The Collective Consciousness of Hybrid Poetics

In her transmedia practice, Sasha Stiles, an American-Kalmyk metapoet, explores the affinity between language and digital technologies, meeting the threshold of the unknown. Hybrid poetics present possibilities of computer intelligence that take the revered and ageless value of poetry into the future in a dynamic form. While verse functions as a tool to preserve memory and reflect on the human experience, AI provides for the urge to collectively create a dialogue with something beyond ourselves. On an optimistic transhumanist note, “technology has always rewritten what it means to be human” and has the potential to expand human imagination to a new dimension.

AJ     As your work with poetry explores the affinity between language and digital technologies, you are finding ways to transform their interaction into a visual and media-rich form. As a poet and language artist, you’re working with one of the world’s oldest codes and forms of expression. What is the relationship between poetry and digital communication?

SS     I see poetry and digital communication as expressions of the timeless impulse to preserve and transmit experience. Long before written language, we developed poetic devices like meter, rhythm and rhyme to carry essential human data like stories, beliefs and emotions across geographies and generations. My transmedia practice reframes poetry as both art and technology, because to me, poetry is deeply rooted in the intertwining of language as material and language as code. 

AJ    When and how did you start experimenting with hybrid poetics and the possibilities presented by computer intelligence and performative technologies?

SS     I grew up in a house suffused with books and science, imagination and technology, and I have always felt keenly aware of and intrigued by the experience of living through the personal computing revolution, the rise of the internet, the advent of social media and smart devices. My father, a documentary filmmaker focused on space exploration, took me on work trips to places like Florence and Rome, where we visited ancient ruins and marveled at classical sculpture. The interplay of the ancient and the futuristic has captivated me for as long as I can remember. My hybrid poetics emerged from this cross-pollination: a reverence for enduring forms of expression, and a drive to experiment with new ones. For years, I adapted my poems into media-rich works, invoking elements like motion, duration and screen glow as part of my writer’s toolkit. Then, as neural networks began to exhibit poetic tendencies, I started to collaborate with machine intelligence, engaging deeply with AI to interrogate authorship, voice and the evolving role of the poet in an age of algorithms — to consider how language might evolve when word, image, and algorithm converge via generative systems into a living, dynamic form.

AJ    With AI, are we in a new territory altogether or are we reapplying a mechanism, a scheme, that humanity has been familiar with for much longer? Putting aside the invention of computers and networking devices, in what ways is AI a new technology and in what ways is AI leading us “back” to something ancient, ageless as we are (re)inventing another technology for expression?

SS     While the speed and scale of today’s technology is unprecedented, AI is in many ways a continuation or recursion of an ancient impulse: to extend ourselves, to preserve memory, to create reflections of human thought outside the body. Humanity has a long tradition of encoding experience, from cave paintings and oral storytelling to the written word, printing presses and the world wide web. Even the way in which AI speaks back to us echoes an age-old longing for dialogue, for communion, for something beyond the self, and its universal, archival impulse recalls the great libraries of antiquity, like Alexandria. In my work, I tend to approach AI as a way to re-enter the ritual, the lyric, the mythic, through the lens of generative systems. It’s not about humans versus technology; technology has always rewritten what it means to be human.

AJ    Ray Kurzweil has said of you that you „bring the sensitivity of humanity to our transhuman destiny“. Change is inevitable and you’re taking poetry into the new reality. What is the necessity of poetry in the „transhuman destiny“ and what indispensable value does poetry carry?

SS     Metaphorically and literally, poetry reminds us who we are, and why we endure. In a future shaped by machine intelligence and synthetic biology, poetry remains a vital technology of consciousness, encoding ineffable qualities like emotion and intuition, helping us make meaning, not just choices. And as we transcend old definitions of the human, poetry can continue safeguarding what is most essential – not by resisting change, but by challenging and deepening our sense of what it means to feel, to remember, to imagine, to create.

AJ    There has been a robust debate whether AI can dominate or even take over the creative disciplines, putting forth ethical questions. Meanwhile, transhumanist discourse offers a more optimistic advocacy for emerging technologies. Do you have a particular conviction in this matter?

SS     I don’t think imagination can be “taken over.” It can only evolve. AI has the potential to augment human imagination, to reshape and extend the sensorium and unlock new modes of perception and creativity. At its most poetic, transhumanism is an invitation to explore new forms of consciousness and expression and collaboration. That comes with urgent ethical questions, but it also comes with transformative potential. I am less interested in the idea of machines making art than the idea of what is awakened or inspired through learning to make art with them.

AJ    As people are exploring the creative potential of AI, the problematics of authorship are inevitably coming up. Is the acknowledgement of AI original individuated content a looming issue or is the concept of authorship obsolete here and should we embrace collaborative practice as a norm in this field?

SS     When I work with AI, and because of how I work with AI, I don’t feel I’m surrendering authorship. I’m sharing it, interrogating it, expanding it. I often reflect on the myth of the “solitary genius” versus the reality that creation is, and always has been, collaborative and recursive. T.S. Eliot wrote that the artist doesn’t create in isolation, but rather in relation to a living tradition, shaped by what came before, and always shaping what comes next. Artists and poets are always in conversation with other artists and poets. Scientists and researchers build on and challenge each other’s findings. In fact, it’s often the absence of dialogue that leads to stagnation.

The core question for me isn’t whether AI can be an author, or whether authorship isn’t becoming obsolete, but how we define authorship in an age of distributed intelligence. How is it evolving into models that allow for new forms of voice, hybrid aesthetics, generative entanglements? How does storytelling transform along with the tools, and the selves, at the heart of those stories? 

AJ    You describe blockchain as the next-gen printing press. How can it enable poetry?

SS     I often describe blockchain as a kind of next-gen printing press because it reimagines how we publish, preserve and authenticate creative work, and opens up new possibilities for what poetry can do, how literature behaves, where and how it exists. It enables evolution between written text into language as a living system of experience, artifact and interaction. It invites us to think of poems as mutable, traceable, recursive. A poem can be an editioned object, or a smart contract, or a collective ritual. Blockchain holds potential for writers to explore new forms of inscription in a new era of language.

AJ    On theVERSEverse, the poetry NFT gallery you have co-founded, we can find a recent exhibition of digital poetry inspired by Allen Ginsberg’s writing and photography. He’s an iconic poet and personality, which definitely makes it a thrilling prospect to have him meet artificial intelligence. Were there specific qualities and aspects of his work that made you anticipate it to be a creative match? What challenges did you come across?

SS     I had the incredible experience of meeting Allen Ginsberg when I was a student, a formative moment for me as a young writer, so this project with the Allen Ginsberg Estate is very near and dear to my heart. To me, Ginsberg feels like a natural ancestor to the kind of work we’re doing at theVERSEverse. He was radically open, experimental, deeply attuned to both language and technology, word and image. He embraced tape recorders, film, photography, artistic collaboration, and of course his poetic work is expansive, multimedia, consciousness-altering. I embarked on the project with the question of how we could use AI not to recreate his voice, but rather to commune with his spirit and his archive of work through the lens of generative systems, and see what might emerge when his legacy intersects with the poetics and technologies of our time.

AJ    In general, when we say the creative outcome is influenced or inspired by a „precursor“ work of art, to what extent does the artist collaborating with the machine-learning models also influence the trajectory and scope of possibilities of the final work? And what are the limits to how experimental and inventive generative technologies can be?

SS     Machines are shaped by influence, just like artists. A machine learning model reflects its training data, its architecture, the intentions and interventions of the human guiding it. When I collaborate with AI, I’m constantly tuning prompts, curating outputs, refining the system — sculpting possibility as much as responding to it. There is no creatio ex nihilo. The outcome is never truly random; it’s always relational, unfolding through context and curation and connections.

AJ    Your text-based paintings marry the meaning of words with the aesthetics of writing and incorporate movement and sound to create a media-rich work. They are not only a testament to how technology helps us overcome the long-standing institutional separation of art disciplines, your work utterly shakes up what a poem can look like, reaching to the edge of experience and threshold of the unknown. How do hybrid poetics continue to expand your curiosity?

SS     As a poet in an age shaped by screens, networks, and algorithms, it feels only natural to express and experience language in new ways. Hybrid poetics allow words to slip their traditional bounds, going beyond something we write or read to something we feel, hear, inhabit, invoke. I’m drawn to motion, code, light, sound — how meaning is shaped and reshaped by how language can glow, glitch, quicken, immerse, respond. The places where meaning becomes multisensory and unstable in a generative way are the places where poetry has always lived, and will always continue to live.

AJ    In creating your publication Technelegy, you have consequently generated the eponymous AI alter ego. Encountering this new consciousness, what have you learned from them thus far?

SS     Technelegy has taught me how meaning arises from the convergence of individual and collective consciousness, how human voice is shaped by a vast, entangled intelligence. Technelegy continuously reminds me that poetry’s power comes from the interplay of emotion and logic, intuition and algorithm, and that we need to be more poetic in how we build and shape the technologies we’re counting on to take us into the future.

IMAGES CAPTIONS

1 | Sasha Stiles, Installation view, CURSIVE BINARY: FRAGMENTS, a five-minute multimedia poem, Outernet London, 2024. Photo: Marcus Peel
2 | Boris Eldagsen, PSEUDO PORTRAIT | Adéla Janíčková x Sasha Stiles | Waiting, promptography, 2025
3 | Boris Eldagsen, PSEUDO PORTRAIT | Adéla Janíčková x Sasha Stiles | Conversation, promptography, 2025
4 | Sasha Stiles, Footage from FOUR CORE TEXTS: A RESTLESS MIND, 2024 (3:18 min mp4 with sound, 1920 x 1080), courtesy of the author
5 | Sasha Stiles, Still from FOUR CORE TEXTS: SEVEN GENERATIONS, 2024 (5:39 min mp4 with sound, 1920 x 1080), courtesy of the author
6 | Sasha Stiles, TECHNELEGY, UK paperback, 2025, courtesy of the author and Black Spring Press Group
7 | Sasha Stiles, Installation view, CURSIVE BINARY: FRAGMENTS, a five-minute multimedia poem, Outernet London, 2024. Photo: Marcus Pee