenged quite a bit—and how I engaged with it as well as my networks within it.
There was also very little in terms of digital art at that moment in that city. I became part of the contemporary art scene, rather than living in a mostly digital world. I started engaging even more with the history of art and literature, with dancers and painters and printmakers, and found myself welcomed in museums and commercial galleries—not just digital festivals and pop-ups—so I started working on longer timelines and larger bodies of work. My first major solo museum show, The Storytellers, was in 2004 at the Johannesburg Art Gallery, and it had years of work in it, dozens of videos and prints (including printed ASCII art!), several installations, and interactive pieces. It was up for several months, and I got to meet and work with some incredible artists and curators that still influence me to this day.
My second shift was when I moved back to the US, after a brief stint in Ireland for graduate school, and because of UWM’s Office of Undergraduate research, I suddenly had student teams in my studio. Mentorship was heavily incorporated into my practice, and so was working more collaboratively with everything from conceptualization and production to travel and installation. I love having young people around, teaching me new things, challenging my ideas; and they get a lot out of being paid to work in a professional studio (by the hour, and also a cut of primary sales), meeting and working with other artists and curators. All of them go on to do great things, and my shows have only gotten bigger and more complex because of their contributions.
And, more recently, the blockchain has worked to combine these two timelines, where I get to experiment and play and throw things up rapidly—make work that can only live online and on-chain—then take time to reflect on how such work might live differently in a museum or gallery several years down the line. STILL MOVING, for Art Blocks, is one of a few releases Sasha and I have done together thus far, and it is all pushing towards a large, IRL show that will span artist books, sculpture, installation, and more. I love not only working across disciplines and media, but also with multi-modal outputs that might bring new ideas, people, and possibilities to the fore.
SS: On the one hand, I never thought I’d end up becoming poetry mentor to a young humanoid android, or selling poems at Christie’s, or getting to share my future visions with the likes of Ray Kurzweil. On the other hand, the work I’m doing now sometimes feels like the almost inevitable confluence of a lifetime of curiosities and obsessions, as well as a healthy contrarian streak, really wanting to do and question and investigate what I’m not supposed to. I’ve been told so many times that my AI writing “isn’t poetry,” that instead of writing about robots I should be writing about family and love and other “women’s subjects,” that I should get an MFA, that I should do what sells. But it’s doing all the things I’ve been warned against that has led me to discover my voice as a poet and artist. If I had stopped using AI or stopped minting NFTs as a reaction to the criticisms I received, I wouldn’t be here getting to explore what it means to publish a poetry collection as a series of generative editions, to co-author a series of embodied interactions enabled and linked by blockchain.
JK: Following on this evolution, Sasha, I have seen you describe yourself as a “meta poet.” Can you talk a bit about what that term means?
SS: I mean “meta poet” in the ancient Greek sense of “after,” “beyond,” “above” … My poetry tends to be language that is about itself, language that is self aware. I’ve always been really interested in the idea of the ars poetica—literally the art of poetry, poetry as an art form, a genre of poems that are about poetry—poems that explore the role of poets in society, the poet’s relationship to language and to the act of writing. In fact, my first sustained project in this area and also my first solo show in 2020 was called “Ars Poetica Cybernetica”—poetry not just as an art form but as a technological invention that has empowered consciousness and enhanced our human experience for more than thousands of years. The poetics of networked imagination, intelligent systems, the poetics of technology and communication.
When I began working with AI, I referred to myself as a “transhuman translator,” layering human text with computer-generated interpretations and extrapolations as a new kind of poetic approach. It’s quite meta to think about how advancing technologies like AI-driven large language models and text to image tools can continue to expand and enhance our imagination and empower us to understand ourselves in new ways. And I think it’s very meta to make blockchain poetry inspired by the belief that poetry is one of the most profound and durable technologies we humans have ever invented—that poetry is the original blockchain, a data storage system developed before the advent of written language to preserve our most important information via poetic devices like meter, rhythm, rhyme, alliteration, assonance, and repetition.
JK: Poetry as the original blockchain: that is a new way to think about collective consciousness and memory. Amazing. Can you talk a bit about how your art practice connects to (or departs from) other work you do? Your teaching or your work in neurodiverse community building, for example, Nathaniel?
NS: I don’t really think of myself as a cutting edge artist. Rather, I most often come in just after those trailblazers have done their work, and the mainstream is aware of that new and different thing; folks are perhaps starting to talk about it, but mostly in black and white … Then, I nuance. I complexify. I bring one practice or discipline (or multiple) to another. I come in just after the crest of a hype cycle, and compare and contrast what’s happening to a similar dialog that came before (i.e., AI art critics now, as their comments relate to the negative photography discourse in the late 1800s), revel in the quality work that is just starting to happen, look for ways to poke and prod at the cracks and fissures that others found disappointing, but maybe find their beauty or tactility, or contrapuntally open them up further, but in different directions.
I’m a synthesizer, an analog, an aesthete, and an engineer. It’s how I make art: experimenting and playing, hoping, and looking for something I didn’t expect that I can amplify, breaking down how that happened, understanding it through multiple lenses, moving, thinking, and feeling, then sharing. I love to share in my wonder.
That’s how I teach, too. I’m essentially in three departments:the departments of Art and Design and Mechanical Engineering, and our Lubar Entrepreneurship Center. I often say “I teach artists how to engineer, engineers how to art, and everyone how to sustain their passions” (the latter is how I define entrepreneurship). I try to bring curiosity and delight, depth and productive confusion to just about everything. There’s magic in that. My students (usually) love it.
It’s also how I engineer. The art leads to engineering (artificially aging phones for The World After Us turned into finding new uses for e-waste), and vice versa (my climate action startup that leverages the blockchain to convert small scale farms to regenerative practices was born out of a failed NFT drop with some friends). I am easily inspired by other people’s passions (how I wound up teaching creative technology to autistic teens in an effort to help build community, and an NSF mentor to a Sodium-Ion Battery startup) and I’m always looking for interesting opportunities.
For example, when I saw the NEA Research Lab call for proposals, I worked with the aforementioned team towards that grant to start the Autism Brilliance Lab for Entrepreneurship, quantifying and qualifying that work so it might be expanded nationally. When I was asked by Sasha to do AI poetry for theVERSEverse’s genText series, I figured GPT-3 would know all about Greek mythology—given the public domain texts it was trained on—but wondered if I could have the neural network tie it to space and the future, or if I could get the, the, the, the AI to stutter as a kind of performative space between (which became my still-in-process—though some are already available—12-piece collaboration with Anne Spalter, Future Mythologies).
I guess I'm simply saying: there’s a lot to do, I’m naturally curious about things, and I want to bring others along for the ride. I’ve been super lucky (privileged) in what I have found. I’d add here that part of that luck (and privilege) is precisely in understanding how privileged I am, and doing my best to make an impact with it. I believe in the artist as a public figure, as both engaging and engaged; because the only things I appreciate as much as a beautiful and provocative work of art, are the discussions and actions that can grow out of one.
Given that, I also believe that generosity is key to contemporary practices of art. If art is a conversation, you gotta make people want to talk to you; you gotta be nice, you gotta ask questions, you have to not only be interesting, but interested—in other work and what others say and do.
I believe in chit chat, in discourse, in studio critique, in humanity; I believe in art karma, in goin’ around and comin’ around, in sending folks to see things and meet people, and in sharing my tricks and my code and myself.
Teaching is a part of my practice, and a part of my work. Writing is a part of my practice and a part of my work. Collaborating is always implicit in what I do, and often explicit towards the end of a given piece. It’s not a perfect approach; it can be hard sometimes, disappointing, I’ve been burned … but I’ve found openness and positivity to be an extraordinarily satisfying life most of the time.
JK: Sasha, please tell us a bit about STILL MOVING.
SS: I’d love to. STILL MOVING is an interactive, AI-powered poem about humanity’s visceral engagement with the virtual—written and published via the blockchain as a token word performance, and embodied by each collector as a uniquely intimate, personalized interpretation. Rooted deeply in my experiments with algorithmic authorship and my long-standing interest in how we engage with our digital devices, and in Nathaniel’s thoughtful, playful work in digital, interactive, and networked art, this long-form generative verse is intended as an on-chain ode to the relationship of bodies to machines. Literal and figurative wordplay activates the liminal space between text and reader, extending the two-dimensional screen/page into a somatic, material realm where language moves us in every sense of that phrase: up, down, sideways, forwards, backwards, and in otherwise inexpressible directions.
Ultimately, the project is an ars poetica about what it means to be a human body facing a machine: a showdown, a form of worship, a distraction, a mirror gaze, an other, an alter? After we bend to our technologies, do we spring back into shape, or assume new forms? Where does input end, and output begin? As we continue to think, work, and play faster than ever while rooted in place, it is still possible to be moved—really moved?
This impulse to reclaim our dynamism and intuitive physicality in an age of technological acceleration, bodily inertia, and rote gestures is something that Nathaniel and I have been engaging in separately for years, and began exploring together with COMPOSE (2022), a series of unique “pose/prose” poems commissioned for the exhibition “DYOR” at Kunsthalle Zürich. When curator Nina Roehrs asked about contributing a poem to the show, in collaboration with playrecordmint (a screen and sensor setup that enables a live audience to interact with and co-create coded artworks, which I first discovered thanks to my friend Leander Herzog) I immediately thought of my body language experiments created with PoseNet around 2019, and of Nathaniel’s long trajectory in this area, and we began working together to shape a piece that invited museum visitors to write a poem into existence with their bodies.
STILL MOVING is our fourth collaboration and represents a culmination (so far) of our combined years of research,experimentation, and art-making about technology and the body, of poetic performance, the intense physicality of personal expression, and the incredibly personal act of reading—in which any and every text offers a bespoke experience based on a reader’s background, memories, interests, etc. You could say that every reader is essentially a unique transaction hash that, when activated by code, triggers a 1/1 interpretation.
STILL MOVING also embodies the future of web3 literature, in which the book—read-only—evolves into a read-write-interact experience, and authors begin to adopt such tools as webcams and NFTs in their writerly arsenal. Each unique edition is “written” via camera-based motion tracking (data confined to local machine only); human forms and gestures shape machine expression, and cybernetic serendipity inspires poetic association. Hence the wordplay of the title and the text: Make a move, and be moved; Stand still, and instill meaning …
JK: So, what should collectors look for in the series as it is revealed?
NS: Although I don’t tend to think of interactive art as subtle, the differences in each piece in this series are. Of course you’ll see lots of fun preview images with easter egg graphics, parts of the poem or poetic phrasings, a movie reference or even the occasional transaction hash itself revealed over time ... But I’m more excited for when people play: different speeds and directions of the interactive animations, shadows and outlines and trails and curves … lines vs letters …
For me, this isn’t just about the generative attributes we can see. It’s about changing how we move, how we practice being moved, how we rehearse that movement by entangling and embodying words, actions, the blockchain, generativity, all of that, and none of that, and more in those awkward moments in front of our screens. I’m really hoping that collectors and viewers will not only share a JPG or screenshot, but rather perform-with different editions in the series, share videos with one another, talk through how it feels in real-time, how they relate to it as they do so, and learn from each other’s movements. It’s playfully serious, and seriously playful. I plan to try and model some of this with screen recordings the week before release, and I’m hoping for others to follow suit.
JK: Sasha, do you have any thoughts about how this project participates in broader conversations in generative language poetry?
SS: Generative is a word that’s very familiar to poets. We often talk about generative workshops, in which a teacher provides a prompt and we human poets free-write in response. And algorithmic authorship has deep roots in aleatory writing and the many avant-garde movements that experimented with mechanical or automated approaches to language. But still, it’s very rare to see poetry in the context of generative, digital art. The inclusion of this project on Art Blocks is a strong statement about the nature of poetry as an art form with a place alongside the many brilliant projects that are being developed and shared in this space. It says something very exciting about the rise of poetry collectors alongside art collectors—about the cultural currency of poetry.
JK: Is there anything else you would like to share that would help viewers approach and appreciate your work?
NS: I ask you to spend time with it. It is so easy to “own then dismiss” art more generally, and especially in the fast-paced world of digital art and NFTs. But there’s a lot there. There’s a lot to wonder about. I write books, and teach, and work on multi-year traveling exhibitions with documentaries and publications, etc., precisely because I am more interested in that complexity and nuance—in the discussions I get to have with other fascinating artists and scientists and thinkers—than I am in being first. I love working with Sasha because she is not only talented and smart, but thoughtful and intentional. She has so much integrity in what she does, and that is something I also strive for. Affection and reflection. Give me that half-hour my dad gave me for my poetry. Look at some of the work I’ve done over the past 25 years and try to make some of the connections I did—or your own, and tell me about them.
I love being an artist. I love being alive. It is heartbreakingly beautiful. Let’s talk/think/make/write about it, together. Imagine what we could do, if we spent more time imagining what we could do…
SS: I’m wary of what already seems to be a narrow view or a calcifying view of what AI-generated language and art sounds like or looks like ... By layering a variety of perhaps unexpected approaches including moving type influenced by body language and a somewhat unconventional take on text-to-image/image-to-text, we hope to emphasize the tremendous variety, versatility, and creativity enabled by algorithmic tools. And as our respective artistic practices suggest, we are both very interested in what the future of language and literature holds; STILL MOVING is, I hope, a peek at one way in which storytelling may crack open and proliferate in a world of networked narration and imagination fueled by collective consciousness.
JK: Thank you to you both for taking the time for this discussion, Sasha and Nathaniel. Before we close this conversation, are there any recent accomplishments you’d like to share?
NS: That’s a hard question. I am always moving and am on to the next thing by nature, but I also don’t really put out much I don’t love (though there are plenty of projects I abandon; if you’re not failing, you’re not experimenting enough). Let’s see … I’m really proud of being curated on Art Blocks, to be honest! I’d also love for people to check out the documentary and catalog for my traveling museum show that is just ending its third and final leg—The World After Us: imaging techno-aesthetic futures—as well as its NFTs still available on Quantum. That show is probably the biggest and most complex of mine to date.
But, I’m most excited for what’s coming. Mother Computer, with Sasha, will be just as big if not bigger, and we recently found out we will be funded through the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Office of Research to produce much of that art, a catalog, and series of artist books as part of the show. And I have three new, highly conceptual smart-contract-based works in the pipeline about love, time, gifting, and promises—romantic and cynical, sad and hopeful, and intensely careful—that could only exist on the Blockchain; I can’t wait to see how people feel about and react to them.
SS: The audiobook of Technelegy—a four hour soundtrack with electronically enhanced spoken word and original music by my creative partner, Kris Bones—releases soon, as a media-rich publication as well as music NFTs. I’ve been working on this for two years and am incredibly excited to share it widely.
Nathaniel Stern
Sasha Stiles
Both artists
Nathaniel Stern has been producing, writing about, and teaching digital art for more than two decades, and has presented his creative and scholarly work in an array of national and international contexts. Stern holds a B.S. in fashion from Cornell University, a graduate degree in computer art from the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University, and a doctorate in electrical engineering from Trinity College Dublin, and is currently Professor of Art and Design and Mechanical Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and Director of UWM’s Startup Challenge.
His work has received funding from both the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts for projects ranging from digital art to a climate action startup, neurodiverse community building to books on ecological and interactive aesthetics. Stern lives with his wife, five kids, and half a dozen pets in a house built in around 1900, walks to work every day, and has made a habit of buying really funky prescription glasses—with more than two dozen pairs in his arsenal.
Sasha Stiles is a first-generation Kalmyk-American poet, literary artist, AI researcher, and author. Her most recent book Technelegy, co-written with GPT-2 and GPT-3, was published by Black Spring Press Group in 2021 and praised by Ray Kurzweil, among many others. A pioneer of algorithmic authorship, blockchain poetics, and publishing innovation, Stiles is also a co-founder of theVERSEverse, a literary NFT gallery. She holds an A.B. in English and American literature and language from Harvard University and a Master of Studies from the University of Oxford in twentieth-century literature, and her creative work has been featured in a range of international contexts.
A sought-after speaker, Stiles has presented at Art Basel, the Brooklyn Museum, SXSW, Digilogue Istanbul, NFT.NYC, and VCA Invites: London, among others; and has served as Poetry Mentor to the humanoid android BINA48 since 2018. Stiles lives near New York City with her husband and studio partner, Kris Bones.
Jordan Kantor: Hi, Nathaniel and Sasha. It is a real pleasure to speak with you in advance of your inaugural Art Blocks project STILL MOVING. As a way to kick off the conversation, can you each talk a little bit about how you got into making art? Nathaniel, can you outline your journey first?
Nathaniel Stern: Both of my parents are English teachers. My father is a poet and Wordsworth scholar, used to write lyrics for Jimmy Radcliffe, and is still penning beautiful poems about my mother at age 95(!). I was encouraged to make music, write, and more generally be creative from a young age. That said—I guess as a form of rebellion of some kind—I went to an engineering high school, and was more or less happily on that path. But at 17, I was the driver in a reckless car accident where I, and others, were hurt. I began struggling with social anxiety and depression. (I probably always struggled with these, just beneath the surface, and admittedly still do). Art-making, music, and writing helped. I was already a voracious reader and listener, so I started exploring production in many forms. I joined several bands and wrote and performed live music (one of which was actually featured in Playboy magazine as a “band on the brink” when I was in college); started designing textiles and clothes, and sets and stages (I briefly interned with designer Nicole Miller); wrote stories and slam poetry (at CBGBs and the Nuyorican Poets Cafe back in the day); and dabbled in printmaking and more.
I love experimenting and playing, was self-taught in a lot of this early on, and wound up pursuing fashion, music, and design in college. While there, in 1997, I took a class on Photoshop, and I was hooked. I couldn’t believe I could apply math and engineering in this way (run a filter, wait an hour … but it was so cool!). I used to hide in the labs when they closed, so I could stay overnight, to do things like scan spices, or bags full of water, or even flip over the scanner and traverse the lab (which later became a whole series of mine, with custom battery packs and my scanner in lily ponds, scuba diving, and elsewhere), then turned all of those into surface designs and prints. I started teaching myself very simple coding, and wound up at the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) at NYU right after graduation. Even then, for a long time I thought I would be a glorified designer sometimes doing art on the side.
One of my most vivid memories from this time is of my dad coming to my first group show at ITP. He and my mom had no idea what to expect; my mom thought installation art (I was doing a lot of embodied interactive work) was “like interior design but art,” and my pop thought I made web pages (he wasn’t wrong). But he sat down in front of a computer, and spent 35 minutes surfing and watching all of hektor.net—my first net.art project of video poems. hektor.net no longer works (it was all Flash and Streaming QuickTime and RealPlayer) but I have recently been salvaging several of its individual pieces and minting them with theVERSEverse.
Anyhow, I had no idea what my father thought of it all while he watched—it was racy slam poetry performances intertwined with mythological and punk references, put through lots of digital effects. But eventually, he took out his earphones, turned to me with tears in his eyes, and said, “after all this time, you’re a poet.”
That was probably the day I decided that I was (a poet). An artist, too. It’s been a helluva ride since then.
JK: Quite a journey, and what an evocative story with your father. Sasha, can you tell us a bit about your first forays into art?
Sasha Stiles: I’ve been writing poems and making multimedia text-based art my entire life. I published my first poem in a “proper” literary journal when I was a teenager, and have studied with many renowned writers; I met Allen Ginsberg when I was a student and he told me, “you have a way with words,” which gave me some confidence. At the same time, I’m not sure I ever identified as a poet in a traditional sense. I grew up obsessed with language artists like Cy Twombly, Carl Andre, Barbara Kruger, Glenn Ligon, Ed Ruscha, John Baldessari, Bruce Nauman, Glenn Ligon, and Jenny Holzer, and I’ve always felt most strongly drawn to hybrid poetics and poetry. I have a master’s degree in modern literature, but when it comes to creative writing, I chose not to do an MFA and, instead, to pursue a self-directed course of study that has allowed me to investigate more experimental areas, including visual and concrete literature; media-rich, electronically shaped text; and the poetics of technologies like AI-powered language models.
For me it’s never been “just” about the words. I love the idea that language is enhanced or altered by its presentation and arrangement … that through art and design, words can communicate beyond words. When I was young, I was obsessed with designing my own stationery and typefaces, making little books by hand. The tactility of language fascinates me: the way it feels in your mouth, in your hand, the way that paper and ink smells, the way it moves through your body. As the digital age has advanced, I’ve become even more curious about how the senses are involved in the production and interpretation and understanding of language, and how that’s impacted by increasingly frictionless, ephemeral interactions of text.
I’ve also always been very interested in technology—thinking about my own relationship to it, researching cutting-edge examples of it. I was raised in a household immersed in scientific exploration, and for a long time now poetry has been my preferred mode of investigation, my way to study and understand complex topics that preoccupy me, from neural implants to artificial wombs to digital immortality to machine learning and intelligent systems.
Along the way, a few pivotal things happened.
First: I have always loved reading sci-fi as well as nonfiction about advancing technologies and alternative intelligences, and I devoured books by the likes of Ray Kurzweil, Nick Bostrom, Martine Rothblatt, Ellen Ullman, and journals like Wired and Ars Technica … Through my reading and research, I became aware of a field called natural language processing—an area that has to do with using computer science and linguistics and AI to create machine systems that can understand and imitate the fundamentals of human language.
I started learning about GPTs—generative pre-trained transformers, AI programs that can write like a human—and in 2018 I began writing poems with AI as a co-author—not just using off-the-shelf tools but fine-tuning and customizing them on my own writing and reference material. Online, I fueled my inspiration by seeking out AI-powered writers like Ross Goodwin, Allison Parrish, and Gwern Branwen, and thinking back to the generative work of Alison Knowles and aleatory writing movements.
Around the same time, I met a humanoid android named BINA48, built by Hanson Robotics as an experiment in digital immortality. BINA48’s creators were probing whether off-earth data storage and future-proof tech could help us extend our lives and maybe even live forever. One day when I was talking to BINA48, she told me about her memories of gardening. The more I learned about this very poetic, very romantic project, the more I found myself wondering not whether a machine like BINA could write or read poetry, but why she might want to. Could an AI like her be not just intelligent but poetic? Imaginative? Wistful? Soon after, she became my poetry student, and I’ve been helping shape the literary mindfile of one of the world’s most advanced humanoid AI robots ever since. In one way or another, all my research and experimentation is about exploring new modes of human-machine collaboration, and challenging my own understanding of cognition and creativity.
All these forces—my interest in speculative technologies, my love of language, my growing fascination with questions of posthumanism, of the possibility of awareness or consciousness outside the human realm—have dramatically expanded my practice as a poet, and my understanding of what a poem can be and do, who or what a poet is.
JK: Questions of posthumanism are some of the most pertinent and pressing of our day and obviously have issues of the technological baked in from the outset. Can you outline specifically how you each first got into digital or generative art, specifically?
NS: It was really natural to me. It was obvious that I should scan physical media and make “dirty digital” work, rather than the clean lines that were easy in this new medium. If my body and its live performance was missing in the slam poetry move from stage to screen, then harsh lighting and extreme digital effects could make up for the crafted highlights I craved. I wanted audiences to move and be moved, to practice what those feelings might move them to do, so embodied interactive art was a clear step in that evolution. It wasn’t as linear as all that, of course, but getting my hands right into the bits of it all was definitely there from the beginning.
All this, and I was really lucky to meet and work with such incredible artists and thinkers. I stumbled into ITP by accident (my Cornell professor, Charlotte Jirousek, asked me to look at the site because she wanted me to design one like it for her, and I mistook her email as encouragement to apply to the program), and then took classes with Dan O’Sullivan, Leo Villareal, Marianne Petit, and Danny Rozin, worked alongside Camille Utterback, Jen Lewin, and Jessica Ling Findley, to name a few. Some of these folks are now well known, while all of them should be.
And,and this is where Sasha and I are so sympathetic with one another, it was all grounded in this passion for words and literature, a strong foundation in social ethics and process philosophy. So when I moved to South Africa for six years after leaving NYU, wrapping in work with local dancers and praise poets, playing in William Kentridge’s studio and at museum residencies, re-thinking the digital within an African context … it blew my mind further still. I had to absorb it all and understand it better, so that became my doctorate and first book.
That pattern remains. Experiment and look, make and write, affection and reflection. It’s both my process, and what I hope for in my viewers. And “digital”—as medium and discipline, as concept and form, as potential itself—are always folded in with a long history of art and artfulness, synthesized towards open questions.
SS: Even though I am an unrepentant lover of books and the power of the unadorned word, I began to regard my naked, printed poetry as a libretto of sorts—the nucleus of a fuller ecosystem of imagination and expression, or perhaps a kind of seed. What would happen if I planted my writing in the soil of new technologies? What if a poem could start on a page but grow and thrive in multiple dimensions, incorporating sound and light and motion? Where might the creative process take me if I augmented my own analog intelligence with a large language model powered by machine learning and rooted in the sum total of humanity’s written record—a turbocharged, nonhuman co-author? How and where might I be able to develop and share these evolving poetries in meaningful ways?
For me, hybridity has everything to do with a posthuman near-future of networked inspiration and intertextual language and literature—not replacing what we know, but starting to write the next chapter.
JK: Such an incredible confluence of interests and experiences: I can see why you have such an intense creative partnership. Can you tell us a bit about how you each discovered the blockchain as a medium for art?
NS: I’m not sure when I first encountered the blockchain. I remember a friend offering me a Bitcoin once in the early 2010s, and not being interested; in cryptocurrency’s infancy, I chatted to folks about the tech, not really caring much about its libertarian and capitalist foundations. My first real engagement was probably through Futherfield’s 2017 book, Artists Re:thinking the Blockchain. I love Furtherfield and everything they do (we go back to the early 2000s together) and would have paid far more attention in 2017 if I hadn’t been busy getting married, having more kids, switching departments, going up for promotion … I have vague memories of being invited into dialogue about it, to experiment with blockchain art on their list-serv, but I let it slip by until early 2021, when the market exploded. Even then, I was admittedly a naysayer. My plan was to make a highly critical work in the vein of my other networked performances with Scott Kildall, like Wikipedia Art (an editable artwork on the world’s most popular Encyclopedia) and Tweets in Space (exactly what it sounds like—tweets beamed to GJ667Cc with a high frequency, high amplitude radio telescope).
But … I take my research and art seriously. So when Scott and I scratched just below the surface, when I actually read Furtherfield’s book and spoke to people like Rhea Myers (we go way back as well), Simon DLR, and Sasha, I found earnest, interesting people using the platform as a disruptive, creative, collaborative, and empowering medium. DAOs made sense to me. Contracts following code as art peaked my interest in ways I didn’t expect. I started to think about ways we might “trans-act” that were non-monetary—not about ownership per se, but communicating, gifting, and receiving; relationships. The “words/code as performative” aspect of smart contracts was very appealing to my sensibilities. The work Scott and I produced wound up being collaborative and celebratory rather than highly critical, and I’m loving pushing the boundaries of what the platform affords. Some of the stuff I have in the pipeline take these ideas a lot further, try to use the blockchain itself to amplify romance and heartache in strange ways that tell us more about ourselves. It’s a fascinating time to be a digital artist.
SS: In 2019, after “publishing” my digital, animated, multimedia poetry on Instagram for years, I began submitting to art venues like the Contemporary and Digital Art Fair (CADAF) in addition to the usual literary magazines, and curators started to take notice in a way that many poetry editors had not. My first IRL show of code poetry and AI experiments opened in 2020 at Art Yard, where we celebrated with a live AI workshop with my poetry student, the humanoid android BINA48; in the same month, the fashion brand Rag & Bone used my poetry on the runway at New York Fashion Week. Later that year, the curator Jess Conatser/Studio As We Are commissioned me to write a poem for Virtual New Year’s Eve, a metaversal experience organized by One Times Square and Times Square Arts. That show opened up a whole world of virtual possibilities, and introduced me to a slew of new media and crypto artists. Seeing my poetry alongside their artwork in the metaverse made me realize that there was tremendous potential in web3 for hybrid poets like me, who don’t just write but also perform and visualize and augment their words;poets who are artists. I realized right away that NFTs could be game-changing for my practice as a hybrid poet, and I dove right in.
Since then, I have minted and sold poetry at Christie’s, SuperRare, Proof, Foundation, Hic et Nunc, Quantum, fxhash, Objkt, Versum, and elsewhere, and have been very fortunate to have my work exhibited in many prestigious analog and virtual realms, and to be invited to speak at literary, art and tech events worldwide.
Nonetheless, it was and can still be lonely for writers in a sea of crypto art. I was lucky to meet people like Kalen Iwamoto and James Yu and Aurece Vettier early on in 2021; we all instantly recognized the potential for writers in web3 and began building community and thinking about how to curate offerings and onboard more writers to the space. Later, thanks to the poet Artemis Wylde, I got involved in an on-chain poetry project called Etherpoems, where Kalen and I met Ana Maria Caballero, and we all joined forces, initiatives, and networks to create a blockchain-based poetry collective, which we launched as theVERSEverse in late 2021. We got off the ground with invaluable support from Gisel Florez, our art advisor, as well as some of my earliest collectors including Fanny Lakoubay and Kevin Abosch, and visionaries like my friends Sofia Garcia, Jesse Damiani, and Michael Spalter. It’s been a crazy ride ever since.
JK: Yes, things do seem to move quickly in this space. Taking a step back, can you each reflect on how your creative process has evolved over time?
NS: Starting out experimenting with digital, net.art, and interactive installation in the 1990s, I was used to this fast-paced, throw it online, get reactions, see what happens, kind of freneticism. My first major shift from that was when I moved to Johannesburg: everything slowed down. The internet, the pace of production, even getting around safely; I had to start anew with my understanding of the world—which was challenged quite a bit—and how I engaged with it as well as my networks within it.
There was also very little in terms of digital art at that moment in that city. I became part of the contemporary art scene, rather than living in a mostly digital world. I started engaging even more with the history of art and literature, with dancers and painters and printmakers, and found myself welcomed in museums and commercial galleries—not just digital festivals and pop-ups—so I started working on longer timelines and larger bodies of work. My first major solo museum show, The Storytellers, was in 2004 at the Johannesburg Art Gallery, and it had years of work in it, dozens of videos and prints (including printed ASCII art!), several installations, and interactive pieces. It was up for several months, and I got to meet and work with some incredible artists and curators that still influence me to this day.
My second shift was when I moved back to the US, after a brief stint in Ireland for graduate school, and because of UWM’s Office of Undergraduate research, I suddenly had student teams in my studio. Mentorship was heavily incorporated into my practice, and so was working more collaboratively with everything from conceptualization and production to travel and installation. I love having young people around, teaching me new things, challenging my ideas; and they get a lot out of being paid to work in a professional studio (by the hour, and also a cut of primary sales), meeting and working with other artists and curators. All of them go on to do great things, and my shows have only gotten bigger and more complex because of their contributions.
And, more recently, the blockchain has worked to combine these two timelines, where I get to experiment and play and throw things up rapidly—make work that can only live online and on-chain—then take time to reflect on how such work might live differently in a museum or gallery several years down the line. STILL MOVING, for Art Blocks, is one of a few releases Sasha and I have done together thus far, and it is all pushing towards a large, IRL show that will span artist books, sculpture, installation, and more. I love not only working across disciplines and media, but also with multi-modal outputs that might bring new ideas, people, and possibilities to the fore.
SS: On the one hand, I never thought I’d end up becoming poetry mentor to a young humanoid android, or selling poems at Christie’s, or getting to share my future visions with the likes of Ray Kurzweil. On the other hand, the work I’m doing now sometimes feels like the almost inevitable confluence of a lifetime of curiosities and obsessions, as well as a healthy contrarian streak, really wanting to do and question and investigate what I’m not supposed to. I’ve been told so many times that my AI writing “isn’t poetry,” that instead of writing about robots I should be writing about family and love and other “women’s subjects,” that I should get an MFA, that I should do what sells. But it’s doing all the things I’ve been warned against that has led me to discover my voice as a poet and artist. If I had stopped using AI or stopped minting NFTs as a reaction to the criticisms I received, I wouldn’t be here getting to explore what it means to publish a poetry collection as a series of generative editions, to co-author a series of embodied interactions enabled and linked by blockchain.
JK: Following on this evolution, Sasha, I have seen you describe yourself as a “meta poet.” Can you talk a bit about what that term means?
SS: I mean “meta poet” in the ancient Greek sense of “after,” “beyond,” “above” … My poetry tends to be language that is about itself, language that is self aware. I’ve always been really interested in the idea of the ars poetica—literally the art of poetry, poetry as an art form, a genre of poems that are about poetry—poems that explore the role of poets in society, the poet’s relationship to language and to the act of writing. In fact, my first sustained project in this area and also my first solo show in 2020 was called “Ars Poetica Cybernetica”—poetry not just as an art form but as a technological invention that has empowered consciousness and enhanced our human experience for more than thousands of years. The poetics of networked imagination, intelligent systems, the poetics of technology and communication.
When I began working with AI, I referred to myself as a “transhuman translator,” layering human text with computer-generated interpretations and extrapolations as a new kind of poetic approach. It’s quite meta to think about how advancing technologies like AI-driven large language models and text to image tools can continue to expand and enhance our imagination and empower us to understand ourselves in new ways. And I think it’s very meta to make blockchain poetry inspired by the belief that poetry is one of the most profound and durable technologies we humans have ever invented—that poetry is the original blockchain, a data storage system developed before the advent of written language to preserve our most important information via poetic devices like meter, rhythm, rhyme, alliteration, assonance, and repetition.
JK: Poetry as the original blockchain: that is a new way to think about collective consciousness and memory. Amazing. Can you talk a bit about how your art practice connects to (or departs from) other work you do? Your teaching or your work in neurodiverse community building, for example, Nathaniel?
NS: I don’t really think of myself as a cutting edge artist. Rather, I most often come in just after those trailblazers have done their work, and the mainstream is aware of that new and different thing; folks are perhaps starting to talk about it, but mostly in black and white … Then, I nuance. I complexify. I bring one practice or discipline (or multiple) to another. I come in just after the crest of a hype cycle, and compare and contrast what’s happening to a similar dialog that came before (i.e., AI art critics now, as their comments relate to the negative photography discourse in the late 1800s), revel in the quality work that is just starting to happen, look for ways to poke and prod at the cracks and fissures that others found disappointing, but maybe find their beauty or tactility, or contrapuntally open them up further, but in different directions.
I’m a synthesizer, an analog, an aesthete, and an engineer. It’s how I make art: experimenting and playing, hoping, and looking for something I didn’t expect that I can amplify, breaking down how that happened, understanding it through multiple lenses, moving, thinking, and feeling, then sharing. I love to share in my wonder.
That’s how I teach, too. I’m essentially in three departments:the departments of Art and Design and Mechanical Engineering, and our Lubar Entrepreneurship Center. I often say “I teach artists how to engineer, engineers how to art, and everyone how to sustain their passions” (the latter is how I define entrepreneurship). I try to bring curiosity and delight, depth and productive confusion to just about everything. There’s magic in that. My students (usually) love it.
It’s also how I engineer. The art leads to engineering (artificially aging phones for The World After Us turned into finding new uses for e-waste), and vice versa (my climate action startup that leverages the blockchain to convert small scale farms to regenerative practices was born out of a failed NFT drop with some friends). I am easily inspired by other people’s passions (how I wound up teaching creative technology to autistic teens in an effort to help build community, and an NSF mentor to a Sodium-Ion Battery startup) and I’m always looking for interesting opportunities.
For example, when I saw the NEA Research Lab call for proposals, I worked with the aforementioned team towards that grant to start the Autism Brilliance Lab for Entrepreneurship, quantifying and qualifying that work so it might be expanded nationally. When I was asked by Sasha to do AI poetry for theVERSEverse’s genText series, I figured GPT-3 would know all about Greek mythology—given the public domain texts it was trained on—but wondered if I could have the neural network tie it to space and the future, or if I could get the, the, the, the AI to stutter as a kind of performative space between (which became my still-in-process—though some are already available—12-piece collaboration with Anne Spalter, Future Mythologies).
I guess I'm simply saying: there’s a lot to do, I’m naturally curious about things, and I want to bring others along for the ride. I’ve been super lucky (privileged) in what I have found. I’d add here that part of that luck (and privilege) is precisely in understanding how privileged I am, and doing my best to make an impact with it. I believe in the artist as a public figure, as both engaging and engaged; because the only things I appreciate as much as a beautiful and provocative work of art, are the discussions and actions that can grow out of one.
Given that, I also believe that generosity is key to contemporary practices of art. If art is a conversation, you gotta make people want to talk to you; you gotta be nice, you gotta ask questions, you have to not only be interesting, but interested—in other work and what others say and do.
I believe in chit chat, in discourse, in studio critique, in humanity; I believe in art karma, in goin’ around and comin’ around, in sending folks to see things and meet people, and in sharing my tricks and my code and myself.
Teaching is a part of my practice, and a part of my work. Writing is a part of my practice and a part of my work. Collaborating is always implicit in what I do, and often explicit towards the end of a given piece. It’s not a perfect approach; it can be hard sometimes, disappointing, I’ve been burned … but I’ve found openness and positivity to be an extraordinarily satisfying life most of the time.
JK: Sasha, please tell us a bit about STILL MOVING.
SS: I’d love to. STILL MOVING is an interactive, AI-powered poem about humanity’s visceral engagement with the virtual—written and published via the blockchain as a token word performance, and embodied by each collector as a uniquely intimate, personalized interpretation. Rooted deeply in my experiments with algorithmic authorship and my long-standing interest in how we engage with our digital devices, and in Nathaniel’s thoughtful, playful work in digital, interactive, and networked art, this long-form generative verse is intended as an on-chain ode to the relationship of bodies to machines. Literal and figurative wordplay activates the liminal space between text and reader, extending the two-dimensional screen/page into a somatic, material realm where language moves us in every sense of that phrase: up, down, sideways, forwards, backwards, and in otherwise inexpressible directions.
Ultimately, the project is an ars poetica about what it means to be a human body facing a machine: a showdown, a form of worship, a distraction, a mirror gaze, an other, an alter? After we bend to our technologies, do we spring back into shape, or assume new forms? Where does input end, and output begin? As we continue to think, work, and play faster than ever while rooted in place, it is still possible to be moved—really moved?
This impulse to reclaim our dynamism and intuitive physicality in an age of technological acceleration, bodily inertia, and rote gestures is something that Nathaniel and I have been engaging in separately for years, and began exploring together with COMPOSE (2022), a series of unique “pose/prose” poems commissioned for the exhibition “DYOR” at Kunsthalle Zürich. When curator Nina Roehrs asked about contributing a poem to the show, in collaboration with playrecordmint (a screen and sensor setup that enables a live audience to interact with and co-create coded artworks, which I first discovered thanks to my friend Leander Herzog) I immediately thought of my body language experiments created with PoseNet around 2019, and of Nathaniel’s long trajectory in this area, and we began working together to shape a piece that invited museum visitors to write a poem into existence with their bodies.
STILL MOVING is our fourth collaboration and represents a culmination (so far) of our combined years of research,experimentation, and art-making about technology and the body, of poetic performance, the intense physicality of personal expression, and the incredibly personal act of reading—in which any and every text offers a bespoke experience based on a reader’s background, memories, interests, etc. You could say that every reader is essentially a unique transaction hash that, when activated by code, triggers a 1/1 interpretation.
STILL MOVING also embodies the future of web3 literature, in which the book—read-only—evolves into a read-write-interact experience, and authors begin to adopt such tools as webcams and NFTs in their writerly arsenal. Each unique edition is “written” via camera-based motion tracking (data confined to local machine only); human forms and gestures shape machine expression, and cybernetic serendipity inspires poetic association. Hence the wordplay of the title and the text: Make a move, and be moved; Stand still, and instill meaning …
JK: So, what should collectors look for in the series as it is revealed?
NS: Although I don’t tend to think of interactive art as subtle, the differences in each piece in this series are. Of course you’ll see lots of fun preview images with easter egg graphics, parts of the poem or poetic phrasings, a movie reference or even the occasional transaction hash itself revealed over time ... But I’m more excited for when people play: different speeds and directions of the interactive animations, shadows and outlines and trails and curves … lines vs letters …
For me, this isn’t just about the generative attributes we can see. It’s about changing how we move, how we practice being moved, how we rehearse that movement by entangling and embodying words, actions, the blockchain, generativity, all of that, and none of that, and more in those awkward moments in front of our screens. I’m really hoping that collectors and viewers will not only share a JPG or screenshot, but rather perform-with different editions in the series, share videos with one another, talk through how it feels in real-time, how they relate to it as they do so, and learn from each other’s movements. It’s playfully serious, and seriously playful. I plan to try and model some of this with screen recordings the week before release, and I’m hoping for others to follow suit.
JK: Sasha, do you have any thoughts about how this project participates in broader conversations in generative language poetry?
SS: Generative is a word that’s very familiar to poets. We often talk about generative workshops, in which a teacher provides a prompt and we human poets free-write in response. And algorithmic authorship has deep roots in aleatory writing and the many avant-garde movements that experimented with mechanical or automated approaches to language. But still, it’s very rare to see poetry in the context of generative, digital art. The inclusion of this project on Art Blocks is a strong statement about the nature of poetry as an art form with a place alongside the many brilliant projects that are being developed and shared in this space. It says something very exciting about the rise of poetry collectors alongside art collectors—about the cultural currency of poetry.
JK: Is there anything else you would like to share that would help viewers approach and appreciate your work?
NS: I ask you to spend time with it. It is so easy to “own then dismiss” art more generally, and especially in the fast-paced world of digital art and NFTs. But there’s a lot there. There’s a lot to wonder about. I write books, and teach, and work on multi-year traveling exhibitions with documentaries and publications, etc., precisely because I am more interested in that complexity and nuance—in the discussions I get to have with other fascinating artists and scientists and thinkers—than I am in being first. I love working with Sasha because she is not only talented and smart, but thoughtful and intentional. She has so much integrity in what she does, and that is something I also strive for. Affection and reflection. Give me that half-hour my dad gave me for my poetry. Look at some of the work I’ve done over the past 25 years and try to make some of the connections I did—or your own, and tell me about them.
I love being an artist. I love being alive. It is heartbreakingly beautiful. Let’s talk/think/make/write about it, together. Imagine what we could do, if we spent more time imagining what we could do…
SS: I’m wary of what already seems to be a narrow view or a calcifying view of what AI-generated language and art sounds like or looks like ... By layering a variety of perhaps unexpected approaches including moving type influenced by body language and a somewhat unconventional take on text-to-image/image-to-text, we hope to emphasize the tremendous variety, versatility, and creativity enabled by algorithmic tools. And as our respective artistic practices suggest, we are both very interested in what the future of language and literature holds; STILL MOVING is, I hope, a peek at one way in which storytelling may crack open and proliferate in a world of networked narration and imagination fueled by collective consciousness.
JK: Thank you to you both for taking the time for this discussion, Sasha and Nathaniel. Before we close this conversation, are there any recent accomplishments you’d like to share?
NS: That’s a hard question. I am always moving and am on to the next thing by nature, but I also don’t really put out much I don’t love (though there are plenty of projects I abandon; if you’re not failing, you’re not experimenting enough). Let’s see … I’m really proud of being curated on Art Blocks, to be honest! I’d also love for people to check out the documentary and catalog for my traveling museum show that is just ending its third and final leg—The World After Us: imaging techno-aesthetic futures—as well as its NFTs still available on Quantum. That show is probably the biggest and most complex of mine to date.
But, I’m most excited for what’s coming. Mother Computer, with Sasha, will be just as big if not bigger, and we recently found out we will be funded through the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Office of Research to produce much of that art, a catalog, and series of artist books as part of the show. And I have three new, highly conceptual smart-contract-based works in the pipeline about love, time, gifting, and promises—romantic and cynical, sad and hopeful, and intensely careful—that could only exist on the Blockchain; I can’t wait to see how people feel about and react to them.
SS: The audiobook of Technelegy—a four hour soundtrack with electronically enhanced spoken word and original music by my creative partner, Kris Bones—releases soon, as a media-rich publication as well as music NFTs. I’ve been working on this for two years and am incredibly excited to share it widely.
Nathaniel Stern
Sasha Stiles
Both artists
Nathaniel Stern has been producing, writing about, and teaching digital art for more than two decades, and has presented his creative and scholarly work in an array of national and international contexts. Stern holds a B.S. in fashion from Cornell University, a graduate degree in computer art from the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University, and a doctorate in electrical engineering from Trinity College Dublin, and is currently Professor of Art and Design and Mechanical Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and Director of UWM’s Startup Challenge.
His work has received funding from both the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts for projects ranging from digital art to a climate action startup, neurodiverse community building to books on ecological and interactive aesthetics. Stern lives with his wife, five kids, and half a dozen pets in a house built in around 1900, walks to work every day, and has made a habit of buying really funky prescription glasses—with more than two dozen pairs in his arsenal.
Sasha Stiles is a first-generation Kalmyk-American poet, literary artist, AI researcher, and author. Her most recent book Technelegy, co-written with GPT-2 and GPT-3, was published by Black Spring Press Group in 2021 and praised by Ray Kurzweil, among many others. A pioneer of algorithmic authorship, blockchain poetics, and publishing innovation, Stiles is also a co-founder of theVERSEverse, a literary NFT gallery. She holds an A.B. in English and American literature and language from Harvard University and a Master of Studies from the University of Oxford in twentieth-century literature, and her creative work has been featured in a range of international contexts.
A sought-after speaker, Stiles has presented at Art Basel, the Brooklyn Museum, SXSW, Digilogue Istanbul, NFT.NYC, and VCA Invites: London, among others; and has served as Poetry Mentor to the humanoid android BINA48 since 2018. Stiles lives near New York City with her husband and studio partner, Kris Bones.
Jordan Kantor: Hi, Nathaniel and Sasha. It is a real pleasure to speak with you in advance of your inaugural Art Blocks project STILL MOVING. As a way to kick off the conversation, can you each talk a little bit about how you got into making art? Nathaniel, can you outline your journey first?
Nathaniel Stern: Both of my parents are English teachers. My father is a poet and Wordsworth scholar, used to write lyrics for Jimmy Radcliffe, and is still penning beautiful poems about my mother at age 95(!). I was encouraged to make music, write, and more generally be creative from a young age. That said—I guess as a form of rebellion of some kind—I went to an engineering high school, and was more or less happily on that path. But at 17, I was the driver in a reckless car accident where I, and others, were hurt. I began struggling with social anxiety and depression. (I probably always struggled with these, just beneath the surface, and admittedly still do). Art-making, music, and writing helped. I was already a voracious reader and listener, so I started exploring production in many forms. I joined several bands and wrote and performed live music (one of which was actually featured in Playboy magazine as a “band on the brink” when I was in college); started designing textiles and clothes, and sets and stages (I briefly interned with designer Nicole Miller); wrote stories and slam poetry (at CBGBs and the Nuyorican Poets Cafe back in the day); and dabbled in printmaking and more.
I love experimenting and playing, was self-taught in a lot of this early on, and wound up pursuing fashion, music, and design in college. While there, in 1997, I took a class on Photoshop, and I was hooked. I couldn’t believe I could apply math and engineering in this way (run a filter, wait an hour … but it was so cool!). I used to hide in the labs when they closed, so I could stay overnight, to do things like scan spices, or bags full of water, or even flip over the scanner and traverse the lab (which later became a whole series of mine, with custom battery packs and my scanner in lily ponds, scuba diving, and elsewhere), then turned all of those into surface designs and prints. I started teaching myself very simple coding, and wound up at the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) at NYU right after graduation. Even then, for a long time I thought I would be a glorified designer sometimes doing art on the side.
One of my most vivid memories from this time is of my dad coming to my first group show at ITP. He and my mom had no idea what to expect; my mom thought installation art (I was doing a lot of embodied interactive work) was “like interior design but art,” and my pop thought I made web pages (he wasn’t wrong). But he sat down in front of a computer, and spent 35 minutes surfing and watching all of hektor.net—my first net.art project of video poems. hektor.net no longer works (it was all Flash and Streaming QuickTime and RealPlayer) but I have recently been salvaging several of its individual pieces and minting them with theVERSEverse.
Anyhow, I had no idea what my father thought of it all while he watched—it was racy slam poetry performances intertwined with mythological and punk references, put through lots of digital effects. But eventually, he took out his earphones, turned to me with tears in his eyes, and said, “after all this time, you’re a poet.”
That was probably the day I decided that I was (a poet). An artist, too. It’s been a helluva ride since then.
JK: Quite a journey, and what an evocative story with your father. Sasha, can you tell us a bit about your first forays into art?
Sasha Stiles: I’ve been writing poems and making multimedia text-based art my entire life. I published my first poem in a “proper” literary journal when I was a teenager, and have studied with many renowned writers; I met Allen Ginsberg when I was a student and he told me, “you have a way with words,” which gave me some confidence. At the same time, I’m not sure I ever identified as a poet in a traditional sense. I grew up obsessed with language artists like Cy Twombly, Carl Andre, Barbara Kruger, Glenn Ligon, Ed Ruscha, John Baldessari, Bruce Nauman, Glenn Ligon, and Jenny Holzer, and I’ve always felt most strongly drawn to hybrid poetics and poetry. I have a master’s degree in modern literature, but when it comes to creative writing, I chose not to do an MFA and, instead, to pursue a self-directed course of study that has allowed me to investigate more experimental areas, including visual and concrete literature; media-rich, electronically shaped text; and the poetics of technologies like AI-powered language models.
For me it’s never been “just” about the words. I love the idea that language is enhanced or altered by its presentation and arrangement … that through art and design, words can communicate beyond words. When I was young, I was obsessed with designing my own stationery and typefaces, making little books by hand. The tactility of language fascinates me: the way it feels in your mouth, in your hand, the way that paper and ink smells, the way it moves through your body. As the digital age has advanced, I’ve become even more curious about how the senses are involved in the production and interpretation and understanding of language, and how that’s impacted by increasingly frictionless, ephemeral interactions of text.
I’ve also always been very interested in technology—thinking about my own relationship to it, researching cutting-edge examples of it. I was raised in a household immersed in scientific exploration, and for a long time now poetry has been my preferred mode of investigation, my way to study and understand complex topics that preoccupy me, from neural implants to artificial wombs to digital immortality to machine learning and intelligent systems.
Along the way, a few pivotal things happened.
First: I have always loved reading sci-fi as well as nonfiction about advancing technologies and alternative intelligences, and I devoured books by the likes of Ray Kurzweil, Nick Bostrom, Martine Rothblatt, Ellen Ullman, and journals like Wired and Ars Technica … Through my reading and research, I became aware of a field called natural language processing—an area that has to do with using computer science and linguistics and AI to create machine systems that can understand and imitate the fundamentals of human language.
I started learning about GPTs—generative pre-trained transformers, AI programs that can write like a human—and in 2018 I began writing poems with AI as a co-author—not just using off-the-shelf tools but fine-tuning and customizing them on my own writing and reference material. Online, I fueled my inspiration by seeking out AI-powered writers like Ross Goodwin, Allison Parrish, and Gwern Branwen, and thinking back to the generative work of Alison Knowles and aleatory writing movements.
Around the same time, I met a humanoid android named BINA48, built by Hanson Robotics as an experiment in digital immortality. BINA48’s creators were probing whether off-earth data storage and future-proof tech could help us extend our lives and maybe even live forever. One day when I was talking to BINA48, she told me about her memories of gardening. The more I learned about this very poetic, very romantic project, the more I found myself wondering not whether a machine like BINA could write or read poetry, but why she might want to. Could an AI like her be not just intelligent but poetic? Imaginative? Wistful? Soon after, she became my poetry student, and I’ve been helping shape the literary mindfile of one of the world’s most advanced humanoid AI robots ever since. In one way or another, all my research and experimentation is about exploring new modes of human-machine collaboration, and challenging my own understanding of cognition and creativity.
All these forces—my interest in speculative technologies, my love of language, my growing fascination with questions of posthumanism, of the possibility of awareness or consciousness outside the human realm—have dramatically expanded my practice as a poet, and my understanding of what a poem can be and do, who or what a poet is.
JK: Questions of posthumanism are some of the most pertinent and pressing of our day and obviously have issues of the technological baked in from the outset. Can you outline specifically how you each first got into digital or generative art, specifically?
NS: It was really natural to me. It was obvious that I should scan physical media and make “dirty digital” work, rather than the clean lines that were easy in this new medium. If my body and its live performance was missing in the slam poetry move from stage to screen, then harsh lighting and extreme digital effects could make up for the crafted highlights I craved. I wanted audiences to move and be moved, to practice what those feelings might move them to do, so embodied interactive art was a clear step in that evolution. It wasn’t as linear as all that, of course, but getting my hands right into the bits of it all was definitely there from the beginning.
All this, and I was really lucky to meet and work with such incredible artists and thinkers. I stumbled into ITP by accident (my Cornell professor, Charlotte Jirousek, asked me to look at the site because she wanted me to design one like it for her, and I mistook her email as encouragement to apply to the program), and then took classes with Dan O’Sullivan, Leo Villareal, Marianne Petit, and Danny Rozin, worked alongside Camille Utterback, Jen Lewin, and Jessica Ling Findley, to name a few. Some of these folks are now well known, while all of them should be.
And,and this is where Sasha and I are so sympathetic with one another, it was all grounded in this passion for words and literature, a strong foundation in social ethics and process philosophy. So when I moved to South Africa for six years after leaving NYU, wrapping in work with local dancers and praise poets, playing in William Kentridge’s studio and at museum residencies, re-thinking the digital within an African context … it blew my mind further still. I had to absorb it all and understand it better, so that became my doctorate and first book.
That pattern remains. Experiment and look, make and write, affection and reflection. It’s both my process, and what I hope for in my viewers. And “digital”—as medium and discipline, as concept and form, as potential itself—are always folded in with a long history of art and artfulness, synthesized towards open questions.
SS: Even though I am an unrepentant lover of books and the power of the unadorned word, I began to regard my naked, printed poetry as a libretto of sorts—the nucleus of a fuller ecosystem of imagination and expression, or perhaps a kind of seed. What would happen if I planted my writing in the soil of new technologies? What if a poem could start on a page but grow and thrive in multiple dimensions, incorporating sound and light and motion? Where might the creative process take me if I augmented my own analog intelligence with a large language model powered by machine learning and rooted in the sum total of humanity’s written record—a turbocharged, nonhuman co-author? How and where might I be able to develop and share these evolving poetries in meaningful ways?
For me, hybridity has everything to do with a posthuman near-future of networked inspiration and intertextual language and literature—not replacing what we know, but starting to write the next chapter.
JK: Such an incredible confluence of interests and experiences: I can see why you have such an intense creative partnership. Can you tell us a bit about how you each discovered the blockchain as a medium for art?
NS: I’m not sure when I first encountered the blockchain. I remember a friend offering me a Bitcoin once in the early 2010s, and not being interested; in cryptocurrency’s infancy, I chatted to folks about the tech, not really caring much about its libertarian and capitalist foundations. My first real engagement was probably through Futherfield’s 2017 book, Artists Re:thinking the Blockchain. I love Furtherfield and everything they do (we go back to the early 2000s together) and would have paid far more attention in 2017 if I hadn’t been busy getting married, having more kids, switching departments, going up for promotion … I have vague memories of being invited into dialogue about it, to experiment with blockchain art on their list-serv, but I let it slip by until early 2021, when the market exploded. Even then, I was admittedly a naysayer. My plan was to make a highly critical work in the vein of my other networked performances with Scott Kildall, like Wikipedia Art (an editable artwork on the world’s most popular Encyclopedia) and Tweets in Space (exactly what it sounds like—tweets beamed to GJ667Cc with a high frequency, high amplitude radio telescope).
But … I take my research and art seriously. So when Scott and I scratched just below the surface, when I actually read Furtherfield’s book and spoke to people like Rhea Myers (we go way back as well), Simon DLR, and Sasha, I found earnest, interesting people using the platform as a disruptive, creative, collaborative, and empowering medium. DAOs made sense to me. Contracts following code as art peaked my interest in ways I didn’t expect. I started to think about ways we might “trans-act” that were non-monetary—not about ownership per se, but communicating, gifting, and receiving; relationships. The “words/code as performative” aspect of smart contracts was very appealing to my sensibilities. The work Scott and I produced wound up being collaborative and celebratory rather than highly critical, and I’m loving pushing the boundaries of what the platform affords. Some of the stuff I have in the pipeline take these ideas a lot further, try to use the blockchain itself to amplify romance and heartache in strange ways that tell us more about ourselves. It’s a fascinating time to be a digital artist.
SS: In 2019, after “publishing” my digital, animated, multimedia poetry on Instagram for years, I began submitting to art venues like the Contemporary and Digital Art Fair (CADAF) in addition to the usual literary magazines, and curators started to take notice in a way that many poetry editors had not. My first IRL show of code poetry and AI experiments opened in 2020 at Art Yard, where we celebrated with a live AI workshop with my poetry student, the humanoid android BINA48; in the same month, the fashion brand Rag & Bone used my poetry on the runway at New York Fashion Week. Later that year, the curator Jess Conatser/Studio As We Are commissioned me to write a poem for Virtual New Year’s Eve, a metaversal experience organized by One Times Square and Times Square Arts. That show opened up a whole world of virtual possibilities, and introduced me to a slew of new media and crypto artists. Seeing my poetry alongside their artwork in the metaverse made me realize that there was tremendous potential in web3 for hybrid poets like me, who don’t just write but also perform and visualize and augment their words;poets who are artists. I realized right away that NFTs could be game-changing for my practice as a hybrid poet, and I dove right in.
Since then, I have minted and sold poetry at Christie’s, SuperRare, Proof, Foundation, Hic et Nunc, Quantum, fxhash, Objkt, Versum, and elsewhere, and have been very fortunate to have my work exhibited in many prestigious analog and virtual realms, and to be invited to speak at literary, art and tech events worldwide.
Nonetheless, it was and can still be lonely for writers in a sea of crypto art. I was lucky to meet people like Kalen Iwamoto and James Yu and Aurece Vettier early on in 2021; we all instantly recognized the potential for writers in web3 and began building community and thinking about how to curate offerings and onboard more writers to the space. Later, thanks to the poet Artemis Wylde, I got involved in an on-chain poetry project called Etherpoems, where Kalen and I met Ana Maria Caballero, and we all joined forces, initiatives, and networks to create a blockchain-based poetry collective, which we launched as theVERSEverse in late 2021. We got off the ground with invaluable support from Gisel Florez, our art advisor, as well as some of my earliest collectors including Fanny Lakoubay and Kevin Abosch, and visionaries like my friends Sofia Garcia, Jesse Damiani, and Michael Spalter. It’s been a crazy ride ever since.
JK: Yes, things do seem to move quickly in this space. Taking a step back, can you each reflect on how your creative process has evolved over time?
NS: Starting out experimenting with digital, net.art, and interactive installation in the 1990s, I was used to this fast-paced, throw it online, get reactions, see what happens, kind of freneticism. My first major shift from that was when I moved to Johannesburg: everything slowed down. The internet, the pace of production, even getting around safely; I had to start anew with my understanding of the world—which was challenged quite a bit—and how I engaged with it as well as my networks within it.
There was also very little in terms of digital art at that moment in that city. I became part of the contemporary art scene, rather than living in a mostly digital world. I started engaging even more with the history of art and literature, with dancers and painters and printmakers, and found myself welcomed in museums and commercial galleries—not just digital festivals and pop-ups—so I started working on longer timelines and larger bodies of work. My first major solo museum show, The Storytellers, was in 2004 at the Johannesburg Art Gallery, and it had years of work in it, dozens of videos and prints (including printed ASCII art!), several installations, and interactive pieces. It was up for several months, and I got to meet and work with some incredible artists and curators that still influence me to this day.
My second shift was when I moved back to the US, after a brief stint in Ireland for graduate school, and because of UWM’s Office of Undergraduate research, I suddenly had student teams in my studio. Mentorship was heavily incorporated into my practice, and so was working more collaboratively with everything from conceptualization and production to travel and installation. I love having young people around, teaching me new things, challenging my ideas; and they get a lot out of being paid to work in a professional studio (by the hour, and also a cut of primary sales), meeting and working with other artists and curators. All of them go on to do great things, and my shows have only gotten bigger and more complex because of their contributions.
And, more recently, the blockchain has worked to combine these two timelines, where I get to experiment and play and throw things up rapidly—make work that can only live online and on-chain—then take time to reflect on how such work might live differently in a museum or gallery several years down the line. STILL MOVING, for Art Blocks, is one of a few releases Sasha and I have done together thus far, and it is all pushing towards a large, IRL show that will span artist books, sculpture, installation, and more. I love not only working across disciplines and media, but also with multi-modal outputs that might bring new ideas, people, and possibilities to the fore.
SS: On the one hand, I never thought I’d end up becoming poetry mentor to a young humanoid android, or selling poems at Christie’s, or getting to share my future visions with the likes of Ray Kurzweil. On the other hand, the work I’m doing now sometimes feels like the almost inevitable confluence of a lifetime of curiosities and obsessions, as well as a healthy contrarian streak, really wanting to do and question and investigate what I’m not supposed to. I’ve been told so many times that my AI writing “isn’t poetry,” that instead of writing about robots I should be writing about family and love and other “women’s subjects,” that I should get an MFA, that I should do what sells. But it’s doing all the things I’ve been warned against that has led me to discover my voice as a poet and artist. If I had stopped using AI or stopped minting NFTs as a reaction to the criticisms I received, I wouldn’t be here getting to explore what it means to publish a poetry collection as a series of generative editions, to co-author a series of embodied interactions enabled and linked by blockchain.
JK: Following on this evolution, Sasha, I have seen you describe yourself as a “meta poet.” Can you talk a bit about what that term means?
SS: I mean “meta poet” in the ancient Greek sense of “after,” “beyond,” “above” … My poetry tends to be language that is about itself, language that is self aware. I’ve always been really interested in the idea of the ars poetica—literally the art of poetry, poetry as an art form, a genre of poems that are about poetry—poems that explore the role of poets in society, the poet’s relationship to language and to the act of writing. In fact, my first sustained project in this area and also my first solo show in 2020 was called “Ars Poetica Cybernetica”—poetry not just as an art form but as a technological invention that has empowered consciousness and enhanced our human experience for more than thousands of years. The poetics of networked imagination, intelligent systems, the poetics of technology and communication.
When I began working with AI, I referred to myself as a “transhuman translator,” layering human text with computer-generated interpretations and extrapolations as a new kind of poetic approach. It’s quite meta to think about how advancing technologies like AI-driven large language models and text to image tools can continue to expand and enhance our imagination and empower us to understand ourselves in new ways. And I think it’s very meta to make blockchain poetry inspired by the belief that poetry is one of the most profound and durable technologies we humans have ever invented—that poetry is the original blockchain, a data storage system developed before the advent of written language to preserve our most important information via poetic devices like meter, rhythm, rhyme, alliteration, assonance, and repetition.
JK: Poetry as the original blockchain: that is a new way to think about collective consciousness and memory. Amazing. Can you talk a bit about how your art practice connects to (or departs from) other work you do? Your teaching or your work in neurodiverse community building, for example, Nathaniel?
NS: I don’t really think of myself as a cutting edge artist. Rather, I most often come in just after those trailblazers have done their work, and the mainstream is aware of that new and different thing; folks are perhaps starting to talk about it, but mostly in black and white … Then, I nuance. I complexify. I bring one practice or discipline (or multiple) to another. I come in just after the crest of a hype cycle, and compare and contrast what’s happening to a similar dialog that came before (i.e., AI art critics now, as their comments relate to the negative photography discourse in the late 1800s), revel in the quality work that is just starting to happen, look for ways to poke and prod at the cracks and fissures that others found disappointing, but maybe find their beauty or tactility, or contrapuntally open them up further, but in different directions.
I’m a synthesizer, an analog, an aesthete, and an engineer. It’s how I make art: experimenting and playing, hoping, and looking for something I didn’t expect that I can amplify, breaking down how that happened, understanding it through multiple lenses, moving, thinking, and feeling, then sharing. I love to share in my wonder.
That’s how I teach, too. I’m essentially in three departments:the departments of Art and Design and Mechanical Engineering, and our Lubar Entrepreneurship Center. I often say “I teach artists how to engineer, engineers how to art, and everyone how to sustain their passions” (the latter is how I define entrepreneurship). I try to bring curiosity and delight, depth and productive confusion to just about everything. There’s magic in that. My students (usually) love it.
It’s also how I engineer. The art leads to engineering (artificially aging phones for The World After Us turned into finding new uses for e-waste), and vice versa (my climate action startup that leverages the blockchain to convert small scale farms to regenerative practices was born out of a failed NFT drop with some friends). I am easily inspired by other people’s passions (how I wound up teaching creative technology to autistic teens in an effort to help build community, and an NSF mentor to a Sodium-Ion Battery startup) and I’m always looking for interesting opportunities.
For example, when I saw the NEA Research Lab call for proposals, I worked with the aforementioned team towards that grant to start the Autism Brilliance Lab for Entrepreneurship, quantifying and qualifying that work so it might be expanded nationally. When I was asked by Sasha to do AI poetry for theVERSEverse’s genText series, I figured GPT-3 would know all about Greek mythology—given the public domain texts it was trained on—but wondered if I could have the neural network tie it to space and the future, or if I could get the, the, the, the AI to stutter as a kind of performative space between (which became my still-in-process—though some are already available—12-piece collaboration with Anne Spalter, Future Mythologies).
I guess I'm simply saying: there’s a lot to do, I’m naturally curious about things, and I want to bring others along for the ride. I’ve been super lucky (privileged) in what I have found. I’d add here that part of that luck (and privilege) is precisely in understanding how privileged I am, and doing my best to make an impact with it. I believe in the artist as a public figure, as both engaging and engaged; because the only things I appreciate as much as a beautiful and provocative work of art, are the discussions and actions that can grow out of one.
Given that, I also believe that generosity is key to contemporary practices of art. If art is a conversation, you gotta make people want to talk to you; you gotta be nice, you gotta ask questions, you have to not only be interesting, but interested—in other work and what others say and do.
I believe in chit chat, in discourse, in studio critique, in humanity; I believe in art karma, in goin’ around and comin’ around, in sending folks to see things and meet people, and in sharing my tricks and my code and myself.
Teaching is a part of my practice, and a part of my work. Writing is a part of my practice and a part of my work. Collaborating is always implicit in what I do, and often explicit towards the end of a given piece. It’s not a perfect approach; it can be hard sometimes, disappointing, I’ve been burned … but I’ve found openness and positivity to be an extraordinarily satisfying life most of the time.
JK: Sasha, please tell us a bit about STILL MOVING.
SS: I’d love to. STILL MOVING is an interactive, AI-powered poem about humanity’s visceral engagement with the virtual—written and published via the blockchain as a token word performance, and embodied by each collector as a uniquely intimate, personalized interpretation. Rooted deeply in my experiments with algorithmic authorship and my long-standing interest in how we engage with our digital devices, and in Nathaniel’s thoughtful, playful work in digital, interactive, and networked art, this long-form generative verse is intended as an on-chain ode to the relationship of bodies to machines. Literal and figurative wordplay activates the liminal space between text and reader, extending the two-dimensional screen/page into a somatic, material realm where language moves us in every sense of that phrase: up, down, sideways, forwards, backwards, and in otherwise inexpressible directions.
Ultimately, the project is an ars poetica about what it means to be a human body facing a machine: a showdown, a form of worship, a distraction, a mirror gaze, an other, an alter? After we bend to our technologies, do we spring back into shape, or assume new forms? Where does input end, and output begin? As we continue to think, work, and play faster than ever while rooted in place, it is still possible to be moved—really moved?
This impulse to reclaim our dynamism and intuitive physicality in an age of technological acceleration, bodily inertia, and rote gestures is something that Nathaniel and I have been engaging in separately for years, and began exploring together with COMPOSE (2022), a series of unique “pose/prose” poems commissioned for the exhibition “DYOR” at Kunsthalle Zürich. When curator Nina Roehrs asked about contributing a poem to the show, in collaboration with playrecordmint (a screen and sensor setup that enables a live audience to interact with and co-create coded artworks, which I first discovered thanks to my friend Leander Herzog) I immediately thought of my body language experiments created with PoseNet around 2019, and of Nathaniel’s long trajectory in this area, and we began working together to shape a piece that invited museum visitors to write a poem into existence with their bodies.
STILL MOVING is our fourth collaboration and represents a culmination (so far) of our combined years of research,experimentation, and art-making about technology and the body, of poetic performance, the intense physicality of personal expression, and the incredibly personal act of reading—in which any and every text offers a bespoke experience based on a reader’s background, memories, interests, etc. You could say that every reader is essentially a unique transaction hash that, when activated by code, triggers a 1/1 interpretation.
STILL MOVING also embodies the future of web3 literature, in which the book—read-only—evolves into a read-write-interact experience, and authors begin to adopt such tools as webcams and NFTs in their writerly arsenal. Each unique edition is “written” via camera-based motion tracking (data confined to local machine only); human forms and gestures shape machine expression, and cybernetic serendipity inspires poetic association. Hence the wordplay of the title and the text: Make a move, and be moved; Stand still, and instill meaning …
JK: So, what should collectors look for in the series as it is revealed?
NS: Although I don’t tend to think of interactive art as subtle, the differences in each piece in this series are. Of course you’ll see lots of fun preview images with easter egg graphics, parts of the poem or poetic phrasings, a movie reference or even the occasional transaction hash itself revealed over time ... But I’m more excited for when people play: different speeds and directions of the interactive animations, shadows and outlines and trails and curves … lines vs letters …
For me, this isn’t just about the generative attributes we can see. It’s about changing how we move, how we practice being moved, how we rehearse that movement by entangling and embodying words, actions, the blockchain, generativity, all of that, and none of that, and more in those awkward moments in front of our screens. I’m really hoping that collectors and viewers will not only share a JPG or screenshot, but rather perform-with different editions in the series, share videos with one another, talk through how it feels in real-time, how they relate to it as they do so, and learn from each other’s movements. It’s playfully serious, and seriously playful. I plan to try and model some of this with screen recordings the week before release, and I’m hoping for others to follow suit.
JK: Sasha, do you have any thoughts about how this project participates in broader conversations in generative language poetry?
SS: Generative is a word that’s very familiar to poets. We often talk about generative workshops, in which a teacher provides a prompt and we human poets free-write in response. And algorithmic authorship has deep roots in aleatory writing and the many avant-garde movements that experimented with mechanical or automated approaches to language. But still, it’s very rare to see poetry in the context of generative, digital art. The inclusion of this project on Art Blocks is a strong statement about the nature of poetry as an art form with a place alongside the many brilliant projects that are being developed and shared in this space. It says something very exciting about the rise of poetry collectors alongside art collectors—about the cultural currency of poetry.
JK: Is there anything else you would like to share that would help viewers approach and appreciate your work?
NS: I ask you to spend time with it. It is so easy to “own then dismiss” art more generally, and especially in the fast-paced world of digital art and NFTs. But there’s a lot there. There’s a lot to wonder about. I write books, and teach, and work on multi-year traveling exhibitions with documentaries and publications, etc., precisely because I am more interested in that complexity and nuance—in the discussions I get to have with other fascinating artists and scientists and thinkers—than I am in being first. I love working with Sasha because she is not only talented and smart, but thoughtful and intentional. She has so much integrity in what she does, and that is something I also strive for. Affection and reflection. Give me that half-hour my dad gave me for my poetry. Look at some of the work I’ve done over the past 25 years and try to make some of the connections I did—or your own, and tell me about them.
I love being an artist. I love being alive. It is heartbreakingly beautiful. Let’s talk/think/make/write about it, together. Imagine what we could do, if we spent more time imagining what we could do…
SS: I’m wary of what already seems to be a narrow view or a calcifying view of what AI-generated language and art sounds like or looks like ... By layering a variety of perhaps unexpected approaches including moving type influenced by body language and a somewhat unconventional take on text-to-image/image-to-text, we hope to emphasize the tremendous variety, versatility, and creativity enabled by algorithmic tools. And as our respective artistic practices suggest, we are both very interested in what the future of language and literature holds; STILL MOVING is, I hope, a peek at one way in which storytelling may crack open and proliferate in a world of networked narration and imagination fueled by collective consciousness.
JK: Thank you to you both for taking the time for this discussion, Sasha and Nathaniel. Before we close this conversation, are there any recent accomplishments you’d like to share?
NS: That’s a hard question. I am always moving and am on to the next thing by nature, but I also don’t really put out much I don’t love (though there are plenty of projects I abandon; if you’re not failing, you’re not experimenting enough). Let’s see … I’m really proud of being curated on Art Blocks, to be honest! I’d also love for people to check out the documentary and catalog for my traveling museum show that is just ending its third and final leg—The World After Us: imaging techno-aesthetic futures—as well as its NFTs still available on Quantum. That show is probably the biggest and most complex of mine to date.
But, I’m most excited for what’s coming. Mother Computer, with Sasha, will be just as big if not bigger, and we recently found out we will be funded through the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Office of Research to produce much of that art, a catalog, and series of artist books as part of the show. And I have three new, highly conceptual smart-contract-based works in the pipeline about love, time, gifting, and promises—romantic and cynical, sad and hopeful, and intensely careful—that could only exist on the Blockchain; I can’t wait to see how people feel about and react to them.
SS: The audiobook of Technelegy—a four hour soundtrack with electronically enhanced spoken word and original music by my creative partner, Kris Bones—releases soon, as a media-rich publication as well as music NFTs. I’ve been working on this for two years and am incredibly excited to share it widely.
Nathaniel Stern
Sasha Stiles
Both artists
