Speaker 1: 0:00

Welcome to Tez Talks Radio. I am your host, Marisa True. Today, I am joined by the prolific Sasha Stiles, a poet, language artist and AI researcher exploring the nexus of text and technology, as well as the co-founder of the Verseverse. So Sasha actually joined us on the show about two years ago, around the time of her collection Technology, and since then her artistic career soared to new heights through collaborations with Gucci as well as Bang Olufsen, and then with her work having been displayed at venues across the world, including the V&A, Art Basel, Art Dubai, Tokyo's Shibuya Crossing and New York Times Square, and so many others. So, first off, hi Sasha, how are you doing?

Speaker 2: 0:40

Hi Marissa, I'm doing well. It's so nice to see you so.

Speaker 1: 0:44

I mean, it's really hard to distill the sheer amount of accolades that you've actually earned since we spoke last. I actually didn't even get round to starting on the awards because, frankly, it was too long. So I think a great place for us to start is a little bit of a catch up from where you were when we first spoke and where you are now. You know, historically, you began experimenting with AI as an artistic medium all the way back in 2018. So coming up to seven years ago now, and then in 2022, we saw the generative AI boom really capture public attention, as the tool was democratized and pretty much anyone could create AI art. So how did that propel your work, or how did that change perceptions of your work in the last few years?

Speaker 2: 1:29

Yeah, it's actually really nice to have a chance to kind of go back down memory lane for a moment, because it's sort of been, you know, forward momentum for for a long while now. So I'd like the opportunity to reminisce for a minute. But it's true, I mean it's I think you know it has been a couple of years since we spoke, and last time around, I think I had just released the U S version of my first poetry collection, technology, which came out in the beginning of 2022. And I'd actually, I think I'd been writing that book, you know, from maybe 2015, 2014,. You know, I've been sort of beginning to grapple with a lot of the themes of that collection before I was even working with AI in a hands-on way, and it was really, you know, the sort of the big advances in natural language processing that started to happen in 2016 and 2017 that really kind of caught my attention and really convinced me that it was time to sort of translate some of my more conceptual and philosophical interests in transhumanism and posthumanism into more of a, you know, hands-on, research-based kind of experimentation with these language tools. So it's been it's definitely been quite a journey since then and I, you know, honestly, coming from a background of focusing really on language and literature. I I I'm still sort I, you know, honestly, coming from a background of focusing really on language and literature. I'm still sort of, you know, surprised at where things have gone.

Speaker 2: 2:52

But it's been really, really exciting and I think you know a lot of the reason it's been so busy is because there's been so much development in the AI space, I mean really since 2017, 2018, 2018, and some of the you know, the first kind of iterations of these large language models had, you know, kind of percolated out and were beginning to people were beginning to take notice of them. Then, of course, you know, in 2022, end of that year, when ChatGPT came out and was sort of launched and became a big moment that kind of sparked this, this new surge and interest in generative AI and, you know, really kicked off a lot of things text to image but also has been sort of the foundation for so many generative tools beyond the tech space as well. So you know that that's that's been sort of another really interesting kind of trajectory, you know, from the pre-ChatGPT era and now through to this moment when almost everyone I talk to knows what ChatGPT is. They've used it. You know, maybe they're integrating it into their practice.

Speaker 2: 4:05

Very few people that I spoke to had ever used, you know, a generative tool like that. So that's been a of these collaborations in new and different ways bring it to different audiences who now, I think, are able to understand it, appreciate it in a much different way than was possible prior to kind of the mainstream acceptance of a lot of these tools. So I think the development trajectory of these technologies has had a lot to do with things being so busy over the past few years, but it's been wonderful and that's sort of run concurrently with, you know, a lot of what we've experienced with the blockchain world kind of growing, developing. You know blockchain and AI have so much in common as well, and so there's been so much. I think that's buoyed me along in the work that I do, working with poetry, on chain working with AI. It's all been part and parcel, I think, of this technological momentum that we've been experiencing.

Speaker 1: 5:12

I mean, I think you definitely benefited off of that exponential growth curve, but what's so unique about your position is the fact that you kind of perfectly straddled the crypto and blockchain art kickoff and then were also perfectly timed for the AI boom as well. And, as you said, you know a lot of your work stemming all the way back from 2018, if not earlier, 2015, I think you said and focusing on this genre of transhumanism and like post-humanism. Do you think the democratization of these tools and basically the fact that, like anyone can use these tools now, has made that genre or that theme of exploration easier for people to understand or harder for them to understand, because this is something that they're directly interacting with in a way that they may not have reflected on to the depth that your work has?

Speaker 2: 6:06

Well, I think that you know, prior to a lot of these tools becoming more readily available, I think that the main kind of image that dominated public understanding of AI was very, and still is, like very dystopian and sort of shaped by a lot of the Hollywood narratives around you know Terminator-style robots and just like a very sort of dismal, pessimistic view of what artificial intelligence can be and like how it might shape the world. And I think that in a lot of ways, tools you know like Midjourney and DALI and ChatGPT and like all the things that have become so familiar, have really enabled so many more people to have a hands-on personal experience with AI and to really kind of understand in a totally different way how it can sort of be revelatory as a creative tool, how it can help just even in terms of the most baseline kind of you know productive and efficiency metrics and for all these different reasons you know productive and efficiency metrics and for all these different reasons, like far beyond art and poetry, like it's been something that I think you know is really a positive in many people's lives. So I think that that firsthand experience and being able to engage with an AI, to engage with some sort of a, you know, intelligent system and not just kind of base your understanding on an abstract notion of it or like a Hollywood version of it. I think that does make a big difference and I know that you know, when I talk to people about my work, I have noticed a palpable change in the kinds of questions that I get in the level of detail, in, you know, people's interest in actually kind of replicating some of the questions that I get in the level of detail in people's interest in actually kind of replicating some of the things that I'm working on or really wanting pointers or guidance, and it really makes me think, like this is moving in a direction where people understand the value of these tools in a new way, and so I don't know, I think that that's a positive signal.

Speaker 2: 8:00

So I don't know, I think that that that's a positive signal. I think for the most part, I think it also results in more people understanding, in a you know, in a firsthand way, a lot of the problems that are embedded in these systems as well, which, again, like you might hear about or you might understand, like in an abstract way, but being able to use the tools, seeing some of the outputs, seeing what's problematic still, seeing where the challenges lie, or engaging in the communities that are being you know, that are growing around these tools. I think that's very eye opening to, not just about the technology itself, but about the culture of the technology, about the development of the technology and how, how we all need to be more involved in shaping it, and I feel like there's a lot more productive conversation, a lot more of a broad dialogue happening around those aspects of AI as well, which I think is a really important thing.

Speaker 1: 8:57

So in that respect, I guess we're still very much early days in as far as people understand that how this develops.

Speaker 1: 9:06

We all sort of have this individual responsibility to figure out what kind of roles it's going to play in our daily lives, and I think that's also another really interesting thing about watching the AI boom over the last couple of years is that there is an entire spectrum of ways in which we use it. So, for example, many people, I would say, use ChatGPT almost like it's an efficiency tool. It's something that's going to expedite some of the work. While, you know, in the production of technology, you very much get the sense that AI was your co-creator, like there was a, there was like this dynamic that was built and I mean, you know, especially given that technology was trained off of your own writing, there's an explicit understanding of kind of the inner workings of the machine that you were co-creating with that. I think many of us who are using it as a tool to make our days more efficient haven't gone deep enough to understand. So, when it comes to your work, you know, what do you think people often misunderstand about the use of technology like AI as a medium?

Speaker 2: 10:09

That's a really good question. I mean, I think my use of the tools has so much to do with really being just really genuinely obsessed and interested and fascinated by a lot of the philosophical underpinnings you know, and thinking about some of the bigger picture questions behind all this. So not just looking at AI as, like you know, this new, shiny, exciting innovation, but really thinking through you know, how have humans relied on technology for a very long time? How has our relationship with technology changed? How we move through the world, how we communicate with one another, all these really kind of, I guess, meta questions that have really preoccupied me for a long time and that led me to spend a lot of time thinking about the writings of people like Ray Kurzweil and Nick Bostrom and, you know, donna Haraway and and all this kind of stuff. And I just, you know, I think that that probably is sort of like the biggest thing that maybe is misunderstood about, about the work that I do, which is just that so much of it comes from like this lifelong interest in not just science fiction but really thinking about speculative futures and thinking about the longer trajectory of our sort of reliance on technology and our kind of interdependence with technology. You know, I think a lot of people think about the work that I do as being very focused on AI and being very focused on the future and on, you know, on machines in a very sort of conventional sense.

Speaker 2: 11:44

But I've been, you know, I've been studying poetry as a technology for a long time and thinking about it and writing about it in that way. I have a background in classic literature and studied Latin when I was younger, you know, for no reason other than that I just thought it was really important to me to understand what it means to read a dead language and kind of everything that comes with that. And I think, like the all of those kinds of influences are really important to the work that I do now with languages like binary code, with um. You know, thinking through the potential future of language, the future of literature and how we create poetry and all sorts of creative expression in forms that will endure over time. All of that kind of comes out of this much you know, much longer trajectory of literature in human history and kind of thinking back to the things that have lasted over thousands of years.

Speaker 2: 12:41

And you know the time that we're in in like the focus of technological innovation that we're kind of zeroed in on is so, so small in the grand scheme of things, which is why I do like to sort of think about blockchain and poetry in the same breath, or why I like to think about artificial intelligence and the library of Alexandria as repositories of human knowledge, like I think there's so many times when we can sort of feel human impulses repeating themselves throughout the course of history, and that's really, I think, what propels me in the work that I do.

Speaker 2: 13:15

It's not just that like relentless pushing forward and curiosity about what's next. It's also kind of like, you know, I see these patterns and I just kind of am drawn to sort of investigating what they, what they reveal and like what they might tell us about where we're headed next. So maybe that's I think that's something that I would love to be able to, I guess, share a little bit more about and like dig into more in general is just a lot of the context for the work beyond what a lot of folks in Web3 might have seen me create over the past few years, because there's a lot more than that.

Speaker 1: 13:52

So it's a lot about how the past informs the future, and I distinctly remember from our first conversation about how you positioned poetry as the original blockchain, in that it was a way of preserving information, and the way that you know poetry is structured means that you have to maintain the level of accuracy.

Speaker 1: 14:10

Accuracy and information, Otherwise the poem simply doesn't work, and that's sort of the indicator of whether you have things recorded correctly, and I think it's very important I think now more than ever, because we are still very much in the midst of a huge technological boom.

Speaker 1: 14:27

A lot of this is kind of being integrated into our daily lives, where we passively consume these technologies without really taking a moment to reflect on the bigger question of you know, how does it reflect past practices, or how are we trying to replicate past practices through new mediums? And also, how is that going to fundamentally change the way that we actually interact or preserve this information? But then, when it comes to art, I think the way these technologies influence art or become embedded in art often comes with this debate around its legitimacy and how you navigate the discussion around, I guess, the misconception that the use of technology compromises the integrity of the work. So, whether it was it's been AI, whether it was generative art, anything computer generated really, I mean DJs even suffer their fair level of scrutiny as to whether what they produce can be considered legitimate music. So this isn't a new phenomenon. But like, how is it? How do you navigate it as an artist yourself?

Speaker 2: 15:27

Yeah, I mean, it's such a good question and again I feel like I have to take a step back and just kind of look, you know, look at this through through eyes that are not just so squarely focused on this moment. I mean, like, if you look at, you know, the history of linguistic innovations. There've been so many moments throughout history when you know the history of linguistic innovations. There've been so many moments throughout history when you know when the hot new thing was something that we now take for granted, like when a book was, you know, unthinkable, when a printed manuscript was unthinkable, when written language was unthinkable. And you know, now, to a lot of folks that I'm, you know, close within the publishing community and the poetry world, ai is unthinkable. Ai generated language is not something they really want to spend time grappling with. Blockchain. Same thing. For a lot of them, I think, it's something that is feared in some ways and maybe intimidates in other ways. So it's definitely like an ongoing conversation, I think, where I'm very used to sort of having that kind of reaction from some audiences that you know, ai is not real poetry, that blockchain, like isn't, you know, isn't an appropriate medium for some of the work that I do all these sorts of things and I think my answer, my answer generally speaking, is just to sort of say look at the way we're even talking right now. We're talking through screens, we're talking through computers.

Speaker 2: 16:53

I, like you, like so many of us in this space, I really kind of grew up in the shadow of the personal computing revolution and grew up into the, you know, the rise of the worldwide web and the birth of social media and like all these really seismic changes. You know, I, like, like all of us, live a life that is so dominated by screens and algorithms and networks and computer language. And I feel like an artist, as an artist, as a poet, I feel like it's my duty, in a way, to reflect that experience, to reflect what it's like to be living in this world that's so mediated by digital technologies. I feel compelled in some way to reflect on those things, to write about how it feels to have gone from an experience where I didn't, you know, have those digital devices in my hands 24 hours a day to now living in a very different mode of existence, like.

Speaker 2: 17:54

I want to sort of chart what that journey has been like for me and hopefully that you know that journey is representative of so many of us in this generation where we have one leg, you know, firmly in the analog and the other in this very different sort of world. But I do think it's. I do think it's my role, I think it's, you know, our role as artists in general to reflect the moment that we're in the best we can, and I think it would be weird for me not to be using AI and blockchain and my computer and all the other technologies that are so much of all of the rest of my life. It really is dominating so much of what I do, not just in the art sphere, but, you know, it's part of it's part of my, my lifestyle and our lifestyle.

Speaker 1: 18:38

And do you think your audiences are becoming a lot more receptive to that message? Becoming a lot more receptive to that message and you know, just watching you interact with all of these different mediums? Because I think, again pointing back to the original debate, where people sort of struggle or grapple with that understanding of how you can use these technologies to still produce something with, I guess, the purity of your perspective as an artist I think that's often where people get tripped up is that by the infusion of technology you compromise that purity or that integrity. So how do you, I guess, succinctly communicate that through your work? Because many, many viewers or many consumers of your pieces aren't going to have the privilege of a conversation like this to fundamentally understand that perspective of why you've incorporated all of these different tools. So how do you portray that through your work? Or is that even necessary?

Speaker 2: 19:31

Yeah, well, I think that you know I do. I do try to sort of, I do try to explain, you know, in a succinct way, that I really believe, at the end of the day, that poetry is a technology and I think that anyone who's read a book has experienced what it's like to be impacted by and emotionally moved by something that is digital or ephemeral, that is not like rooted in the physical, because text is virtual. Text is infinitely reproducible. Virtual Text is infinitely reproducible. You can take a piece of text and you can, you know, copy it millions of times, and it's the same thing. You can print millions of books and it's the same book that you give every reader and that doesn't diminish the experience of reading that book.

Speaker 2: 20:13

I think, you know, there's again like a lot of preconceived notions that we bring to what art should be, what poetry should be, what technology should be, what science should be, when actually a lot of these things are different sides of the same coin, or maybe different, you know, aspects of the same creative process. They're just, you know, we're going at a topic or we're going at an idea using different tools, but it's still sort of the same fundamental impulse. So I don't know, I feel like there's aspects of that that do come through, like in my work in different ways, and I've had people sort of come and say, okay, now I sort of understand, like why a code poem might make sense, like as a quote, unquote, real poem, because you know, all poems are little machines for making meaning in some way. So it kind of begins to make sense why a poet can work with technology and it, you know, might make sense. And I think, like there's shorthands in my work for that. You know, this is why I think this is why, like since I was very young, I've always been drawn to language art, not just the text piece of poetry and literature, but I've always been really drawn to text-based art, to the materiality of language and to using all sorts of new media tools to present language and to animate my text, to animate my poetry and kind of bring it to life in different ways, because I feel like a lot of this can actually be sort of immediately felt and immediately experienced, you know, through the presentation of the work. You just kind of get it at a gut level when you're watching a poem as a, you know as a video, and there's sound and there's movement and there's movement and you can actually experience what that's like in the moment you start to realize, okay, maybe this poem doesn't have to be printed on a piece of paper in a paperback book in a bookstore to be a real poem. Maybe I can walk into a gallery and sit here for five minutes and listen to this poem and watch this poem, and that's also an authentic experience. So I feel like it's just sort of creating those moments of access in a way and, you know, leaving it there to invite people in just to kind of experience, to experience it if they want and if not. Like you know, I I'm very much someone who likes to play with poetry and play with words across mediums.

Speaker 2: 22:40

I've always had a very sort of hybrid, very transdisciplinary, transmedial practice, and so that's why I have physical books and generative pieces on the blockchain and physical sculptures and, you know, large scale projections. You know all these different things give me sort of a different way to play with words and a different way to sort of convey the feeling that I want to evoke behind a poem. So I like to be able to kind of play in all these different mediums. So it does sort of find people kind of where, where they are comfortable or where they might be the most receptive to some of these most receptive to some of these.

Speaker 1: 23:21

I think it's so beautifully put because I think what you allude to is effectively kind of breaking that prism or like opening up the idea that what we understand is sort of this like neat and tidy system is still subject to its own evolution, whether it's something like language or whether it's something like mathematics or code, that these are systems designed for us to commonly understand, but that doesn't kind of remove the ability to innovate within those spaces and sort of understand the relationship from one medium to the next, which kind of gives you, I mean, infinite possibility when it comes to the way these technologies can actually be developed, you know, in sort of understanding or reconceptualizing language as technology, rather than just like a system of understanding, which is arguably what technology is in the first place.

Speaker 2: 24:08

I think that's why, ultimately, I am so fascinated in AI, because it really does feel like it is the. It feels like it's the beginning of a new era or a new chapter in language and storytelling. You know, we started with oral tradition and that was sort of one big moment. You know, before we actually had the ability to write things down, everything was done orally. We had, like you know, whole genres of storytelling and art that evolved in that moment because that was the technology of the time. The technology was, you know, being able to codify systems of language and sounds. And then, you know, then moving into the era of literacy and all that that entailed, and like how that evolved human consciousness and creativity, how that gave rise to, you know, whole different systems of communication and the distribution of information and all that that created. And now it feels like we are on the brink of this like new generative era where, instead of now, you know writing with these, you know, with these, these alphabets and these grammars, we're now able to write and express ourselves in images and videos. We're able to kind of use generative language to articulate things that we wouldn't otherwise be able to say. We're enabling people that might not have had a voice or might not have been able to make themselves heard. We're empowering people with the ability to speak and to express what's in their imagination and what's in their heart, and I feel like that is going to have such seismic effects on everything.

Speaker 2: 25:50

It's not just how does this change? You know how our email program auto-corrects our typing or whatever Like this. This is going to lead to so many transformative moments. I mean, it's really I think it's already beginning to really reshape how we collaborate, how we communicate with one another, how we sort of think together as a hive mind, you know, and how we kind of can co-create or co-author. You know how we can be creative as a group, how we can tap into each other's minds and ideas in different ways. Like there's so many things that are brewing, that are percolating here and I think that's why I'm just so tantalized by this whole area is it just seems like AI is language, like it is a mode of communication in this much bigger way than just sort of, you know, a gadget, a technology in the way that we typically think of a technology.

Speaker 1: 26:44

And I also think about it in the respect of you know we're only talking really from the lens of the English language. And when you think about you know if we were to look at the thousands of characters in Mandarin that are used to express everything, that like the 26 letters that we have in the English language are actually quite limited. So trying to expand on that through mediums like AI becomes this whole other conversation. And then, in terms of you know, perceptions of these systems as technologies, I actually recently read your poem. You know we were computers first and touching on how women were in fact the original computers. So women were almost that technology but at the same time are often sidelined in technology and you know, like the narrative of its progression. So I did want to touch on that poem in particular and ask you about the process behind it and you know how you wanted to also position women in this conversation, not just language.

Speaker 2: 27:39

Yeah, well, I really appreciate that question. So the poem was actually created for a special event that I was just at last week in Zurich. It was a conference called Equal Voice, which is a summit, kind of a global summit that brings together leading voices in media and politics and culture to sort of advocate for the representation of women and non-men really in media. And, you know, coming on the heels of the election in the US and you know various other things, it was really an interesting moment to gather with a group of, like, very inspiring, very powerful, very motivated women and to kind of think through a lot of the challenges that we're facing right now. You know, and I was invited in to talk about my role as a woman in tech and AI. Focus this year was very much on technology and on artificial intelligence and I really wanted to be able to contribute something that you know the attendees of that conference could take home and I wanted to, you know, write an AI poem that could sort of be a souvenir of the summit, of the themes that came up, of all the things that were kind of in my head and like in my gut going into that moment and, I think, what was really on my mind at that point was, you know, the challenge of being a woman in the tech space and particularly in the crypto space. In a really kind of interesting moment in the US politically and you know, really just trying to grapple with this idea or this, I guess this lived fact or this lived experience that, even though women have really driven so much of modern computing as we know it, we are still sort of sidelined from conversations about the future of blockchain and AI and crypto and technological advancement more broadly. We are still sort of sidelined in a lot of the larger cultural and social conversations claim, you know, all these really important moments in modern history that have led us to where we are and that have enabled us and enabled, you know, like all these kind of big leading voices in the world right now, enabled them to have the platform they have. Women have really driven and enabled a lot of those things.

Speaker 2: 29:56

So, you know, in the poem I was thinking about people like Ada Lovelace and Katherine Johnson and Grace Hopper and many, many, many more, but you know, thinking about all the women who were. You know, for example, the computers who were calculating numbers at the Harvard College Observatory. You know, for example. Or you know, all the women who worked at NASA and had a really pivotal role in pushing the space exploration program forward, or the women who were the first programmers of the ENIAC right, like one of the first electronic computers, who were basically inventing programming language with no blueprint, like no background information, like they were just they were building this from scratch and it was their inventiveness and their ability to really bring something to life that enabled those things to happen.

Speaker 2: 30:49

So I, as I often do, I tapped my AI collaborator technology, kind of poured out a lot of these thoughts that were in my head, kind of pulled that into my context and my like little fine tune training set and used it for some of the prompting and just kind of went that into my context and my little fine-tuned training set and used it for some of the prompting and just kind of went back and forth and created this poem that has to do with, I think, the AI, sifting through the role of women as computers in history and then the role of women kind of in contemporary society, the way that women are generally regarded, and it was kind of trying to reconcile these things and think through some of the parallels, some of the juxtapositions, some of the things that don't seem to make sense. But yeah, I had a fun time writing it and then I performed it for this summit, this group, and it was a really special moment to be able to do that.

Speaker 1: 31:38

I mean, I thought it was a beautiful poem and I thought it perfectly highlighted how women were very much some of the original pioneers of this technology.

Speaker 1: 31:45

But also, when we talk about or when we just dissect the term computer, we are talking about a very manual mathematical process rather than how we've come to understand computers today, and it kind of alludes back to what we were talking about earlier, about this evolution of language and evolution of our understanding of you know, it's the same. Let me say seven or eight letters I can't eight letters, but they mean something so different to us now than they originally did to us back then, when I guess the birth of this sort of industry was really really kicking off. And then, you know, taking this all the way through to your interactions with things like blockchain technology I mean we can't glaze over all of the work that you've built and minted off of Tezos. I wanted to ask you know what's the role that blockchain actually still plays in your poetry and your work, if at all, and how has your relationship with technologies like NFTs on Tezos shifted since? You know we've seen pretty much every iteration of the market one could see in the last two years or so.

Speaker 2: 32:48

Yeah, it's been interesting. No, I'm still very, very much invested in Web3. And you know, in fact, the poem that we were just talking about, I minted on Tezos on Object as a digital souvenir for everyone at the summit. So actually all the attendees got a paper wallet that was connected to a Kukai wallet. So you know a lot of folks who'd never owned an NFT before, who'd never really experienced blockchain, left with their first NFT, which was really a cool thing. It just brings me back to the reason why I came here in the beginning was because I make a lot of poetry that is, by many standards, unpublishable in other ways, either thematically and contextually. Ai is still very unappetizing to a lot of mainstream publishing houses. It's a lot more accepted, I think, in the art world than it is in publishing at the moment. But also a lot of my work is multimedia, or it's generative or, you know, it's text that doesn't sit still on a page and therefore, you know I can't publish it by those traditional means. So I came to blockchain like with a very sort of organic and very sort of I don't know functional intention, which was to start publishing these works in ways where I could distribute them, where I could share them with readers and, you know, help these poems find audiences. And I've continued to do that because my work, you know, continues to kind of play with new media and to really leverage, you know, a lot of the tools that are very familiar to a lot of folks in the space, like using, you know, using code, using generativity, using platforms where I can mint iterations of a poem, and I've been continuing to sort of evolve the way that I think about writing a poem, the way that I think about performing a poem, the way that I think about how a collection might make its way into the world. You know, thinking about all those things with, with blockchain in mind and with partners who are open to utilizing these kinds of technologies as part of the overall project. And one example of that is the collection that I released in April of this year with Bang Olufsen and Maker's Place, which is a collection called Four Cortexts, which is, it's like a poetry pun, but you know, a riff on TS Eliot's Four Quartets, which is one of my favorite poetry collections.

Speaker 2: 35:18

But this group of four poems is really all about voice. It's really all about voice and the evolution of voice over time and how poetry started as song and music and like a physical kind of emanation from the body, and all four of these poems are really meant to be performed in multimedia. They're meant to be heard and felt and seen, and so I really created them to be published on blockchain and then also to be heard and felt and seen. And so I really created them to be published on blockchain and then also to be kind of performed via these Bang Olufsen you know instruments as well and sort of thinking about that from the start was really important, I think, for the project overall.

Speaker 2: 35:55

Not writing the poem first and then thinking as an afterthought, how do I turn this into an NFT, how do I make this into a digital version? But from the very start thinking, okay, this is about, it's about sound, it's about audio, it's about voice. How does that translate to the way that this makes its way into the world? It's about preservation of information. It's about the transmission of stories and rituals and family memories over time. So how do I harness blockchain as a way to kind of continue my ancestral lineage, like all those things were very foundational to that process.

Speaker 2: 36:34

So I can't imagine not continuing to use these tools in some iteration, you know, continuing to use these tools in some iteration, you know, when it feels like it's material to the work that I do. I always like to incorporate themes and mediums that reinforce each other and, to me, choosing to use blockchain, for example, as a way of writing and publishing and performing a certain type of poem is the same, as you know, choosing to publish something with a certain font or use a certain paper or turn it into this kind of book or make it into this kind of a visual poem, like it's all part of the materiality and the artistry of the poem for me. So it's it. Really. It has become like a very important part of my process and I do a lot of it still on Tezos and a lot of it is on is on object in particular. So still one of my favorite places to play and to write.

Speaker 1: 37:27

I think it's incredible the way you've just explained how many ways there are for us to consume art.

Speaker 1: 37:35

That is often the written word and like, how, like, as you said, you know whether it's through song, whether it's something that emanates physically through the body, versus whether it's preserved on a technical medium like a screen.

Speaker 1: 37:46

And I wanted to come back to something that you said at the beginning of your point, which is that you know blockchain and, like the art world that exists on particular blockchain communities gives place or gives home to a lot of kind of new and creative mediums that perhaps didn't exist before or are not readily accepted before, and the fact that a lot of written word that is perhaps in part AI powered is still not welcome within publishing spaces. And I know this is someone who's personally been accused of using Chat, using chat gpt, when I just presented my own writing and understanding that there is this creative conflict that I think, in many ways, we we broke through in the art space, but we haven't actually really broken through in the language space, which is how do we, how do we, infuse something like ai into written language in a way that people consume, or I mean, very simply put, just read without having to assess it against whether it was purely human generated or not, because, again, we kind of cycle all the way back to step one.

Speaker 2: 38:52

Yeah, and again, I think some of it is. I don't want to like simplify it too much, but like some of it is. It's all relative, in a way, like we think about AI as this really different, you know, unprecedented technology, but in a way like it is another language technology that allows us to communicate, just the way that the development of written alphabets was an innovation that allows us to communicate. And I like no one's sitting here saying, well, you can't use, you know you can't use the alphabet. You have to like start from scratch and create language all over again. You know you're, you can use these 26 letters and you can keep reassembling them. That means you don't have to start from scratch. In fact, you can have this whole language full of words that we've already created and now you can like mix these up as however you want and use these. And so now with AI, we're saying, okay, well, here's, here's all of humanity's written record, it's all at your disposal, use this, you know, for whatever might be helpful.

Speaker 2: 39:51

To me it's just sort of like another iteration of how we have found material to kind of build our creativity on and build our storytelling on. It's just a different kind of foundation, a very different kind of foundation, but we've always needed to sort of iterate on what came before in order to continue moving forward, and so much of the literature that I've studied and really loved over the years is kind of all about that. It's all about how we rely on, you know, canon. We rely on the voices of writers who came before us, and so much of the work we do is in response to them, and maybe it's challenging them, maybe it's refuting them in a way, but it's always kind of a response. So I tend to think about AI in that way as well.

Speaker 2: 40:37

That, you know, it's not to me, it's not really. It's not so much about the ease or the convenience or the efficiency of being able to kind of like tap into an existing repository of language. It's that when you have that repository at your fingertips, your ability to write, your craft, is now turbocharged and you are able to now do things with language that were previously not possible. So now, what does this unlock? What kind of language can we create that doesn't exist yet? What kind of stories can we tell that we are limited by our current approaches to language? We are limited by our current you know approaches to language. You know how will that sort of be broadened out now that we have generativity as a tool in our writerly toolkit? Like those are the things that I'm so fascinated by. But it's also, of course, like terrifying as a writer to see everything we know about creating language be sort of upended.

Speaker 2: 41:34

So it makes total sense to me why there is this still like a very slow acceptance of these tools in the writing world, why there still is so much hesitation and there's still so much concern too about you know having your work ingested into these systems, having your work be exploited, having your work be plagiarized. And I think there you know, the more that writers work with these tools, the more you understand how they work, the more you understand how they pull language apart into its. You know basic components that it really is not about. You know rehashing things you've written or trying to copy style. I think that that helps kind of illuminate on that side and I think you know, like anything else, just it kind of takes time.

Speaker 2: 42:24

It takes time to sort of wrap your mind around this new way of thinking, this new way of reading, this new way of writing. It takes time to sort of recalibrate from the notion that we've held for so long that writers are solitary creatures, that we really are, you know, locking ourselves in a room, like Virginia Woolf said, you know, and just we're alone, like we're alone with the muse, and now we're sort of thinking well, ai is this tacit acknowledgement that when we write, we're writing with every word of the human language. Every word that everyone has ever uttered is here, you know, and we're pulling from that and I think that's a very for me, it's a really beautiful, like really exhilarating idea, but it's also very humbling and, I think, is very challenging to accept as well. So I think there's a lot of reasons why it's it's been such a difficult thing too.

Speaker 1: 43:13

I think, as with anything, it's just not a binary issue, like there's a huge gray area in terms of the ways in which people infuse technologies like this into their work. The extent to which it leads the process versus, you know, is edited by the person at the end who masters the perspective, and so it just as you said, I think it just presents a challenge and it's going to take some time and deliberation to work out where the lines really are, and I think you know that's also going to be highly objective, very personal, like I know, for you know my own writing practices. I'm still very old school. I'll use chat, gpt if I think there's just something that I can't crack, but then I'm more than likely to just go back and rehash over the prompt that it's actually given me in return, rather than taking the results as the final product. So I think people need to understand that it's another iterative tool that is not something that's just a product generator or an answer generator.

Speaker 2: 44:17

Totally. I mean, I think of it really as just it's another way of thinking. It's like a way of extending your thought process and kind of taking you down really interesting pathways. And I feel like if you are someone who, if you don't care about words, or if you're not a very good writer, like I do think it's, I think it's an amazing tool because you are able to very easily kind of convey things that might be difficult, and if you're a good writer or you enjoy writing, there's nothing about it that says you have to outsource what you love to do to a machine. It's a way of potentially going deeper into the writing process, doing more of what you love.

Speaker 2: 44:52

It's maybe a way of taking really complicated ideas and kind of having a thought partner to sift through. I mean, I feel like there's just so it's such an open-ended tool and it gets painted as something that is so prescriptive and there are no rules yet about how you should use it, especially when it comes to writing. There aren't. I don't think there really are as many good AI tools for creative writers as there are AI tools for visual art quite yet. I mean, maybe that's it's changing a little bit, but I think that's a piece of it too, is it's just a little bit of a different kind of opportunity for creatives in different fields at this point.

Speaker 1: 45:31

Definitely and just in the interest of time and like I want to make sure that we touch on this before we part ways is the verse verse. It's grown a lot over the past few years, so I'd love to get a bit of a synopsis on everything that you've been working on when it comes to the verse verse and where it's headed to next. Thanks for asking.

Speaker 2: 45:49

It's actually really good timing, because we just celebrated our third birthday, I guess our anniversary we launched in November of 2021. So we are officially three years old. It has grown a lot since then and we feel really, really grateful for all the support, especially the support of the Tezos community and the Tezos Foundation. We're still doing a lot of work, closely aligned with Tezos. I think we've just felt since the beginning that there was a lot of synchronicity between how Tezos operates, how the community operates and kind of the experimental ethos that we've always kind of held dear, and really this idea of using blockchain as a printing press in a way. And how can we really use an efficient, very cost-effective, like how can we really use an efficient, very cost-effective, very nimble tool or, you know, a platform like Object, which is where we do a lot of our work? How can we leverage that as a way to start publishing not just our own work, but to really kind of encourage that kind of, you know, communal publishing, that kind of communal activity as well?

Speaker 2: 46:52

So we've, you know, we've done a number of exhibitions over the past few years, including some that were hybrid, where we had a physical installation of work that was also mirrored on Tezos, for example, which was fun, so kind of getting to play through. You know this conceptual duality of poetry as both. You know a technology as a virtual kind of ephemeral thing, but then also poetry as an object, as a tactile book, as a piece of paper, as a sculpture, you know. And how does that, how does that fit in with, you know, being able to do something as a, as an in real life exhibition and then also as a blockchain exhibition? So stuff like that has been, has been really this year we're really focused on well, we're calling it our year of rereading. So we've been kind of going back and sort of paying homage to some favorite projects and favorite moments and kind of giving a little bit more attention, a challenge to the pace of Web3, the challenge to kind of the overall pace of, you know, the digital art world these days, and we really kind of want to remind ourselves, I guess, through this initiative, that poetry is really about, you know, taking the time to slow down, to pay attention to things, to sink deep into thought and ideas, and we're trying to do that. So, rather than, you know, focus so much on new, we're kind of looking at how to generate new interpretations, new ideas, new performances, you know, new ways of looking at a poem, like, how do we do that? And still kind of stay true to this ethos of innovating and kind of continuing to experiment.

Speaker 2: 48:39

And you know what we're preparing for, I guess in the next few months we're working on some really fun things with the estate of Allen Ginsberg, which is a project that we actually kicked off a year and a half or two years ago now with Tezos year and a half or two years ago now with Tezos, but working with the Ginsberg estate using some digital tools to activate Ginsberg's poetry archives.

Speaker 2: 49:05

And working with the amazing data poet, ross Goodwin, on a really exciting project that we're going to bring to LA and we see. The last thing is we've got actually a big exhibition of diverse verse curated works that are opening at Mad Arts in Florida this month, I think actually. So we've got quite a bit going on at the moment, but things are moving along and we're just we're having so much fun and really just so grateful that the community at large has been so receptive to the idea of poetry in the space, which we did not expect at all in the beginning. So it's been really wonderful that we've been able to have conversations about poetry as an art form, about poetry as a technology, and that so many digital artists, in the Web3 space too, have really kind of embraced the idea of poetry in their work and sort of talking about the poetics of technology more broadly. So it's been a really rewarding um yeah, really rewarding few years with the verse verse.

Speaker 1: 50:00

I mean it sounds like you've been going from strength to strength and it doesn't even sound like momentum is slowing down whatsoever. So I hope you just conserving your energy as and where required to keep this going, and I loved the sentiment of you know going back through the archives and paying homage to past works and kind of rejigging. The notion of progress is also sort of like preservation as a form of progress as well.

Speaker 2: 50:26

Yeah, I love that. I love that Preservation is a form of progress, for sure.

Speaker 1: 50:30

But I'm sure you know everyone's going to be keeping a very keen eye on everything that you're doing in not only the months ahead but the years ahead. But thank you so much for spending a beautiful and very cerebral hour with me and hopefully it won't be too long before we get you back on again and then catch up with everything else that you've done in between that time.

Speaker 2: 50:50

I would love that. Well, it's always such a pleasure chatting with you and, yes, let's do it again before too long. Thanks so much for.