About this Event
Language artist Sasha Stiles explores poetry as a living technology shaped by memory, collaboration, and the tools we use to make meaning. Moving from oral tradition and writing to computation and generative AI, this participatory workshop invites students inside A LIVING POEM, Stiles’s generative artwork recently presented at MoMA in New York.
Participants will contribute fragments of language and watch them evolve, recombine, and take on unexpected forms, exploring what happens when human and algorithmic imaginations meet inside the machine of poetry.
Sasha Stiles is a first-generation Kalmyk-American poet and language artist whose work explores what it means to be human in a more-than-human world. Her interdisciplinary practice reimagines poetry as an ancient technology and a living computational medium, advancing poetic intelligence — the synthesis of emotion and algorithm — as a philosophy for the generative age. Her work has been honored with the Prix Ars Electronica and Lumen Prize, featured in The New York Times, Poets & Writers, and Artforum, and exhibited internationally, including at MoMA and Art Basel. A recent Monument Lab Fellow and Google Arts & Culture Artist-in-Residence, she has been co-evolving with her AI alter ego, Technelegy, since 2018.
Sasha Stiles. A LIVING POEM. 2025. Generative language system (original poetry, fragments from MoMA’s text-art collection, p5.js code, GPT-4) and sound. Music: Kris Bone. Image courtesy the artist
Saturday, October 3, 2026 from 1pm-3pm
PNCA - 511 NW Broadway, Portland OR
In Person Only
RSVP Required
Art, Aura & the Algorithm: PNCA's 2026 Symposium
Schedule Overview, October 1-3, 2026
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 1
5-8pm
First Thursday Exhibition Openings
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• Symposium Exhibition
• Aura photographs with Aura Archive
• PTXM Artist-Led Sewing Circle
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FRIDAY, OCTOBER 2
10am
Welcome & Opening Remarks
10-11:30am
Virtual Panel: Whither Aura: Profaning, Reclaiming, Preserving
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11:45am-12:30pm
AI Séance Performance
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1:30-3pm
Academic Faculty Panel: AI, Agency, and the Politics of Futurity
3-4:30pm
Creative Research Panel: BY WHOSE AUTHORITY?
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6pm-7:30pm
Keynote Lecture: Sasha Stiles (Dorothy Lemelson Lecture)
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SATURDAY, OCTOBER 3
1-3pm
Workshop: WHEN LANGUAGE COMES ALIVE: A LIVING POEM WITH SASHA STILES
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Event venue & nearby stays
Pacific Northwest College of Art, 511 Northwest Broadway, Portland, United States
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