NEW YORK, March 21, 2024 – To celebrate International Poetry Day and U.S. National Poetry Month, MakersPlace has teamed up with luxury audio brand, Bang & Olufsen, to announce the world premiere of “FOUR CORE TEXTS: Humanifesto and Other Poems”, a quartet of media-rich works written and performed by award-winning poet, language artist and AI researcher Sasha Stiles with original music by collaborator Kris Bones.
Coinciding with NFT NYC, the partnership will see the Bang & Olufsen flagship store in New York turned into a web3 digital art gallery of sounds and visuals, powered by MakersPlace, starting April 3 and ending April 10, 2024. The exhibit builds on Bang & Olufsen’s entry into web3, which started with their launch of the B&O DNA Collection in 2022.
Stiles – who has been described by curator Hans Ulrich Obrist as “the great visionary of AI art and poetry” and whose AI-powered artwork has recently been featured at Art Basel, Christie’s and Gucci flagships worldwide – will debut four transhuman poems in an immersive, site-specific installation co-created with B&O, paying homage to spoken word and the musicality of verse. Informed by Stiles’ Kalmyk-Mongolian heritage as well as by T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets,” the new collection augments Stiles’ acclaimed approach to algorithmic authorship with AI-powered translation, custom voice clones and myriad sonic elements, weaving the ancestral voices of shamans and nomads together with the digital whispers of contemporary codes and creators.
“As a poet exploring the evolution of language from antiquity to futurity, sound and technology are integral to my practice, even more so as I endeavor to use AI to help document and reconstruct family stories and voices,” said Stiles. “FOUR CORE TEXTS is a celebration of oral tradition and aural innovation, using cutting-edge tools – text generators, transcriptions and translations, synthetic audio, etc. – in concert with B&O’s beautiful instruments to transcend my own human tongue and transform the experience of a poem.”
The artworks from “FOUR CORE TEXTS” will be available for sale beginning on April 3, 2024 on MakersPlace (learn more). There will be a celebratory opening event at the B&O gallery, hosted by Sasha Stiles and MakersPlace, on April 4, 2024. RSVP required.
About Sasha Stiles
SASHA STILES is a first-generation Kalmyk-American poet, language artist and AI researcher whose work probes what it means to be human in a nearly post-human era. Widely recognized as a pioneer of generative literature and blockchain poetics, and author of the “instant techno-classic” poetry collection Technelegy (2021), her work has been published and exhibited around the world, and featured by institutions from MoMA to Christie’s to Art Basel, and publications including Artforum, Lit Hub and The Washington Post. Stiles is also 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 Optimism AI Award, the Lumen Prize shortlist, the IoDF 100 Innovators List, and nominations for the Forward Prize, Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Stiles 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.
About Bang & Olufsen
Bang & Olufsen is a luxury audio brand founded in 1925 in Struer, Denmark, by Peter Bang and Svend Olufsen whose devotion and vision remain the foundation for the company. For nearly a century, Bang & Olufsen has been pushing the boundaries of audio technology and the company continues to sit at the forefront of acoustic innovation.
Today, every Bang & Olufsen product is still characterized by the unique combination of beautiful sound, timeless design, and unrivalled craftsmanship. The company’s innovative and progressive products are sold worldwide in Bang & Olufsen stores, on bang-olufsen.com and in select retailers. The company employs approximately 900 people and operates in more than 70 markets. Bang & Olufsen’s shares are listed on NASDAQ Copenhagen A/S.
About MakersPlace
MakersPlace is the premier fine-art marketplace to discover and buy authentic digital art from the world’s leading artists. Launched in 2018, MakersPlace helped catapult digital art onto the global stage with the historic sale of Beeple’s Everydays: The First 5000 Days for $69.3 million in partnership with Christie’s auction house in March 2021 — the record price for any digital artwork. Our mission is simple: to enable a vibrant future for digital creativity.
MakersPlace stands at the forefront of an exciting new era in art, where digital and physical worlds converge. Its future initiatives focus on deepening collaborations with top-tier web3 artists and expanding partnerships with world-class galleries and curators. Moving forward, MakersPlace is committed to catalyzing this transformative movement, continually pushing the boundaries of art and technology.
