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The Black Spring Press Group

Technelegy

Technelegy

£12.99 GBP
£12.99 GBP
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Available in Hardback (2021) and Paperback (available to preorder, coming Spring 2024)

Technelegy is an essential handbook for our time of astonishing technological transformation by the world's leading AI poet.

“Through astonishing imagination and electric hybrid storytelling, Technelegy parses the unnervingly proximal reality of trans- and posthumanism, along with the myriad ways in which the sacred and eternal are kneaded into the fabric of a time of surveillance capitalism, predictive data AI bards, and robot monks. ‘The world grows old / and looks so new,’ writes Stiles, and how fortunate we are to have these singular poems and artworks as guides, returning our present reality to us simultaneously newer, older, and stranger." - Jenny Xie, winner of the Walt Whitman Award for poetry

In 2018, first-generation Kalmyk-American poet, artist and AI researcher Sasha Stiles found herself wondering what the rise of large language models might mean for writers - and for creativity at large. To probe the possibilities, she began translating over a decade of analog poems and research into a personalized AI model, augmenting human voice with next-gen imagination. She is widely recognized as a pioneer of generative literature and language art. Crafted jointly by Stiles and her poetic alter ego, Technelegy is a prescient artifact of the pre-ChatGPT era - a collection of generative poems nestled in their own training data - and an unprecedented experiment fusing past and future, woman and machine, verse and code, elegy and wordplay, in search of answers to the urgent question: what does it mean to be human in a nearly posthuman world? 

Listen to Meta Poetica, Stiles’ companion podcast about the technology of language, is available on Spotify.

Listen to TECHNELEGY: The Audiobook/Album available on Spotify and Everand.

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Sasha Stiles

is a Harvard and Oxford graduate, and has served as poetry mentor to the AI humanoid BINA48 since 2018 and lives near New York City with her husband and creative partner, Kris Bones.

Her work has been published and exhibited around the world, featured by institutions from MoMA to Christie’s, and referenced in publications including Artforum, Lit Hub, The Guardian and The Washington Post. In 2022, Stiles became the first writer to bring AI-powered verse to a major art house when her cinematic poem “COMPLETION: When it’s just you” – adapted from the text in TECHNELEGY – went on view at Christie’s and into the renowned 1OF1 collection. 

A frequent speaker at international events from SXSW to Art Basel and guest lecturer at schools and universities around the globe, Stiles is co-founder of acclaimed literary gallery theVERSEverse and has been named one of the “Top Artists Shaping the Digital Art Scene.” Other honors include a Future Art Award, the Lumen Prize shortlist, the IoDF 100 Innovators List, and nominations for the Forward Prize, Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Visit her website, sashastiles.com