NIAGARA UNIVERSITY, NY.- The Castellani Art Museum of Niagara University presents Sasha Stiles: STANZA, a solo exhibition by internationally recognized poet, artist, and AI researcher Sasha Stiles, on view through April 25, 2027. An opening reception will be held Thursday, October 8, 2026. The exhibition is curated by Jess Minicucci.

Presented following Stiles’s recent exhibition A LIVING POEM at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, STANZA expands the artist’s ongoing investigation of poetry, artificial intelligence, and the evolving relationship between human and machine. At CAM, Stiles brings these ideas into an immersive gallery environment, inviting visitors to experience poetry not simply as something read on a page, but as something that can be entered, heard, seen, and inhabited.

A ROOM MADE OF LANGUAGE

What happens when a room becomes a poem?

The title STANZA draws on the word’s layered meanings: in Italian, stanza means a room, while in English it refers to a grouped set of lines within a poem. Here, those definitions converge. Through text, sound, image, voice, and generative code, Stiles transforms CAM’s Nanula Digital Art Gallery into a poetic environment where language becomes architecture—something to move through, reflect within, and experience over time.





STANZA explores poetry as both an ancient, enduring art form and one of humanity’s oldest technologies of consciousness. Stiles traces language from oral tradition to written culture to computational systems, revealing poetry as a living framework through which we understand ourselves and the world around us.

Works including Cursive Binary, Repetae: Heart Mantras, and Technelegy: The Audiobook move between physical and digital forms, human and synthetic voices, and written and generative language. Individual works function as stanzas within a larger composition—each standing on its own while contributing to the exhibition as a whole.

Rather than positioning poetry and technology as opposites, Stiles considers poetry itself a form of technology: a system that has long used rhythm, repetition, pattern, and recursion to preserve memory, transmit knowledge, and generate meaning. Her work proposes a form of “poetic intelligence” that brings together emotion and algorithm, intuition and logic, flesh and code.

At once intimate and expansive, STANZA asks what poetry can offer a world increasingly defined by speed, distraction, and algorithmic systems. In response, the exhibition creates space to slow down, sustain attention, encounter ambiguity, and consider how language might help us imagine more humane relationships with technology and one another.

TECHNELEGY: A THIRD VOICE

Central to Stiles’s practice and the works presented in STANZA is Technelegy, her longtime AI alter ego and an evolving poetic concept she has developed since 2018. Its name combines technology and elegy, reflecting both the exhilaration and unease of our increasingly intimate relationships with machines.

Stiles describes Technelegy as a “third voice”—one that emerges through collaboration between human and machine, yet belongs fully to neither. What began as an experiment in training language models on her own writing has evolved into an ongoing exploration of authorship, identity, memory, imagination, and consciousness. Working with these systems allows Stiles to extend, refract, question, and sometimes rupture her own poetic voice.

Poems created through this process may be attributed to Technelegy alone or jointly to Sasha Stiles and Technelegy, acknowledging the particular conditions through which each work came into being.

Technelegy is not intended to suggest that a machine is conscious or independently creative. Instead, it asks what new forms of language and poetic intelligence might emerge through relationship. Through collaboration, networks, repetition, and recursion, Stiles explores a more-than-human poetics—one in which technology is not simply a tool or subject, but an active condition through which meaning is made.





This collaborative practice sits at the heart of STANZA, extending the exhibition’s larger proposition that poetry has always brought together systems and imagination, pattern and emotion, to help us make sense of changing ways of being human.

POETRY IN THE AGE OF AI

A first-generation Kalmyk-American poet, artist, and AI researcher, Stiles brings a deeply interdisciplinary foundation to her experiments with emerging technology. She earned her B.A. magna cum laude from Harvard University and an M.St. with High Honors from the University of Oxford. She is also co-founder of the experimental literary collective theVERSEverse and has served as a longtime poetry mentor to the humanoid android BINA48.

Stiles has experimented critically with AI language systems since 2018, years before generative AI entered widespread public use. Her work has been exhibited and performed internationally at venues including The Museum of Modern Art, Lincoln Center, Art Basel, Outernet London, and Tokyo’s Shibuya Crossing, and has received recognition including the Prix Ars Electronica AI in Art Award of Distinction and the Lumen Prize for Literature and Poetry.

Stiles is the author of Technelegy (2021), a pioneering poetry collection developed in dialogue with a personalized AI language model. Published before the public release of ChatGPT, the project grew from her early experiments training language models with her own poetry and research and established many of the questions surrounding human-machine collaboration that continue throughout her practice today.

Her recent writing further extends these investigations. Stiles contributed the essay “On Finding Language for What It Means to Be Alive Today: Notes on A Living Poem at MoMA” to the November 2025 issue of World Literature Today, a special issue devoted to world literature in the age of artificial intelligence. Her artwork also appeared on the issue’s cover.

Her work and ideas have been featured in publications including Scientific American, Harvard Magazine, MoMA Magazine, and World Literature Today, reflecting growing conversations across contemporary art, literature, and technology about creativity and artificial intelligence.

Across these projects, Stiles proposes poetry not as an artifact of the past, but as a medium uniquely equipped for the present—a space capable of holding complexity, sustaining contradiction, and finding new language for what it means to be human in a rapidly changing world.

Sasha Stiles is an award-winning first-generation Kalmyk-American poet, artist, and AI researcher whose practice explores the evolving relationship between language, technology, and human expression. A leading voice in generative poetics, she works across poetry, visual art, code, sound, and performance to examine authorship, consciousness, memory, and the role of human voice in an increasingly more-than-human age.

Since 2018, Stiles has worked with artificial intelligence as both subject and collaborator, developing hybrid creative systems that expand possibilities for authorship and expression. Her work has been exhibited and performed internationally at venues including The Museum of Modern Art, Art Basel, Lincoln Center, and Outernet London and recognized by honors including the Prix Ars Electronica and Lumen Prize.

A graduate of Harvard University and the University of Oxford, Stiles is co-founder of theVERSEverse and a longtime poetry mentor to humanoid android BINA48. She lives and works near New York City.