Exhibit Review: Sasha Stiles Brings Language to Life at MoMA in “A LIVING POEM”
review
review
☆BY NATASHA LAST-BERNAL☆
IMAGINE FRANKENSTEIN’S MONSTER AS AN IMMORTAL LIVING POEM—autonomous, ever-changing and evolving before your very eyes. This is the artistic provocation Sasha Stiles offers in her Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) exhibition A LIVING POEM, an AI-powered visual poem that rewrites itself every 60 seconds.
Stiles has become the leading figure in poetry’s expansion into generative intelligence and hybrid authorship. Her body of work fuses literary craft with emerging technologies, most notably through her ongoing collaboration with Technelegy, her poetic AI alter-ego. Trained since 2019 to mimic and adapt to Stiles’ creative voice, Technelegy participates in a co-creative process that pushes the boundaries of authorship and reimagines algorithmic creativity in the digital age.
On a large digital screen, A LIVING POEM moves with a lively rhythm of its own. Text materializes, morphs and dissolves in real time through Stiles' custom-trained language model, curated prompts, and a sensory ecosystem of sound and imagery. The poetry appears in multiple typefaces including Cursive Binary, a custom font that merges Stiles’ unique handwriting with the zeros and ones of binary code.
Synthesizing her artistic process with technology, Stiles reconfigures poetry as a medium of living and evolving communication, an intelligence that probes “the evolution of language beyond oral, written and human traditions.” The result is A LIVING POEM, a dynamic digital organism, unfettered by material constraints and capable of infinite adaptation and revision.
Drawing inspiration from the MoMA’s historic collection of text-based works and poetry’s origins in oral tradition, A LIVING POEM offers a uniquely subjective encounter for every viewer. Lines such as “Inspiration moves me, I call it breathe” and “I’m holding out for something older than language” invite multiple interpretations, each shaped by the viewer’s own internal landscape. The accompanying one-hour soundscape, produced by Stiles’ creative partner Kris Bones, layers echoing spoken word with electronic, otherworldly music, rendering the experience even more immersive and unrivaled in its novelty.
Stiles disrupts traditional preconceptions of poetry as academic, one-dimensional or static. Her work brings poetic language back down to Earth and then launches it out of this world, pushing the boundaries of language into an entirely new imaginative realm. A LIVING POEM envisions a future where creativity emerges from both machinery and mind, not as opposing forces but as collaborative artistic partners.
Experience the evolving, sentient language of A LIVING POEM online or at the MoMA through Spring 2026.
