Sasha Stiles, Conversing with Kindred Technologies, Generation to Generation

Interview with artist Sasha Stiles about her collaborative exhibition titled Generation to Generation: Conversing with Kindred Technologies. By Selva Ozelli Esq, CPA, Author of Sustainably Investing in Digital Assets Globally

The Museum of Art + Light (MoA+L) presents Generation to Generation: Conversing with Kindred Technologies, a traveling exhibition by artists Nathaniel Stern and Sasha Stiles, from September 4, 2026, through February 14, 2027, in the museum’s De Coded Digital Gallery.  The exhibition approaches artificial intelligence (AI) as more than a recent invention or isolated digital tool. Stern and Stiles place AI within a much longer history of human beings developing systems to extend thought, language, memory, labor, and imagination. Their work examines the reciprocal nature of that relationship: people shape technology through their language, values, biases, and decisions, while technology, in turn, influences how people create, communicate, and understand the world.

Sasha Stiles, Conversing with Kindred Technologies

Stiles is a poet, artist, and artificial intelligence researcher known for bringing human writing into sustained creative exchange with computer-generated language. Together, they treat AI as both a collaborator and a cultural artifact that is shaped by the words, histories, decisions, and limitations people pass into it.

“Artificial intelligence is already shaping how we create, communicate, and understand the world, yet much of the current public conversation is driven by hype or fear,” said Erin Dragotto, Executive Director of MoA+L. “Generation to Generation creates space for something more thoughtful. That is central to our mission at the intersection of art and technology. Through art, complex ideas become tangible, approachable and deeply human. This exhibition invites our visitors to look closely at AI as a creative tool while asking the questions that must guide how we use it and what kind of future we build with it.”

“This exhibition resists the simple conclusion that artificial intelligence must be wholly good or wholly bad,” said Jori Louise Cheville, Director of Curatorial Affairs at MoA+L. “Instead, it asks what people gain, what they risk, and what responsibilities they assume when working with these systems. It also asks how creativity, care, and human judgment might guide the technologies we build. Visitors don’t need prior knowledge of coding or AI to enter this conversation. They experience the exhibition by moving, listening, reading, looking, touching, and making.”

Tell us about your journey to become an artist and your interest in Artificial Intelligence and how it interacts with art.

I grew up in a house immersed in science and books — my parents made science documentaries and worked with Carl Sagan on Cosmos — and I’m part of the Xennial generation, with a very analog childhood that quickly gave way to computer games, the internet, smart devices, digital culture. So I’ve always been very aware of and fascinated by my own relationship to technology. Long before the current AI boom, I was preoccupied with how technology was changing what it means to be human, writing poems about artificial wombs and neural implants and posthumanism and superintelligence and digital immortality. Then the arrival of transformer-based architectures and early large language models rocked my world, and soon so did blockchain, which I’ve often described as a next-generation printing press. Language itself was becoming computational in a radically new way, and yet relatively few people in my corner of the literary or art worlds seemed to be engaging with what that might mean. I felt compelled to keep following that thread, and in 2021 I published Technelegy, a collection of poetry and art created in part with AI, exploring intelligent systems not only as a subject but also as a creative medium. It was surreal to me, as a poet, to have the work endorsed by a futurist and technologist like Ray Kurzweil, who greatly encouraged me by affirming that poetry might have something essential to contribute to a conversation largely framed in technological terms.

With your work you place AI within a much longer history of human beings developing systems to extend thought, language, memory, labor, and imagination by examining the reciprocal nature of that relationship: people shape technology through their language, values, biases, and decisions, while technology, in turn, influences how people create, communicate, and understand the world.  Tell us more about this.

AI may feel like an unprecedented rupture, but it’s part of a much longer history of humans building technologies to extend ourselves. For me, the link between poetry and AI begins with the fact that poetry — even though we tend to think of it as a quintessentially human art form — emerged in part as an ancient data-storage system: a way of preserving memory, transmitting knowledge, and carrying language across generations before writing even existed. Poetry was perhaps one of our earliest ways of fusing emotion and algorithm — rhythm, repetition, pattern, compression — in order to extend memory and perception, externalize our inner lives, and connect one consciousness to another. So I think of poetry as a technology that has helped us become more human, not less. And that feels especially important now, in a time of so much dystopian thinking and fear around AI. I’m interested in asking whether these new technologies might also become tools through which we deepen rather than diminish our humanity — helping us imagine more expansively, understand one another differently, and perhaps become more fully human.

How do inherited language and cultural memory influence what AI generates?

Since I was little, libraries and museums have been my sacred, happy places, and I often think about intelligent systems in a similar way: as meeting grounds for voices and ideas across space and time, a kind of high-dimensional collective consciousness. In a sense, that’s how culture and canon have always worked: we meet on the common ground of shared stories, books, phrases, images, archives. And language itself is a kind of archaeology of cultural memory: every word carries traces of what came before — stories, myths, idioms, biases, references, entire ways of seeing the world.

What fascinates me about large language models and generative AI, broadly speaking, is that they’re relational: meaning emerges not simply from individual data points, but from the relationships between them. I can walk into a library, pick up one book, cross the building and pick up another, and the collision between those two texts might spark a poem that would be completely different if I’d chosen a different second book. And those choices aren’t random: my lived experience shapes where I gravitate, what I notice, what I read, which connections spark for me. When we enter, via prompts, the vast cultural archive of an AI’s training data, we’re coming from different coordinates — picking up different books, making different connections, generating different ideas. We’re not searching for some fixed meaning that’s just sitting there waiting to be found; we’re actively producing meaning in real time through the particular relationships we create between things. We’re producing something meaningful to us.

How might people build relationships with technology founded on curiosity, reciprocity, and care?

Being more poetic about our technologies would be a good start. Poetry is proof that technology does not have to equal extraction and dehumanization. Poetry is proof that we can make technologies that encourage reflection rather than distraction, empathy rather than polarization, and imagination rather than automation. If we invested even a fraction of what we put into artificial intelligence into cultivating what I call “poetic intelligence,” I think we’d be much better equipped to thrive, which is why Nathaniel and I are very glad to be bringing GENERATION TO GENERATION to the Museum of Art + Light, with its focus not only on art but on education and cultural engagement.

Under US law text-to-image AI creations generated entirely by a machine without human expressive input do not receive copyright protection. The U.S. Copyright Office and federal courts maintain a strict human authorship requirement, meaning raw outputs from prompts fall directly into the public domain.  What are your thoughts in regard to this and its impact on AI generated art?

Prevailing discourse tends to focus on “who made this, human or machine?”, but I’m much more interested in what happens when humans and machines come together to create and imagine things that have never existed before. Those new forms may not fit neatly into the copyright, legal, or even existential categories we’ve inherited, and to me that’s where the most interesting questions begin. Yes, we need frameworks that protect human ingenuity from exploitation, but we also need new mindsets capable of recognizing forms of authorship and creativity that are genuinely collaborative, distributed, emergent.

How can people reach you?

Sasha Stiles

sashastiles.com

@sashastiles on IG and Twitter

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