Sasha Stiles’ FOUR CORE TEXTS is both a poetry collection and a symphony of voice, visual art, and cutting-edge technology.
This collection takes its title from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, which comprises four interlinked meditations on humanity’s relationship with time, the universe, and the divine, while Stiles’ poems focus on language, lineage, and technology.
Collaboration with Artificial Intelligence & Humans (Living & Dead)
As in the video-text-music fusion of Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, Stiles and collaborator/musical director Kris Bones electrify poetry from the page to the screen using all of the tools technology has put at their disposal, including exquisite sound design, text animation, human and synthetic vocals, typography, and color. This presentation brings poetry full circle from its roots as an oral and dramatic tradition.
At the core of this artistic mix is her collaboration with Technelegy, a personalized AI that Stiles has trained using her own autobiographical content and the rich linguistic heritage of the Kalmyk dialect. This collaboration is pivotal, as it allows the poetry to resonate not just with Stiles’ voice but also with a chorus of voice clones based on family members and archival sounds, creating a bridge between the past and the present, the personal and the universal.
Language as Lineage
“The First Quartet” serves as a powerful meditation on the separability of language from mere words. Each section begins with the line, “In the beginning, I was sound,” but most of the sounds described are songs, grunts, moans, wind, rain. Language, of the kind composed of distinct vocabulary, is largely absent from this four-pronged history. This is, of course, in direct contradiction to the Biblical, “In the beginning there was the Word, and the Word was God.”
Meanwhile, the text is recited in Kalmyk, the dying Mongolian dialect spoken by Stiles’ mother and grandparents. Though we cannot understand the words, we feel them. Though they are spoken by the synthetic voice of an artificial intelligence, still, we feel them.
“Seven Generations” underscores the narrative power of language through the lens of matriarchal ancestry. It portrays language not just as a means of communication but as a vessel of familial and cultural history. Stiles highlights that even without a direct linguistic connection—she does not speak Kalmyk, the language of her ancestors—the essence of the stories and the emotions they carry can still be profoundly understood.
Stories chant themselves
in a language I barely know
but understand as l do my heart,
trusting what it tells the cells of the body
I am yet scarcely understand.
“A Restless Mind,” the third and shortest of the four poems, contemplates the pervasiveness of language in the mental landscape. The poem illustrates the incessant activity of the mind and the desire to transcend this incessant chatter.
Arrest this mind, says lung, tongue,
points to the dwelling spot
Where language does its work,
not always well, not always.
Maybe all this languaging isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
Death as Humanity and Divinity
“Humanifesto” is the climax of FOUR CORE TEXTS. It brings form to the question that has been brewing under the surface of the first three: Is using words really what makes us human? The rise of LLMs (of the sort with which Stiles collaborated to write these poems) complicates that view of ourselves.
Our mortality and humanness are a complex gumbo of simple pleasures. We are not consistent, and that is what makes us beautiful. A clock may count in even steady increments, but we’re no more measurable than an unscored symphony that will one day end, even if the clock ticks on.
Time seeps through
the cracks. The machine
of waiting counts seconds,
hours, days, years
but cannot measure
the music of breath,
the heart's clockwork,
which isn't a machine
at all but a symphony,
however brief. The curtain
will fall. The final chord
will strike.
This poem places less emphasis on language than the first three, seeming to instead think in rhythm while pointing to the inadequacies of language, as if to say, The machines might master language, but what they’ll never get is the rhythm of life. Death and desire, the painful elements of life that meditation seeks to attenuate, are finally those beautiful twin afflictions that keep us grounded in humanness and beauty.
And yet, because we so fear death, we use any means at our disposal to create an everlasting life for ourselves through creation:
We give them breath and they burst
into being: poems, songs, prayers.
We call it living,
though that's a small word
for what we really do:
take the infinite, make it ours,
make ourselves infinite, too.
We will die, and maybe we’ll be remembered. As Stiles has said before, technology is an ancient, durable data storage solution for transmitting information, behaviors, stories, and memories.
Perhaps the most eerie thing about these poems is the dedication. As Stiles explained in an interview with nftnow:
“This entire quartet is written in collaboration with my AI alter ego, but in the case of ‘Humanifesto,’ during the writing process, Technelegy offered up the dedication ‘to Sasha’—related, no doubt, to the prevalence of dedications in the training data. Given that this transhuman poem is about the fate of humanity, it felt important to incorporate these two words into the final version.”
Just as language, story, and heritage have been our training data, maybe “training data” is how we’ll be remembered to future generations, however human they are.
Visit the FOUR CORE TEXTS exhibition page.
