Sasha Stiles has spent since 2018 asking what it means to write as a human when a machine can write alongside you. Her installation “A Living Poem,” on view in MoMA’s Agnes Gund Garden Lobby, is the most literal answer she’s given: a text piece that rewrites and performs itself anew every 60 minutes, drawing on MoMA’s own collection of text-based art and never arriving at a finished version. Stiles describes the work as “always becoming, never finished” — a description that also works as a thesis statement for her whole practice.
The machinery behind the poem
The installation runs on a custom generative language model built on top of GPT-4, trained on a dataset Stiles assembled herself: her original poetry combined with fragments pulled from MoMA’s collection, run through a bespoke system built with p5.js and carefully engineered prompting rather than an off-the-shelf chatbot wrapper. The visible text uses a typeface Stiles calls Cursive Binary — handwriting merged with binary code symbols, a small typographic detail that does a lot of the work of signaling “this was made with a human hand and a machine” without saying it outright.
Central to the piece is Technelegy, Stiles’s ongoing AI collaborator project — a system trained specifically to “emulate and augment” her own writing voice, which she’s developed and written about since well before “AI collaborator” was a phrase in common use. An immersive soundscape by Kris Bones, accessible via QR code at the installation, ties the piece back to poetry’s oral-performance roots — a reminder that the generative text on the wall is meant to be experienced as something closer to a recitation than a static plaque.
Why this is a useful counter-example right now
A lot of AI-and-art coverage right now is a capability story: a model that can now do a new thing. Stiles’s work is the opposite kind of story — an artist who’s treated a language model as a long-term creative partner for close to a decade, with a specific, named collaborator (Technelegy) whose voice has evolved over that time rather than being swapped out for whatever the newest model happens to be. “A Living Poem” is on view at MoMA through March 3, 2026, giving it a real remaining window for anyone who wants to see it in person before it, fittingly, stops rewriting itself.