Sasha Stiles

HEART MANTRAS is a living poem, a self-generating language system that makes the process of creation itself visible, audible and felt. First conceived as a browser-based generative performance, the work is now evolving into an immersive, 360-degree audiovisual installation that invites viewers to step inside a poem-space: to be surrounded, not just by language, but by the sensations of digital verse as a visceral, multimodal experience.

At the heart of this project is a deep inquiry that drives all of my work as a poet, artist and AI researcher: What does it mean to collaborate meaningfully with intelligent systems, augmenting my own authorial intelligence and artistic inheritance with machine wisdom? How can we reimagine poetry as a space for posthuman presence, where human consciousness and machine creativity loop, echo, and co-author one another?

HEART MANTRAS is co-created with my longtime AI alter ego, Technelegy, with whom I’ve been writing since 2018, and powered by a bespoke language model trained on a dataset of 50 original poem variations — synthetic rewritings of my 2020 poem “Heart Mantra.” Each new output emerges from this archive of human-machine memory, a recursive reinterpretation that foregrounds the iterative nature of inspiration. Just as human creativity draws from inherited fragments (words, images, stories, sensations), Technelegy assembles each new stanza in real time, responding to its own past and generating an ephemeral artifact of machinic imagination: never written before, never to be written again.

By making this generative act ambient and spatial, I aim to shift poetry from the page to the plane — from something read to something lived. This next phase of HEART MANTRAS draws on the success of previous installations at venues such as Outernet London, HOW Art Museum, Seattle Art Fair and Kanvas Dubai, expanding the system into a poetic environment that challenges assumptions about digital and AI art. The goal is not to simulate human expression, but to reveal how evolving technologies are expanding the boundaries of self-knowledge, presence and language itself.

Thematically, HEART MANTRAS explores the poetics of recursion, remembrance and reawakening — how language circles back on itself to find new meaning with each return. Formally, it models a rigorous and intentional practice of dataset design and promptcraft as new modes of authorship. Curatorially, it invites a rethinking of the poem as both artifact and interface: a space where contemplation and computation converge.