Castellani Art Museum presents 'Sasha Stiles: Stanza'

An immersive exploration of poetry, artificial intelligence & human expression

√ Following her recent 6-month exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, award-winning poet, artist & AI researcher Sasha Stiles transforms CAM’s Nanula Digital Art Gallery into a room made of language

Castellani Art Museum press release & photos

The Castellani Art Museum of Niagara University (CAM) 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, Oct. 8. The exhibition is curated by Jess Minicucci.

Presented following Stiles’s recent exhibition of “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.

Scenes from "Sasha Stiles: STANZA" at the Castellani Art Museum of Niagara University.

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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 MoMA, 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.

Exhibition information

“Sasha Stiles: STANZA” is on view Sept. 13 through April 25, 2027, with museum hours of 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday. It is curated by Jess Minicucci.

An opening reception is set for Thursday, Oct. 8.

The Castellani Art Museum of Niagara University is located at 5795 Lewiston Road / 7 Varsity Drive, Niagara University, NY 14109

More about the Castellani Art Museum of Niagara University: With learning and public access at the heart of its mission, CAM is a premiere resource for the visual arts in Niagara County. The museum’s permanent collection includes over 5,000 pieces of modern and contemporary art, Niagara Falls art, and regional folk arts. CAM is committed to the preservation of these artworks, along with offering exhibitions and programs that serve the campus, local communities, and tourists.

For more information on CAM, visit www.castellaniartmuseum.org, and follow CAM’s Facebook page, X (@CAM_of_NU) and Instagram (@CastellaniArtMuseum).