Speaker A: Hey everyone, and welcome to another episode of Waiting to Be Signed, a super special interview episode. We're joined by Will, As always. And then we have 2 lovely people in the studio with us, Sasha Stiles and Nathaniel Stern, who you know from fx hash, Art Blocks, Feral File, Super Rare. The list goes on. Very, very happy and very pleased to have them in this virtual recording studio with us. Hello everybody. How are you doing?

Speaker B: Hello. Sasha and I both trying to be nice to each other. Hi, we're doing great. Uh, I'm doing great. Can't speak for Sasha. Uh, Thanks for having us here. Longtime listener, first-time caller.

Speaker C: Yes, we love what you both do and thanks so much for having us on. This is really, this is fun. I've been looking forward to this chat. It's always nice to see and hear people as opposed to just kind of seeing your tweets.

Speaker A: We are very robust tweeters, aren't we, Will? You are.

Speaker B: That's like me and Sasha. Sasha's pretty on point. I'm not.

Speaker A: Yeah, me neither.

Speaker B: I'm working on it. I'm working on it.

Speaker A: But that's where there's balance in like these collaborative efforts, right? Your collaborators, Will and I are collaborators of sorts. It's the give and the take. Anyway, we're here to talk to you and to learn more about you as people and as artists. And, you know, when we do these, I think this is the first time actually that we've had 2 people on not talking about a single project. Yeah.

Speaker D: So, well, I think the only other duo we had was Marcelo and Andreas, and that was just to talk about Toccata. This is going to be a more holistic interview than that one.

Speaker B: Firsties.

Speaker A: Exactly. So if it's messy, it's messy, but there's beauty in the mess. So maybe we can kick it off with just some intro questions. And the first one that we usually start with is, what is your art background? How is it? What is your background in coding? Wait, what is your background in art? Not as— all right. Well, you can edit that out.

Speaker B: You get that in edit. Yeah.

Speaker D: What is your background in art and coding and how did you find the blockchain? That's usually what we start with.

Speaker C: You want to go first, Nathaniel?

Speaker B: Oh, I was like pointing at you to go first.

Speaker C: I know, but your practice kind of goes back further than mine actually. So I think it might be kind of cool for you to start.

Speaker B: Okay, sure. I am 46 years old. I've been playing with digital technologies since the early '90s. I went to an engineering high school. My entire senior class shared one email address so that we communicate with some fellow students in Russia. I went to a high school that was founded during the Cold War, so the only foreign language we learned was Russian. Я говорю по-русски azik. My best round now is still Russian. And then I was in a pretty nasty car accident and kind of found my way to the arts. I studied fashion design for my undergrad. If you could see me, obviously. Then Photoshop, AutoCAD—that early stuff came out while I was in college. I went to Cornell University, and they were doing early experimentation with kind of industrial design for the fashion industry. So they had in the '90s, like. A 3D scanner, a pattern grader. We were doing textile repeat patterns in Photoshop. And so of course my engineering background kind of caught up and I was like, oh my gosh, I didn't know you could do this with computers. And so at the time everyone thought that web design was hard and only computer scientists were doing it. And so when my teachers, Professor Charlotte Jerusik and Professor Jerry Gay in particular from Textiles and Apparel and from Communications, saw that I was good with code. They basically paid me to teach myself CSS, HTML, JavaScript to design their websites. At some point, my professor sent me the website for ITP, the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU. It was founded in the '70s. It was one of the first digital art or electronic arts master's programs. At the time, I thought they were saying, you need to go here. And I applied and I wound up going there. I found out A decade and a half later that she was just saying, hey, can you make my website look like this website? And it completely like changed my life that I went there. It's an amazing program. Leo Villarreal was one of my professors. Dandy Rosen was one of my professors. I was working alongside Camille Utterback and Jonah Brooker Cohen and so many others. So there is where I really kind of became an artist. When I went, I thought I was gonna be a designer. And then I met my ex-wife who said, no, this is really cool stuff. You're onto something here. My ex-wife is South African, wound up moving there for 6 years. where I was teaching and producing art. Interesting there, the net art crew that I was a part of, on the one hand, it felt like I was really far away. I was on dial-up when I got there. So although I was a known entity within this small group of net artists, I also wasn't really part of the big community. I was more of a fanboy who was friendly with them. On the other hand, the benefit of it was I wasn't seen as an outsider in Johannesburg. And so I was being offered museum and gallery shows in my early 20s. I had my first museum solo exhibition in 2003, and it was interactive installations, video art, net art, and it was kind of amazing, like really young, being able to do and engage with that. And so at some point I decided that there was really crappy writing on interactive art specifically, and I wanted there to be good writing. So I went and did a PhD, and I did that in an electronic and electrical engineering department at Trinity College in Dublin. And it was kind of a mix of collaborating with engineers on their work. publishing on art and making art. And then fast forward to 2008, I was offered my first academic post. I thought it would be a short-term gig. 15 years later, I'm still living in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. It's kind of been an interesting thing, you know, the influence of South Africa, the influence of Europe, praise poetry. Both my parents are English teachers. So in fact, my very first well-known pieces were all streaming video poetry, very similar to Sasha's work in its content, or at least in its You know, the fact that it was video poetry online. This was like pre-Flash, pre-YouTube, pre-stream. It was all QuickTime streaming and RealPlayer, neither of which are technologies that exist anymore. And it's interesting, like, I was introduced to blockchain very early on. In fact, I think at some point somebody even gave me a Bitcoin and I was like, no thanks. And, you know, we were talking about it. And it's funny because on the one hand, I've been told so many times as a digital artist, this is it, you're going to make it, you're going to make money. Yeah. So I ignored that. On the other hand, the kind of the fact that Bitcoin was built on top of and blockchain was built on top of these kind of neoliberal libertarian capitalist technologies, I was like, I just don't have a taste for this, which is funny because I teach at an entrepreneurship center in addition. Like, so currently I'm a full professor and my tenure home is art. I'm 50% mechanical engineering and I run an entrepreneurship program. But the entrepreneurship program to me is I define entrepreneurship as sustainability for your passion. And so most of our startups are like food trucks and clothing and things like that. Anyhow, eventually when I saw the Beeple $69 million sale, that piqued my interest and not because of the money, but because that's when I like to intervene. Like the work I've been doing across performance net art and installation, et cetera, compared to some of my peers, I'm not the most cutting edge. I'm not the first person to do things. I'm more interested in right when it hits the mainstream. Yeah. Right when everyone has an opinion, but nobody knows what the hell they're talking about. That's when I want to like complexify and nuance the conversations, which is where I think my collaboration with Sasha and AI also comes in. But that's when I wanted to do the blockchain. And my initial thought was to do a very critical work. This is with Scott Kildall. We were going to do a pyramid scheme. We were going to like have some real fun with it, take the piss. And then, of course, as soon as we scratched the surface, And we take our job as artists very seriously that we do our research. We don't just pretend we know. If we're going to complexify and nuance, we got to get in there. We found such an amazing community of earnest players who were leveraging this capitalist libertarian system towards socialist goals, creativity, trying to figure out what a trans-action might mean. Platform artists, Rhea Meyers and I go back over 20 years. She actually reviewed my first book, my PhD, and seeing what she was doing was phenomenal. And I got to meet, because of my connections, to the digital art realm. You know, Ruth Catlow from Furtherfield and I go way back, and she was introducing me to people like Simon DLR, and I was completely blown away. And so since then, I've been kind of playing between what can I take historically from digital art and introduce that into the blockchain space so that there's a longer dialogue and a longer conversation, but then also what can I do that's platform-specific. And so I've got a lot of new experimental work coming out that really utilizes the blockchain in ways that people don't use it. And then with Sasha, I really think about AI and blockchain as being twin technologies, not only because they were developed around the same time, but in many ways, AI moves at the speed of light. It is so fast and changes so quickly, and there is no better timestamp in existence than the blockchain. And so it's a really interesting way to kind of document and archive that history. Okay. I talked a lot. Sasha, you're up.

Speaker C: No, it's amazing listening to you kind of walk through it all. It's, even though I know you and your work so well, it's always cool to kind of hear the trajectory. In a nutshell, my story is that, you know, as you said, I'm, you know, I'm a poet, I'm an artist, an AI researcher, and all those things. But I really consider myself a writer first and foremost. And that's always been the thing that I love doing more than anything else in the world. I just grew up in a house filled with books and have always loved playing with language. And I've been writing poetry for as long as I can remember, just human analog poetry, you know, studying kind of the traditional literary canon and then getting into contemporary poetry. And obviously is a really big part of what I do now. The other piece of this, which goes back to my childhood, and I think is really kind of baked into who I am and what I like to think about, is the fact that both my parents are science documentarians. And they, you know, have always been really interested in thinking through sort of big questions and writing and thinking about space exploration and kind of the extreme territories on Earth and what's happening, you know, at the deepest levels of the ocean and things like that. And so I think my brain has always been kind of primed by them to want to ask those kinds of questions as well.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: I grew up sort of tagging along when they would go to shoots at JPL and NASA and things like that. So, you know, I grew up with this twin appreciation of poetry and this art form that's considered very emotional and raw and, you know, feral in some way. And then on the other hand, really kind of seeing in a very up-close way the beauty and the creativity of technology and engineering, the kind of inspired creativity that goes into, for example, projects that take our machinery to Mars or deep into the Marianas Trench or something like that. So I think And I think that's always sort of fueled my own creativity. All of which is to say that I've really, I think, found myself writing a lot over the years about technology, not just about it thematically, but sort of thinking through my relationship to digital infrastructure and technologies and kind of just using poetry as a way to grapple with what it means to kind of come into adulthood and then into, you know, midlife with all these transformative technologies really embedding themselves in our lives and really transforming so much of what we take for granted about the human condition. So I write about a lot of things like, well, of course, artificial intelligence and the prospect of digital immortality, the quest for longevity science and things like that, technospirituality, you know, experimentation with artificial wombs and how technology may be impacting the way that we reproduce as a species. Things like that, I think, really preoccupy me quite a lot. And I find that poetry is a really good way to sort of parse the implications and all of that. So sorry, I know I'm rambling a bit, so I'll kind of sum up the last part of this, which is what brought me into the blockchain. But all of these things were themes and ideas that I was writing about in rather more conventional ways for a long time. I was publishing poems in traditional literary journals and things like that, but I really felt compelled to do more with words than just kind of put them on paper as static, you know, black and white Times New Roman, 0.12 lines. I started to get really interested in using digital tools, various graphic design software at first, and, you know, pretty simple things, but using various digital tools to animate poems and to add sound and to add music and add motion and to really kind of look at how to use new media to evolve my traditional poetry into the concrete poetry tradition. And I found it really exhilarating and it felt very true to the kind of work that I wanted to do, but it was very hard to find out how to publish these kinds of pieces within my publishing community. It's a very strange thing to think about taking, like, you know, a 3-minute media-rich poem and then send it to, like, the Kenyon Review. That's just not a really good way to publish it. So I found myself posting these things on social media and sharing them through whatever digital channels were at my disposal. And over time, I just started to hear from new media curators. These are people really coming from the art world who are saying, Your poetry is really interesting. Would you maybe be open to putting it into a virtual exhibition, for example? And it started to make me think that, you know, rather than looking at publishing these pieces of writing in the way that I was used to, it might actually be a really good thing to consider putting them out there in the art world, putting them out into the realm of new media. And that's kind of opened up a whole new world for me. It's led me, you know, to do work on the blockchain. It's led me to really get deep into my experiments with artificial intelligence. And to really think about using technology, not just as a theme of the work that I'm doing, but to really use it as a medium and really use technology to embody my poetic concerns and to really kind of create a metapoetics that's exploring what blockchain and AI and generativity and algorithms and code can actually teach us about language and about the consciousness that is so closely aligned with language.

Speaker A: Quick question there to help maybe frame in my mind when things are happening. When did you start publishing these media-rich poems, like first to social media and then beyond? Because I think it's really helpful to have that cultural context to understand what was happening in the world, what was happening on the internet when some of these shifts came.

Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, I started really posting things on Instagram maybe in like 2016 or 2017 or something like that. But then I started my technology Instagram in like 2018. So, you know, that was kind of when I started really putting things together in one place. And that's around the same time that I started working really intensely with AI as a co-author as well. was around that 2018 mark. And I think, you know, there's a few cultural touchstones that I'd sort of been responding to, or that were, you know, responsible for me sort of really starting to get into it. I mean, I was really interested in the work that people like Quirin Granwin was doing with natural language processing, people like Ross Goodwin, who I think in like 2016, 2017 were doing really incredible things with language models and really kind of pushing the boundaries of what computational poetics could mean. No one in my traditional literary world was really using these tools. So I was kind of finding these examples in the world of like creative coding and kind of just, I don't know, going down the rabbit hole in various like internet forums and stuff and just kind of following my nose there a little bit. It was around the time that some of the first sort of like no-code interfaces to access large language models were becoming available. So there was actually, I should have said this before, I don't have a coding background. Like I'm a language and literature person through and through. And everything that I've learned about coding and AI, I've sort of taught myself and all that. So I'm definitely self-taught on a lot of these fronts. But my first experience hands-on using GPT-2 was through an interface coded by a guy named Adam Daniel King. And it was this interface called Talk to Transformer. It was a really easy way to just get into this language model and start playing. You could just enter an input and do some really simple, maybe manipulations of variables and then get an output. And it was like the most baseline version of what the models could do. But that's how I started to learn a little bit more about the mechanics of how these systems work. But also it kind of made me start thinking conceptually about what it meant to be a poet using a tool like this to author language. So I think the rise of those kinds of tools that really took models like GPT-2 out of the realm of pure technologists and kind of enabled people like me to use them in a way that felt less intimidating and that kind of lowered the barrier to entry, that was really, really important.

Speaker D: Awesome. There's so much to follow up on from both of you there, but I think before we jump into some more of the general questions about your practice, can you tell us about how your collaboration began? And Sasha, you know, you're saying you don't really have much of a coding background, so how do you kind of divide it? Is it one person working on the concept stuff, or are you doing the words and Nathaniel's doing the implementation? But Nathaniel's got this background in visuals and stuff too, so I imagine it's like very back and forth and then You're probably picking up a lot of skills as well, right? Like you can probably throw down a little JavaScript at this point.

Speaker B: Sasha, you found me first. So why don't we start with that?

Speaker C: Well, yeah, I mean, the long and short of it is that I was aware of Nathaniel's work because I'm a voracious reader of all sorts of science and technology magazines. Wired magazine is like one of my bibles. I was reading Wired, I think it was just online, but I saw an article about The World After Us, which is Nathaniel's incredible show, which I won't put words in your mouth. I'll let you talk about what it is, but it's this incredible show that deals in a very top-line way with, well, e-waste is a big part of it. And looking at the relationship between technology from a hardware and from an infrastructure standpoint, and then kind of looking at the relationship between the natural world and these devices that we've created. There were these beautiful images in Wired of that show, and they just captivated my attention because I was doing a lot of work at the time coding using natural objects. I have this series called Analog Binary Code where I actually translate poetry into objects found in nature. And so I'd been spending a lot of time just sort of thinking about that and working with these objects and coding in this way and encountered these beautiful images from Nathaniel's show and just thought there seems to be a lot of simpatico here in the way that we think about nature's intelligence and how we kind of see that syncing up with what's commonly referred to as artificial intelligence and just kind of thinking about what we can sort of learn by overlaying the two. So I think I followed you on Twitter and then—

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: We eventually found our way to each other, you know, through the wilds of crypto Twitter and realized we did, you know, have a lot in common. I didn't realize he was a poet at first, but that was like a happy, you know, thing to find out later on.

Speaker B: So when I started working on that project with Scott Kildall, which was called NFT Culture Proof, and the basic gist of it is when we started researching into the blockchain, we thought that the best thing about NFTs were the community, but none of it was on-chain. It was happening on Discord, it was happening on Twitter. And so we basically made a series where you would write stories and communicate with each other, but every line that you put out there would live completely on-chain. And then you would get an NFT with your text and the 7 texts before you. And so we were looking for writers to prompt the daily routines and stumbled upon the Crypto Writers Discord and then Sasha Stiles. And then I immediately was totally enamored with Sasha Stiles, both her very well-known work like Cursive Binary and Analog Binary, but also her lesser-known work, I I own more— what are they called? Ecopunks. I own more Ecopunks than anyone out there. And when I went to go follow her as a fanboy, I was like, holy crap, this lady already follows me. And I could not believe it. And so I started chatting with everyone from the Verseverse, Kalen Iwamoto and Ana Maria Caballero. And Sasha became prompters for NFT Culture Proof. And I started having many conversations with all of them. But Sasha and I were just so sympathetic to one another. The World After Us, that exhibition, and I'm happy to talk about it if you want me to, was still traveling at the time. And we were on our way to its second museum in upstate New York. And I wound up inviting Sasha to be on a panel discussion alongside myself, Johannes Lehmann, who is a soil scientist that I used his equipment to artificially age phones and turn them into fossils, Konstantin Sobolov, who is a civil engineer who helped me make circuit-backed tiles out of all recycled waste from concrete and motherboards from servers. And then myself and Sasha, and immediately we just couldn't stop talking. And so the collaboration very quickly emerged from there. And that's, that to me is my favorite kind of collaboration. You know, I, as someone who both has an engineering degree and an art degree, I like to joke, like, when an artist asks an engineer to collaborate, what they really mean is, can you build this shit for me? And when an engineer asks an artist to collaborate, what they really mean is, can you make my stuff pretty? And, you know, true collaboration should be, how can I help You, your stuff is so cool. And then new ideas should emerge. I will say that, and then Sasha, I think you should pick this up too, in terms of our working styles. First of all, I collaborate a lot and Sasha almost never collaborates. So that's been an interesting way to work together. I also have my own solo practice, but what's interesting to me about that is when I work with others, like when I've worked with Jessica Munich Ganger, who's a printmaker I love working with, or you have Genia Kaganovich, who is a metalsmith and sculptor I love working with. I'm always the technologist, like I'm the nerd. When I work with someone like Scott Kildall, he's the nerd and I'm the aesthete. But in all of these, I'm the writer. And with Sasha, it's the first time that I defer to her because I think what she does as a language artist and an AI poet is magic. And that is not to say that she doesn't use my writing also to train her datasets, or that, you know, if I have feedback, especially when it comes to the language that doesn't go in the poem, but rather in like artist statements or academic grant writing, etc., that I don't have a say. And I think we all have a say in everything. But, you know, we like to both do everything. But then sometimes, just because of our skill sets, things fall to us. Like, yes, Sasha can code. But the default is I'm doing the code. Like, yeah, I do a lot around aesthetics. But default is Sasha will make the decisions. And it's funny, because I have a bunch of studio assistants, I have a team, I'm a professor, you know, I have grants that I'm working with, they do a lot of sketches, and then inevitably Sasha will take over and make it how she wants it, and then either she'll build it or my students will build it or I'll code it. And so there's a lot of back and forth. I am an extremely experimental artist. I love to see what happens and leave it that way. Sasha is also experimental, but she's also very particular in her aesthetic decisions. And so I think it's a really good coupling because we both love kind of deferring to each other. There's never been an argument around it. We've wiped completely clean one of our, our oral binary. We started from scratch like twice because we couldn't agree on how it went. And like, that was the closest we ever came to getting in an argument, but we didn't. It like worked. I think in many ways I bring a lot of my aesthetics to the table. She brings a lot of her aesthetics to the table, and then sometimes completely new aesthetics emerge. One of the things I like to talk about in our collaboration, and maybe this is a good point to talk about The World After Us, The World After Us Was the largest show I had ever worked on to date, and the basic question that I began with was what might our phones look like in a million years? And I asked that not from a design perspective, but from the perspective of material. I started by trying to literally fossilize. I called them fossils with the pH phones. We would smash, freeze, burn, blend. Johannes Lehmann is a soil scientist. He works with biochars. He artificially ages biomass and bio waste to get a triple win. One is you remove, you sequester carbon dioxide from the environment. Two is you get rid of this bio waste. 3, you can use it in soil. That's the soil scientists to get minerals. And I said, hey dude, can we throw some phones and laptops in that shit? And he was like, hell yeah, because he's a big art collector and he was super excited by what we're doing. So we were aging these. I would then do things like grow plants out of phones, my phony plants, or grow a mushroom out of a watch, which is the image that Sasha saw and that was on the COVID of Wired.com. And I called these my server farms, my phony plants. I've got one with an aloe growing out of a computer for you coding nerds out there. It was called Aloe World. Sasha actually that NFT. And then finally, I took a bunch of things to see what if we human intervened. So I would do things like blend phones and then turn that dust into ink and then make traditional prints in the printing studio of phones using that ink. So they were called my phony prints, phony ink on paper made out of my wasted t-shirts. And then I also started doing things like questioning, what if it wasn't just plants that found places to live? And this, the title of the show comes from Alan Wiseman's The World Without Us, where he poses the question, If all humans disappeared tomorrow, how quickly would non-human life retake the planet? And the answer is not very long at all. So that's where these plants started finding habitats. But I started to ask questions like, what if matter itself, what if e-waste itself began to spread and incubate and grow? And that became the wall after us, which was these huge, like 250 square meter, like 1,000 square feet more installations of phones and laptops and e-waste and electronics and cables and plants climbing and festering and growing up the wall. There were these 10 to 12-foot towers on spikes of electronic waste. And so in many ways, finally getting back to Sasha and I, but the work I had been doing, and this came from a grant thanks to the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, which also we just got the same grant again to work on our collaborative next show, which I'm sure we'll be happy to talk about because the IRL implications are really exciting. But I like to say that that work was kind of looking at what electronic waste and materiality and embodiment look like after the human. And Sasha's work, from my perspective, with technology is like, what do humans and meaning look like after the human? And so when you marry these 2 things together, suddenly you have this new collaboration that, like, I pinch myself at some of the stuff that comes out when we work together. And like, I've always had such high respect for Sasha as an artist and a human. To have such integrity and such generosity at once. But then every now and again, I'm like, holy shit, she's blowing up. She's given like a TED Talk. She just had like 2 Christies. I'm like, she's gonna leave tomorrow. What am I gonna do about this show? Um, but also just, I think we're loving working together so much that I'm like, okay, calm down. It's gonna be okay.

Speaker A: Everything's gonna be okay. Everything's gonna be okay.

Speaker B: She likes me. She really likes me.

Speaker A: Maybe that's like a really good time to bring in a conversation because there's Kind of like that third collaborator, you know, Sasha, you have an AI collaborator that you bring into the table and, you know, through the form of technology. And for people who might not know about technology, can you explain it and like how that comes into your collaboration with Nathaniel as well?

Speaker C: Yeah, for sure. So I actually have a couple of AI collaborators. First and foremost collaborator is my AI sort of alter ego, which I've dubbed Technology, which I'll talk about first and then I can get into the other one. Well, first of all, the word technology, it's funny, I still get people sort of saying, you know, there's a typo, you wrote technology instead of technology. You know, it's funny, like, it's so— it's meant to be this way. It's a portmanteau word of obviously technology with all the connotations of that word. And then elegy, which nods, of course, in my world to the poetic elegy. And it's a word that's meant to sort of conjure and evoke both the forward-thinking, you know, kind of the exhilarating push of technology and the way that technological tools have always enabled us to become more and more human. So like that positive galvanizing force of technology, at the same time, sort of looking at the things that obsolesce as a result of those advancing technologies, the things that we consider very important that are being outpaced or that are being replaced. So it's meant to sort of look at both those sides of the equation. And that term is just one that I've been using for a long time and it sort of naturally became the name of this AI alter ego, as I call it, which basically is a catch-all term for the series of custom text generators that I've been fine-tuning that are rooted in existing large language models, things like GPT-2, GPT-3, and now GPT-4, but which are then overlaid with a custom dataset. So basically, like, the way that I think about it is the underlying language model is sort of what gives a system the ability to write, quote unquote, like a human. It's a system that has absorbed vast quantities of human text as examples, and then it's using all of its cybernetic power to sift through all that data, to sift through all those examples, and sort of essentially teach itself how to put words together, how to put language together in a way that is human-esque. What I've done, and at the time, I think this was still like a relatively novel sort of use case for these things, even among a lot of the writers that I knew who were using these models, is that I wasn't just using sort of the off-the-shelf version. I was actually creating a custom dataset based on all my own writing. So I was taking, you know, drafts of my manuscript, which, like I said before, were just analog poems that I'd been writing for years and years. And I took boxes of notes that I'd been collecting from various sources that were informing my manuscript. And I took, you know, like all the hundreds of Post-its that I'd been scribbling ideas on and like little words and phrases and like little nuggets of poems that never went anywhere. And I took all that information.

Speaker B: Hmm.

Speaker C: And put it all into one sort of massive training dataset and then use that to customize or fine-tune the underlying model so that it not only knew how to write like a human, but it knew how to write like me. So that's the approach that I've taken with technology and is, you know, how I wrote my first book, Technology. It's how I write the poems that are at the root of Nathaniel and my collaboration, with the addition that I've taken moments from Nathaniel's writing, his critical scholarship, even things like titles and the way that he refers to his artworks or the color palettes that he might use, things like that. I've taken kind of an amalgamation of words and vernacular and ideas from Nathaniel's writing, and I've incorporated that into a version of technology as well. And that's the version that I'm using to prompt and to co-author the poems that are part of our collaboration. And then the other, which I'll just mention super fast, but the other AI sort of influence in my life has been a humanoid robot named Bina48, who I've been mentoring in poetry since 2018. And it's a robot built by Hanson Robotics and the Terrasem Foundation many, many years ago, and has also, you know, done some collaborative work with the likes of Stephanie Dinkins and some really other amazing artists. But I was invited by her managers, really her developers, to come in and basically mentor her in poetry and kind of use the opportunity to understand what it means to create a training dataset, what it means to influence or evolve a mind file, as they call it, and to look, you know, from a very close view, to look at how a non-human mind like Bina's is able to take disparate pieces of information and link them together and produce what is essentially a new thought. So it's been a really, really important experience for me too, to get to work on that project and literally get to put my hands into a machine's brain and to see kind of reflected in this machine how my own poetic mind works and how when I come up with an idea, when I'm inspired, when I have read a few different books and it's suddenly sparked an idea for a new poem, I'm able to see how that actually works in a language model or in a neural network, how nothing comes from nothing. It's always the collision of existing pieces of information that sparks something new. So that's been a huge influence, I think, on my own practice, but also has driven a lot of the thinking that Nathaniel and I are getting into with our Project Mother Computer and with this grant that he mentioned earlier. It's really all about creative AI, but thinking through a lot of, you know, conceptual, philosophical, kind of foundational approaches to why creative AI is useful, what it can teach us about our own intelligence, and then, you know, lots of other implications and offshoots that we could maybe get into later if it's relevant. But yeah, it's been really, really fun getting to explore in all these, all these directions.

Speaker A: I would love to hear more about Mother Computer because I think that seems like a really large-scale work that we need to pay a lot of attention to. But before we jump into that, as you're working with BINA48, Sasha, when you're diving into this computer mind, are you seeing divergence? Are you seeing that we are the same? Is it inspiring you to think in different ways? Because, you know, based off of all the media that we see, like, AI is here. It's a huge black swan event within, like, the cultural history of the now and I guess the future. How can we have a relation with it, you know, from a pure mindset? Not a mindset, one word, but like a set of our minds, if you know what I mean. It's very sci-fi. It's something new and You know, I think it's something that we'll be grappling with for a long time.

Speaker C: Absolutely. Well, that's a big and really, really important question. I think, I mean, a number of things. One is that just again, to give like a super fast background on Bina48, she was basically developed as an experiment in whether we can preserve something of our own human personas as data and as software. And so I think like purely from that viewpoint, thinking about what is important about my experience as a human or what your experience is or what Nathaniel's experience is and kind of understanding Where, you know, the flesh and blood and the visceral kind of lived experience of it ends and this sort of ephemeral kind of software piece of it begins has been a really interesting, almost like a little riddle for me to just turn over in my own head and really kind of understanding, you know, what is it that makes us human? Is it memories and stories and beliefs and opinions and things that can be sort of encoded and transmitted? Are there other things that we're not able to actually encode or that we're not able to render, you know, in machinic counterparts. So that I think is an interesting thought experiment. And it's really enabled, I think, by the rise of these AI systems that are enabling us to take information and to put it into contexts where they can be sort of fed back to us so we can interact with them. So we can basically like relate to that information in useful ways. So that's been, I think, like a really big piece of it for me. Maybe the other thing that swirls through my head a lot is I think we tend to think about AI as sort of like replicating human consciousness. And we kind of set up all these tests and markers to sort of see whether or not it can do the things that we do. And I think what I've learned or what I'm really starting to understand at a more and more gut level, the more that I do this work, is that AI isn't necessarily best used in trying to replicate what humans can do because we can already do these things. It's more about leaning into the things that an AI system can do that we can't do. So working at speed and scale and processing really vast quantities of information, or being able to kind of take us, you know, an aerial view and really kind of synthesize it into something useful. And to me, like, the sweet spot that I like to be in, in my own practice, is not using AI tools purely as tools, not writing purely on my own, but kind of finding a space in the middle where there's a third voice, there's a third poet that is sort of a combination of AI and human, and the human is doing the things that only the human can do. The AI is doing things that only a machinic mind can do and that a human mind can't, and access things that my own mind can't touch, and then putting those things together. So really, for me, a lot of this has been learning to think about AI not as a replacement, but as an augmentation, and not as something alien, but as something that can really kind of illuminate the things that are maybe hidden to me or not accessible to me right now. And I think that's also really at the heart of Mother Computer is thinking through the potential for AI as a creative collaborator and, you know, as a key to sort of unlock realms of creativity that we as human artists, but also as human scientists and thinkers and all sorts of things that we cannot do unless we have the aid of technology. I think that's been like a big component of it for me is how can I use these technologies to enhance what I love to do as a writer? How can I use it to augment my imagination and not replace the things I love to do, but make it more meaningful, more fun, help me do more of what I think is important to me?

Speaker D: I think that's such a great variation on something we hear a lot talking to code-based artists, a lot of the generative artists that we've interviewed, where they view the computer as like a collaborator, right? Like sometimes they write their code and then run it and it produces a different result, perhaps because there's a bug in it. And it's like, oh wow, like that's actually even cooler than I intended. I'm going to explore that, right? And it unlocks this whole other area of pursuit for them and their work. I really like that. A question for both of you here is a little bit loaded but relevant to everything we're talking about. What is poetry today in these modern times with blockchain, with NFTs? And like, how does new media play into maybe an expanding definition? Because like a lot of us When we think of poetry, we think of just little books, right, containing pages and words.

Speaker A: Times New Roman font size 12 on a page.

Speaker D: Yeah, exactly.

Speaker B: You know, I think Sasha and I would have pretty different takes on this too, and I think our backgrounds would probably really inform a lot of this. You know, as Sasha mentioned, she comes from a very traditional poetic background. I come from a space where my father was a Wordsworth scholar. I'm a big romantic. My parents were both English teachers, but my father was also a songwriter. He used to write all the lyrics for Jimmy Ratcliffe, who sang at my parents' wedding. And for me, even my kind of poetry came out of a space where I was a musician and I was playing in a band in college. And like, I did things like for the fashion show, I made all my bandmates clothes and we lip-synced our song on the runway. When I left, stopped making music to go to grad school for art, I missed the kind of performativity of being on stage. I missed writing lyrics. And so I started doing slam poetry. And in fact, before I knew what slam poetry was, I was doing poetry with my saxophone. Like, I would play and then speak and then play and then speak. And then I remember someone in Ithaca came to me and was like, I've never heard slam poetry like that before. That was amazing. And I'm like, thanks. What the F is slam poetry? But then I wound up competing on the nationals. And in the '90s, I was at the New Yorican Poets Cafe and at CBGB's and kind of doing this circuit. So for me, poetry has always been an embodied performance. Like, even when I write my academic books, I read them out loud as I'm writing them. In fact, there's an audiobook version of the first chapter of my second book because I was reading it aloud in my studio and 2 of my students were listening and they were like, I never got your writing until I heard you say it out loud. You have to record that. And so from that space, moving to the media-rich environment It completely made sense to me. Like taking HectorNet, which was my first big kind of net art piece in the late '90s, I was taking the poetry that I was performing at the Nuyorican and CBGBs and then putting it in front of a green screen with like cameras and then performing it and editing it together and streaming it on the internet. And so to me, that kind of embodied performance is part of how I'm a poet. In terms of how I might define poetry, that's a little more difficult. And I think Sasha and I would probably see eye to eye here in that, you know, one of the things we're doing for Mother Computer is all of our poems we're turning into artist books, but really expanded notions of artist books. So one of the artist books is going to be like 5 overhead projectors with layers of transparency on top of them. One of them is going to be a 10-inch LP. And so I also have an extended notion of what poetry might mean. First of all, like art, if you define it as a poem, it's a poem, full stop. That's all you need to do. It's— poetry is performative in every sense of that word. I speak it, therefore it is. And so sometimes I think of the images like my scanner art has been called poetry in the past. This is a series where I take desktop scanners, custom battery packs, and I traverse the landscape and it becomes a composition of time. So that's the other thing that I would throw out there for poetry. I do think that it is temporal in some way, that there's a beginning, a middle, and end. That doesn't necessarily mean you have to do it in order, but like, that's why I like to think of my scanner works as poetic. But I do have a very expanded notion of poetry. I also think there has to be— not has to be, but I tend towards work that have a linguistic play to it. If you notice all of my work, I'm big on the dad puns. When does a joke become a dad joke? It becomes apparent, um, it's fully grown, you know, etc. and so forth. I love language play. My father's 96 years old, still writing poetry, is working on his first chapbook. It's all puns. Yeah, so I guess to answer that question, like, some form of temporality some form of play with the linguistic or the symbolic, at least in its kind of denotation, connotation, and mythic qualities that language has.

Speaker C: Wow. That's amazing. It's so funny because like, even though I think by crypto standards maybe, and by digital art standards, I have like a very traditional poetry background, but I think by the poetry community standards, I'm like very experimental and fringe. Like I never did an MFA, like I never studied in any of the right channels. Or anything like that. And when I grew up, it was really just about finding things that I loved and just trying to figure out, like, what I loved about them and, like, how to do something that made me feel the same way. It wasn't just poets that taught me to write. Like, I spent hours listening to people like Lou Reed and trying to write lyrics and stuff like that. So we definitely have that musicality in common, which I think is so interesting. But to that point, I think a lot about how strange it is that our contemporary notion of poetry is a 2-dimensional printed object, but also that we think of poetry as, like, kind of a conventional lyric format, which is such a narrow definition. And it's like one that's really perpetuated by a lot of MFA programs and stuff, which is a big reason why I'm really happy to be able to explore poetry, like, outside the confines of those thought systems. Just thinking back to the beginning, like, and trying to get to a definition of poetry, like, I love to think about the rise of poetry, like, in the very beginning. And the fact that poetry started as an oral art form and as kind of an immersive embodied art form, like poetry didn't start as a written thing. It started as spoken word. And the reason we invented poetry is because before we had written language to concretize ideas and archive them, we had to figure out how to make ideas memorable so that we could repeat them and preserve them and transmit them from like person to person and from generation to generation. So We invented poetic devices because they make information easy to remember. It's much easier to memorize a poem than it is to memorize, like, you know, a news article. Poetry is an art form, but it's also a technology, and it's an invention that came out of a very practical need, which is to store data. So I like to kind of think about poetry that way, just to kind of ground the work that I'm doing now and to kind of draw a line from the poetic to the technological, whereas a lot of the pushback that I've gotten over the years is rooted in this sort of knee-jerk reaction that poetry and technology are diametrically opposed to one another. I actually think they're very, very closely aligned, and I think poetry is actually a kind of code in a way, and I think poetry is a kind of blockchain, as I've said many times. So I definitely love to think about the relationship between the two. I kind of love also thinking about the way that poetry, uniquely among so many art forms, really embodies our current mode of digital duality. And by that, I mean that poetry, like Nathaniel was saying with his experience, you know, in performance and spoken word and all that, poetry is on the one hand, like incredibly visceral and physical. And we think about it as being such a cerebral activity, like, you know, a poet locked in their room, just like scribbling with a pen, but poetry is rooted in the body and it comes out of our gut and like the palate, and it's shaped by the tongue. And like, I don't know any poets who don't speak their poems to make sure they sound right. And it like literally is shaped by our hands and by our physicality. And we get ideas when we're on long walks, and there's something really physical about the poetic. So I think like there's something about new media that kind of plays with that idea too. And at the same time, poems are so visceral, but they're also ephemeral, right? Because they don't have to exist as materiality either. They are objects that can be embedded in the brain. They're words that can basically, you know, exist just in memory that don't actually need to have any sort of physical manifestation. And so I think in that sense, it's really interesting because poetry is both hardware and software. It's like voice and body and all these physical components. But it's also like the program itself. It's the code that when you run it evokes some sort of response or some sort of an idea or creates some kind of an augmented reality, which is really what all language does. So I think like for me, I like to think about poetry kind of in those terms. And that's been sort of a nice lens to use in my work and just sort of thinking through the relationship between what poets have always done and what technologists are trying to do now, both with things like blockchain, but also with AI, using language systems, using words as an interface for the world, as a way to unlock ideas and sort of help us access things that we would not otherwise be able to envision. Like all the AI systems that people are using, like DALL-E and Midjourney and Stable Diffusion, like they're rooted in, well, most of them are rooted in text-to-image interfaces or text-to-something interfaces. And I think it just all points to the fact that like poetry is maybe the apotheosis or the epitome of that idea that language is the interface that unlocks like all those things that are so like crucial to human imagination.

Speaker D: Do either of you play with things like Midjourney or Stable Diffusion, like from a visual standpoint? Because Nathaniel in particular, like listening to you talk about your exhibit, mushrooms growing out of phones and stuff, it sounds very much like something that someone might make in a prompt these days.

Speaker A: I think somebody has made that in a prompt. I'm pretty sure I've seen that somewhere on Twitter.

Speaker D: Yeah.

Speaker B: And actually that image is in both DALL-E and Midjourney. Like, you know how you can look up? So that particular image is part of it. So yes, I've played extensively with some of the text-to-image AI stuff. Admittedly, to me, there's something magical about these ephemeral sculptures. They live as actual sculptures in the gallery and then as physical photographs of temporary sculptures and, you know, images of NFTs. And there's a there there. There's something about making yourself and having that embodied materiality. On the other hand, to me, I guess I almost treat it like copyright, not from a legal perspective, but from a creative perspective. Like, to me, because copyright in reality doesn't work, right? And I'm sorry, I have like very strong opinions about this. But, you know, if you're a large company with lawyers on retainer, you can sue little guys who are using your materials, even if it falls under fair use. And if you're a little guy and a company wants to copy you, they can just do it and then put you out of your misery with their lawyers. But what I'm interested in is, look, if you want an image of a sunset, go take an image of a sunset. You don't need to steal that from the internet. You should only be doing that if it's a comment on the original material, and that's where fair use lies. And so for me, if you're going to use AI, it should be specifically because using AI is part of the conceptual framework that you're engaging with. There should be a reason, the same way that you might decide to make a photograph Or a painting, and in fact, I say that very specifically because I think a lot of the conversations around AI right now are very similar to the conversations around photography in the late 1800s. Right? Oh, it's all technology. You're not actually doing the work. It's just an image of what's really there. And you know, we could go on and on. And then, of course, photography both became everywhere. Like anyone could do it. Yeah, they can. But that doesn't make everyone a photographer and an artist with photography. Right? And so AI is going to develop its own. Interdisciplinary languages. It's going to be like coding and photography in that it's going to be in every field and its own field, and especially in the arts. So that being said, some of the earliest experiments I did with AI and text-to-image were when they were not publicly available. I signed up for Google Colab in early 2021 to experiment with the very first text-to-image AIs, but I wanted to ask questions like— so I made a series called Are Computers Racist? And I would put in prompts like, portrait of a thug or rioters destroying property and see what it would create. And it's kind of obvious what these things might create early on. Now, granted, there's debiasing now and a lot of work has been done to do it, but like, to me, that was important. And also it was important that I make it in a way that wasn't just me tricking the system to do anything I wanted and like proving a point. So I only allowed myself one day to make the entire series and I minted them on that day. So that it was timestamped. And then later down the road, you know, for me, I started training my own datasets to do, for example, images like my scanner work. Didn't like the results. Wound up instead now using Firefly, Photoshop's AI, to extend my own images. So it's trying to create work like Nathaniel Stern. And to me, that's a comment on the kind of ecological systems and forces. I mean, Sasha mentioned this earlier. I think this relates to Mother Computer, where my second book— my first book was on interactive art, my second book is called Ecological Aesthetics, and it's looking at ecology not from the standpoint of necessarily organisms or life, but rather the ecological forces at play from love and language to physics and matter and things, and how they are forces upon each other that shift and change life and matter. And so to me, AI is another ecological force. Right? You know, and it also plays into how I differentiate design thinking and arts thinking. You know, as an artist, I'm often asked to design things, and I can do it, but I'm not really a designer. Like, designers can make art, and artists can design, and we craft things. But to me, design thinking is like empathize with a specific person or group, find the problem you're trying to solve, solve it. Art is dump a garbage bag on the table and see what you can make out of it, right? It's collaborating with your materials. It's why so often artists confuse medium and discipline. Oh, what's your discipline? Paint. What's your discipline? Metal. What's your discipline? Print. And to me, AI is just a new garbage bag to dump on the table. It's all these ecological forces at play. It's another way to engage in dialogue. And so I do still experiment, but for me, it has to be a conscious choice. I can mention a new work I'm working on with Scott Kildall right now, which actually interestingly has a lot of the similar concepts to Mother Computer. We're working on a series called Cybernatural Landscapes, and he makes custom sensors that read electrochemical activity inside of a plant. And so basically, he's reading plant feelings. And so we're going to do a 4-season performance where we read plant feelings, then generatively use the data that's incoming from that, as well as the date and sunlight in a day to create a prompt. And then that prompt will create an image of a cybernatural landscape. And so for us, it's a very specific, okay, there's this 3-way collaboration between this kind of human creativity, plant feelings, and AI as ecological forces on one another to create.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker B: a larger landscape. And we love the idea of using the data as a literal random seed from the plant to kind of play that up. So maybe it's a poem, given my earlier definition.

Speaker A: Maybe this is a really great opportunity to then maybe talk a little bit more about Mother Computer, because from what I can glean from the information out there and the information on the website, it really is about this cybernetic future, the natural world as well, and, you know, We are part of this natural world. Technology is derived from us. So what's its place in the natural world? So what is Mother Computer for people who might not know? And how are you bringing cybernetics, nature, us into play within the works that are a part of this overall exhibition?

Speaker C: Really, like kind of the top line way that we're thinking about it, it's an opportunity to sort of explore in myriad ways the relationship between, well, artificial intelligence and natural intelligence, or between amalgamated intelligence or alternative intelligences and natural intelligence. So I think, you know, we're sort of looking at systems in a number of different ways and wanting to kind of continue the thinking that we've been doing separately and together, but really give ourselves the opportunity to embody a lot of the ideas in different mediums and materials. So, I mean, really, The way that we've been thinking about it all along is that it's a poetry collection. It's basically a book of poems, but as a series of installations and projects, it's basically a poetic ecosystem made up of discrete poem objects that in different ways explore and interrogate and ideate on and then sort of augment a lot of the themes that we've been talking about today and using different platforms, different materials, different approaches. to kind of bring them to life. So it's sort of an anthology where one poem might exist as a generative long-form project, another poem will exist as a series of sculptures, for example, and so on and so forth. It really is sort of this beautiful collision of our solo practices, I think, in a way that really allows us to marry a lot of the concerns that are so dear to both of us, like, you know, the analog and the virtual and the ancient and the future and the human and the post-human. Yeah. And really getting a chance to play both with these ideas theoretically, but then also turn them into a show that can live in a physical space and that can then be a portal for visitors to come and sort of begin to start playing with these ideas themselves. And there are elements of it that are sort of like pre-generated, pre-curated, and that kind of exist as discrete artworks. There's other elements that are meant to be more interactive and that we don't really know how they'll look because they're going to be generative. And that's kind of the part too. So yeah, how would you, how would you put it?

Speaker B: Yeah, so I think you covered a lot of it really, really well, and I love always hearing you talk about both your work and our work. I want to pose a few questions, like what would it look like to walk into a palm? How would it feel to experience the ecological forces of AI with your body? What does it mean to fold in generative art? How might we sense and make sense of cybernetic and ecological intelligence systems. How do information, understanding, synthesis, inspiration, generativity, creativity— how do all these things differ? When I work on a physical show, and I think it's really important as an artist, as a poet, as a body, as a human, as a thing, to experience things affectively, to ask these questions materially, not just conceptually, like, can we marry those 2 things together? It's one thing to hear me talk about the world after us. It's another thing to stand next to a 12-foot tower and 2,000 square feet of waste and point at it and be like, I had that phone, or have you tried this, or can you do that? And so I really want us to feel the power of these intelligences in our bodies, in a space. And so to me, IRL exhibitions are really important. And I also think blockchain plays a role here. Like, what does the blockchain feel like, right? So Still Moving, for example, is our first experiment in embodying the blockchain. Where it's the first, I think, fully embodied interactive artwork that's fully on chain. And it's motion tracking in real time that distributes a poem around your movements. And so you can actually see behind me, and I know you won't hear this on the podcast, but that's like, there's Mother Computer, that's the show. And every poem that we write will live in various forms, right? It'll live as a, for example, a generative poem on fx hash. And then we're taking The Word After Us, which was our first big collaboration, very much based on the world after us, but we're then printing it on paper and then using scraps of that paper and other scraps and waste in my studio, blending it and turning it into its own paper again, making a generative project, and then taking inspiration from fx hash and spray painting the words back on top of it. How might we generate physically, which we always already do, this generative project and work, and what does that feel and look like? The e-wasteland is another project we're working on based on the wasteland. That's going to be pre-curated, my images that an AI is kind of extending my scanner work. And then Sasha's written the poem. So that'll be dropped as a stanza-by-stanza poetry unreading, as we like to call them. But then there'll also be a media-rich poem. There'll also be an artist book, which is going to be a series of those transparencies on the overhead projectors. The installation is actually going to be huge piles of electronic waste that we spray paint just slightly off-white to turn them into paper, and then Sasha's going to handwrite the poem across all of them. And so really trying to create— and I like to think of my exhibitions as having like 3 relationships that I want to augment, amplify, intervene in, whatever the heck you want to call it. The first is an intimate relationship. How might we complexify our understandings of AI? So many people have an opinion, but they rarely know the difference between DALL-E and Midjourney and Firefly. And there's huge differences in terms of the companies that are investing in them, where the images are scraped from, the politics behind them, who's using them, right? What's the difference between Bard and ChatGPT, right? What's the difference between LLMs, large language models, and small data, as Sasha means to call it? Like everyone's talking about the datasets, but what about the parameters? What about the model itself? What about the ways they relate to each other? What about fine-tuning and debiasing? Why is it all computer scientists that are doing this? That's the intimate level I want to change. Systemically, we want to make changes. We want more people from non-computer science backgrounds to get invested and involved in the politics and the creativity, in the discourse, in the laws surrounding AI. And then finally, inspirationally, my target audience is usually people between 15 and 35. It's people who might change their entire careers Or if not, at least change what they're doing within their discipline based on what they see, feel, hear, or experience in spaces like this. So what might you do with ecological waste at your job now? How might you creatively produce with AI in your job now?

Speaker C: Something that I probably should have said before. Well, first of all, just as a quick, like, add-on to what you just said, it's interesting. I did a poetry workshop the other day and we actually did an exercise where we used the same exact prompt in multiple text generators just to show the vast differences that you can have, like, without even changing any variables or parameters, but just like looking at how different systems have different outputs. So all this stuff about, like, you know, copywriting prompts or whatever, it's interesting how much attention is put on prompts and not on parameters. But I was going to say too that I just wanted to kind of clarify, like, the reason that poetry is at the heart of a lot of this is because language is so closely aligned to what we think of as humanity. Like, language in so many ways is very much tied to consciousness. And right now, you know, as we can see from this conversation that we're having about all these AI-powered systems that really use language as a basis, and from other, you know, aspects of this conversation, like, we can see how language is really transforming. Like, the way we use language is transforming, the way language is created is transforming, the way that human beings consume language is transforming. Like, all these things that we've sort of taken for granted about how language exists and behaves and what it means, what it signifies, Like, a lot of those things are really being upended in some really profound ways. And so just as Nathaniel has really looked at sort of what will my phone look like in X number of years, my whole practice has really been rooted in this question for a long time of what will language look like in 1,000 years or, you know, a million years? How is language changing right before our eyes? How are we now evolving in real time from, you know, a history of oral tradition and written literature and now into generative text? What does that mean for what a post-human consciousness might look like? How is language going to look differently in the near future and then in the distant future? Is code our new language? How do humans talk to computers and what is that kind of transhuman communication? So I think all those things are really at the heart of our separate practices in a lot of ways, but we're really looking at this exhibition as an opportunity to dive really deep into this area that I think is so fascinating for so many reasons. And just as Nathaniel was saying, I think This is why I've always felt so strongly about trying to onboard more writers, more poets, more folks from, you know, my world of the humanities, bring them over into this territory because it's very much about language and it requires people that really have a deep understanding and love of words and language to really kind of get into and share perspective.

Speaker B: Sasha, can you share— sorry, I didn't mean to cut you off, but like, I love Can you share your language leaps historically and new language leap jam that you often share in our workshops?

Speaker C: My jam?

Speaker B: Yeah, you know what I'm talking about, right? Like there's been 3 historical huge language leaps and you think there's a new one.

Speaker C: No, I think I like said it in a super, super fast way, but well, it was sparked by like the writer Ismail Qadare has talked about there really being only 2 kind of major moments in the history of language and literature, and that being the oral tradition and the written tradition. And so it really seems to me like we are, you know, with the advent of first, you know, generative computing, computational poetics, and now really with AI language models, we're on the cusp of a completely new way of creating and publishing and distributing and understanding language, which is through these intelligent systems. And so we're looking at writing not just using systems of syntax and grammar and alphabets, we're actually looking at writing with the entirety of humanity's written record kind of informing the output. So being able to write with the collective consciousness, I think, you know, of our civilization kind of informing every word, which is a really seismic shift. And yes, I think we really want to be able to grapple with what that portends. Like, what does that mean? Like, for obviously for the future of poetry, for the future of language and literature, But also, what does that mean for how humans will continue to understand ourselves and tell stories? And that's going to preoccupy me for the rest of my life, you know, this question and this work. And this is really a way of asking the questions we want to ask and giving ourselves the opportunity to start iterating on what some of the answers might be or what they might look like. But this is at the heart of the work we've done with Feral Font and kind of ideating what language will literally begin to look like. It's at the heart of cursive binary and my interest in asemic writing and sort of the fusion of language that's legible to us and language that is generative and that is speaking some sort of other language that we can't quite decipher yet. And it's also kind of nodding back to the roots of language, which is in pictorial systems, and kind of looking at how in a way we're coming full circle and at the same time evolving into new territory. So yeah, I think like This is a really fascinating area, like, for people who are interested in linguistics and especially for poets and writers and literature lovers.

Speaker B: I'm sorry I cut you off there, Sasha. I just— you blow my mind every time you go through this.

Speaker C: Oh God, no, you didn't cut me off at all. Thank you for getting me back on track.

Speaker D: I'm curious to ask both of you, you know, you release art all over the place on the blockchain now. We've got a few projects from the two of you on fx hash. Obviously, you had your Art Blocks curated piece recently. How do you think about like where you're going to put your work and why, and like price point and things like that? And then more generally, you know, so much of what we see in the art space on blockchain is visual first, right? It tends to be flat 2D images, non-interactive pieces. Do you ever get frustrated or disappointed or, you know, let down maybe by the collector community here when you don't see an equal embrace for more challenging conceptual work like the two of you make?

Speaker B: We don't want to point fingers, but, you know, of course it's a little disappointing to look back and say, oh my gosh, we're the only curated Art Blocks drop ever that hasn't sold out. Of course, that's a little disappointing. At the same time, we also look at who's collecting it and how much of it is on secondary and not on secondary, and that really excites us. I jokingly like to say, you know, prior to the blockchain, I was a really well-known and respected artist who got lots of shows, but never really got much sales. And after the blockchain, I'm still that. But at the same time, I think for me, a huge part of the blockchain is conservation and archiving. The first article I ever wrote in the public before I had many NFTs was about the notion of being able to be collected and to have someone take care of And be a custodian of my digital work. I used to sell my interactive installations very inexpensively to museums just because I knew the museum would take care of it. And so that's a huge part of what I care about within this. I'm going to keep plugging. I find that when I try to make work that's going to sell, I'm usually not that happy with the work. And when I make work I'm happy with, I'm not necessarily that happy with the sales, but I'll take the latter over the former any day. Day of the week. And in fact, I'm going to continue to push. And when I look at— and I've got some really exciting things on the horizon— when I look at artists like Simon DLR and Rhea Meyers and think about their successes, it gives me hope because I do have a lot of respect for it. So I'm never disappointed or jealous of work that sells well. Of course, part of me gets a little heartbroken when my stuff doesn't do well, but I'm a fanboy. I always look for the value in any given series or work or piece or artist. And I have found this to be such a generous space. And I kind of came to terms with a long time ago, and Sasha, I think, has had more successes than I have in this realm, but I came to terms with a long time ago that I'm an artist's artist in a lot of ways, and I'm cool with that.

Speaker C: That's very hip of you. That's a nice badge of honor to wear, actually. I guess the way that I look at it, the poet's life is a life of lots of rejection. I'm I've had many more poems rejected than have been published. And I, you know, I tried to shop Technology around to lots of places before I found my publisher. And I'm okay with the idea that if you're doing something that's different than the current model for success, that people aren't necessarily going to jump up and down for it right away. You kind of have to— I don't know, you just kind of have to do what you want to do and believe in it and just kind of know that it's going to be a bit of a slog. Yeah. When I started writing with AI and bringing that work into various workshops and stuff and kind of trying to seed it out to magazines, like, I got a lot of pushback and people who told me, you know, it's not real poetry, or this is cheating or whatever. And I don't know, I think you just have to sort of, whether it's rejection in that form, whether it's like the rejection that comes from people not buying a piece, you just kind of take it for what it is. And it has no bearing on the work itself. And I actually Maybe this is just me like twisting it in my own head to make myself feel better, but I kind of have always liked not doing what everybody wants to do. And now that there's so much popularity around certain things, I'm kind of less interested in the stuff that's gone mainstream. But I find it like much more productive and like much more exciting to kind of be working without those expectations or pressures. So I don't mind like not being one of those artists who, you know, needs to like sell out in 2 seconds.

Speaker B: Sasha, you're such a badass.

Speaker C: Well, I mean, like with poets too, we're supposed to do things quietly and slowly and like the hype of drops and things like that is very counterintuitive in a way. So to be 100% honest, because Will, you mentioned the Art Blocks drop and like we were really excited about that drop and we're still really excited about that project. And we've done some really cool things with it in real life events. We've done some really cool things online. We have many things planned for it. But I think there was also something of a relief in having it be released and then kind of having a mixed reaction because it kind of was like, well, not everything has to be like an instant sellout. That's not the only marker of whether something was worth doing or not. It was a really exciting project to work on. It's taught me a lot. I think it's taught Nathaniel a lot. And I think in our talks with the Art Blocks curation team too, like it was a meaningful project because it's doing something different. And it's not meant to necessarily just be consumed in the way that a lot of the other curated projects are. It's meant to be experienced live and to be interacted with. And we just need to find more opportunities to kind of show it come to life in the right ways.

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, the messages we've gotten from like Snowfro and Punk6529 and Operator have been like so heartwarming and exciting. I also think that in some ways, I can say at least for myself and, you know, Sasha also has a day job, but I speak from a very privileged position. I'm a professor. That was the coveted job of artists for so long. I get to be inspired by students and teach and have tenure and have a regular salary. And what that also means, I precisely should be experimenting and pushing the boundaries. My job is to do that and then to teach others to do that. And so I always thought of any sales I made as a kind of bonus. The Art Blocks drop, granted, we still did okay. It's still the most I've ever made from a drop. Yeah, I paid off all my credit cards and shoved some money in my kids' college fund, right? I have 5 kids, by the way. I don't know if I mentioned that. So as you say, Sasha, in some ways it's a badge of honor and in many ways it's a privilege. Yeah, I haven't made that much from NFTs, but we just got this huge grant from my university to turn this into an IRL exhibition. I had Grant Young visit my studio a couple months ago. He's based in Milwaukee as well. And we're both sitting there fanboying each other, right? Like, I'm like, oh my God, your work is so great. The way that you talk about it, the way that you write about it, the amount of sales. And he's like, look at this catalog. I can't believe you had an IRL show like this. And like, cool.

Speaker D: That's awesome to hear. And I didn't ask that question specifically to like bring the vibe down. It was more just like, we tend to always ask a market question. So, you know, hopefully the vibe is not down.

Speaker A: Yeah, it's not down.

Speaker B: I'm loving this. And also like, and also I mean, like, you guys are very— you are validly in part about the market, and I appreciate that honesty. Like, talk about ecological aesthetics, like the market and the space and cryptocurrency. Like, those are forces on value and values and what we value. And you can't either make that the only thing that gives something value or ignore it.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker B: Like, ignoring capitalism is like ignoring gravity. And so, you know, when something sells out, it has an impact. When something doesn't, it has an impact. When we decide to burn what's left of Still Moving, that's gonna have a goddamn impact.

Speaker A: Ooh.

Speaker D: All right.

Speaker A: Are you officially announcing a burn coming?

Speaker B: We are not.

Speaker A: Okay. All right. Just on the record, there is no announcement of a burn for Still Moving. Okay.

Speaker D: I think we need to start working to wrap this up. I wanna ask one question though. Our favorite drop from the two of you on FX Hash, maybe not to put words in Trinity's mouth, was Oral Binary. We covered it on the show when it came out. It's kind of a bop.

Speaker A: I think I have like 8 of them still.

Speaker D: Yeah. So can you tell us a little of the story about that project? And you already said earlier that you kind of killed it twice before you got to where it arrived at, right? So what's the story behind that one?

Speaker B: So my first ever drop, my fx hash genesis, was a piece called 444 and 44. It was really naively done. I threw it together in a weekend. It was right before the burn. I didn't know what was coming. I didn't really know how to promote things. I think I sold maybe 20 of them, and I think less than 20 of them. But that piece I jokingly call my Nathaniel Funtime NFT piece. It's a kind of throwback to slam poetry and beatboxing and a cappella and my band days. It's a total love fest for the kind of NFT communities I had started to become a part of and my peeps. It was kind of half joke, half fun. But I brought that to Sasha and said, like, let's do a bop. Like, let's— like, I'm gonna beatbox and we're gonna be funny and we're gonna be fun. So we were in her sound studio. Chris Bones is her partner and both life and creative partner. Chris Bones is an amazing musician, does all the music for her work. We were in his sound studio and we recorded, like, hours of us singing and beatboxing and doing all these funny things. And it was meant to be similar to that. And then Sasha came back. Yeah. Back and was like, I can't do it. It's not me. And so we went back to the drawing board and she wrote a poem and worked with Chris to make it much more of a kind of, not as fun of a kind of bop and more of a kind of serious vibe, if you will. And then she was trying to get me to do the serious stuff. And I was like, no, I can't do it. So I'm like, I'm going to rap some zeros and ones in the background and like, we'll put you center stage and I'll work on the coding and I'll make it mix. But we'll put your voice in front of center. And interestingly, that also became how most of our media-rich poems now work too, where it's Chris's music, Sasha front and center, and I'm kind of in the backdrop. And I'm more than happy to play that role because we both know what goes into these things and how much we're all working on it and are happy to it. And you know, I think the hardest part about Oral Binary where we had to scrap it is when we had this conversation, it was like maybe I think three weeks before Miami, and we had gotten. A grant from Refraction Festival, a creative grant, to drop it at Miami. And we were like talking about, can we do this? Are we not going to go to Miami anymore? And like Sasha was going to go. I wasn't even going to go if I didn't drop this. And so it was like a really hard moment. And to be honest, and I know Sasha feels the same way, I'm not putting words in her mouth here. I think the thing we wound up in the end was like so much stronger than anything either of us would have done on our own. And we're so happy with it. And we never expected either that or the word after us to sell out so quickly.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker B: So we were really thrilled. Sasha, do you want to chime in a bit?

Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, that was a nice summary of it. And by the way, it just made me think, you were very nice earlier to say that I was particular instead of saying that I'm a pain in the ass, which is probably more accurate when it comes to some of these things.

Speaker B: I think the work is always stronger when you're particular, actually. Like, I love that about you.

Speaker A: You have a vision.

Speaker B: You have a vision. Like, I— you're willing to compromise, but not on the integrity and the aesthetic overall. You're only willing to compromise on how we accomplish it. And I appreciate that. I think it's valuable. I think I would've released that thing as it was. I was happy with it. I am so much happier with what we wound up with.

Speaker C: Well, that's the beauty of collaboration. And I think like whether it's a human and human collaboration or a human and machine collaboration, like that's the beauty is just kind of trusting that eventually like you'll get someplace that you couldn't have gotten on your own. It's always a process of testing the boundaries a little bit and like, is it too much me or too much you or, you know, not enough me, not enough you? You know, that's sort of inevitable in any project like this. But yeah, for Oral Binary, it was a really fun thing to work on because like Nathaniel was saying, some of my earliest NFTs are media-rich poems with music and spoken word. And like, a lot of people don't actually know that about my work. Like, they think it's all graphic and visuals and stuff like that. But some of the first things I ever minted were me performing. And then my partner, as Nathaniel mentioned, is an amazing music director, music producer, and we've been working together for a long time and we work really intimately on creating soundscapes and kind of using electronic tools to enhance the spoken word and all that, and really kind of looking at how performance and the body can become part of these media-rich archives of poetic experiments. So that's been like really important to my practice for a long time. And at the same time, like, you know, it's funny that we talk about the fun versus the serious, like a lot of my work, I think, has a lot of wordplay in it. And I actually, like, one of my favorite things is when people come up and they're like, Your poetry is actually really fun or really funny, or there's things that made me laugh. And I don't think of myself as a funny poet, but I'm very punny and I'm very interested in wordplay and just kind of really leaning into that zone where things amuse me. And so I think I have my idea of what fun wordplay is, and Nathaniel has another idea. And it was just really great to be able to kind of bounce those off each other.

Speaker B: And I'm not scared of the serious, as you know. There's always kind of very— there's There's really romantic stuff. There's really sad stuff that I'm working on. I'll add working with Chris Bones, geeking out with him around the math to figure out how to get p5 to time it right and sample it right. Because I used a completely different codebase for Oral Binary than I did for 444 and 44. I also think someday we have to do something with— I have all these recordings of Sasha Saying things like, Nathaniel, did you just eat all that pie? And like me being like, does technology have a sister? Like, they're hilarious. I'm gonna do something with it someday, Sasha. You wait.

Speaker C: Oh God, that's terrifying.

Speaker B: Does Hector have a brother?

Speaker A: Is this where we talk about future direction and projects that you're excited about?

Speaker B: I don't think that would be a project. I think that would just be like a tell-all.

Speaker C: Well, I mean, I think it does sort of point to like, well, one area that I know is of interest to me and to Nathaniel probably as well, but I think we have sort of, in general, this community has an idea of what generative art looks like and what generative art can do. And I think like both with projects like Oral Binary and with Still Moving, we were trying to push back a little bit and say like, there's actually a lot more that we can do with generative algorithms and generative platforms.

Speaker B: I think The Word did that too. I think The Word doesn't look like anything else out there.

Speaker C: For sure. And The Word was one of the first like language performances on fxhash. fx hash. Oral Binary was one of the first to incorporate generative music and generative spoken word as well. And Still Moving, of course, like, has that embodied interactive element to it. So I think, like, continuing to kind of push in those directions and kind of look at how to take generative art, you know, out from behind the screen and kind of put it in performative zones and maybe liberate it a little bit from the platforms where they're made and kind of figure out how else they can live and manifest in the world. Like, I'm super interested in How a generative project can sort of be the template or the libretto for other kind of works and looking at how maybe it doesn't have to be the end-all be-all, like to have the project in that form, but kind of look at what else it can become, which is something that we're working on with Still Moving, for example. It is, you know, the project that exists on Art Blocks Curated, but it's also a 15-minute media-rich performance that we've done involving dancers, involving room-sized projections and actually like inviting people to move their body in front of cameras to change and interact with and read the text in real time with music, with spoken word. So I think like, again, it's just sort of fun to think about continuing to play with how do we activate the space between the body and the computer screen in lots of ways, like whether that's activating the air with sound and performance, or whether it's like, you know, reaching outwards in order to like create that kind of visceral connection. Just those kinds of performative elements, I think, are certainly like of interest to me right now.

Speaker B: I'm totally 100% behind that. The 2 things I'm playing with in the studio right now are one, literally substantiating AI on the blockchain. And a good example of that would be an NFT or Feral Font. We call it Neural Network Font Type. We trained an AI on the bare minimum amount of data that you can for letterforms and then vectorized them, turned it into a true font. So you can actually download and install this font on your machine. It's like very unnerving and weird. We use it in our media-rich poem for Feral File. We're working on a generative version of it with the poem and the letters being of various sizes and colors behind each other. But then one of the things we're also doing is extruding the letters and turning them into casts and then melting down recycled metal, including computers, and pouring that into casts. So it'll be like brass from battery tabs that have been recycled, or copper from piping from demolished buildings. And we're going to actually map that generativity. And like, when you see the letters in the installation, you'll be able to know where the metal comes from in each letter. And in many ways— and we're melting down some computers to do it, so it's like a computer-made, computer-made font because computers made the font, and then computers make up the materiality of the font. Another thing I'm really excited about is, and I mentioned this earlier, is like platform specificity and kind of pushing at the boundaries of the blockchain. And so I'm working on a number of smart contract-based conceptual works that are very poetic and romantic. One of them based on Félix González-Torres and On Kawara, I'm selling every minute in a single day as a promise I can't possibly keep, with a recognition that blockchain is already making promises it can't keep. But then the only promises truly worth making are the ones we can't keep. Like a child asking, really, Mommy? Forever and forever. At the end of storytelling, they know it's not real, but they love it anyhow. And there's another one based on Untitled Perfect Lovers where it's 2 smart contracts that continually give money to each other until gas depletes it, and then they still keep trying and failing, for example. And so to me, there's a beauty in the transgress actions we might take or fail to make on the blockchain that I want to start experimenting with that I think is really fertile ground that hasn't been explored yet.

Speaker A: You know, just talking about some of the other forms of interactivity and kind of pushing what the blockchain is doing now, have you experimented at all or thought about experimenting with the params feature of fx hash?

Speaker D: I was just going to ask this. Yes.

Speaker A: Yes, you will. You are thinking about this.

Speaker D: I will. As they're talking, I'm like, wait. This is like the perfect, you know, if and when there's another fxhash drop from the two of you, I wonder if you've looked at params at all. This is like, seems right up your alley.

Speaker A: The ability to take and codify a gesture of movement, a breath of air, as you said, and then it'll be immutable forever.

Speaker C: I actually coded and released a project in sort of that first push of fx with Wide Awake Beats and the fxhash team, like right when it was all coming out. And I did a project that kind of of, you know, mixes together a lot of the visual generativity that I've done quite a lot of, and then also mixing in some generative sound, generative spoken word as well, and kind of looking at using params to kind of basically offer mentors stems and the ability to almost, you know, like piece together, in theory, like piece together a performance. But that was done in like a very involved, like very beautiful virtual environment where the choices that mentors were making were actually embodied in, like, movements through the space and in choices they were making about which door to go through or which hallway to walk down. So it was a way of sort of playing with different approaches to params, but it definitely, it was a really exciting introduction to that interface and being able to think about how to build in that kind of variability, like, into the concept of a generative poem or a generative project and, like, really do that in a way that is true to the very individual experience of reading a poem, but also is true to the author's intent. So kind of finding that ground in the middle where it's, you know, not giving too much choice, but giving enough to make it really kind of hit home in a very, like, personal way. So yeah, I think it's a really, it's a really, really interesting feature.

Speaker D: And I'll say that params has evolved quite a bit since that first Wide Awake Beats drop. There's been some amazing like adjustments that they've added where you could, there's one project called Pensado a Mano where you can literally draw in the canvas space and then it, the algorithm like takes that as the input to create your token. So there's like way more interactivity that is available now than there was back then.

Speaker B: I love hearing that. 'Cause admittedly, like it didn't appeal to me. The notion of that level of control felt like it wasn't generative. You know, one thing Sasha and I did talk about for an NFT when we released it is like, okay, maybe people want to choose like vowels or consonants or so that they might make words if they buy multiples. But the idea of incorporating gesture or even outside ecologies, like I love the idea of pulling in like weather data in real time. Like that's something, you know, Scott and I have been talking about a lot is the biggest problem of pulling in real-time data is it won't be available in the future. But if you just pull it in at the time of mint, There are much more possibilities there. So, I mean, that would be something that I'd be keen to explore.

Speaker C: In a way, Nathaniel, it's actually very similar to the project we recently did during Art Basel, the interactive poem in body language, where we actually worked with Play Record Mint, this amazing generative sort of platform, to create a poem with lots of different options that visitors could actually stand in front of the screen, interact with the screen, and make choices about how to write their poem into experience. So by moving certain ways, they could influence like the background color, they could influence the title, they could influence different completions for the poem. It was a very simple way of just showing how something like that could come to life.

Speaker B: Yeah, in many ways, it's almost like a mix between Still Moving and what I'm talking about here in that it's not interactive on-chain, it's interactive in a physical gallery in a space. So this, we did 2 collaborations with Play Recordment, one's called Compose and called Embody Language. And in real time, you would be able to manipulate the poem based on body tracking. And then when you were happy with your understanding of how it worked, you would press mint and it would give you a 3-second timer, and then it would mint a PNG of that current iteration.

Speaker D: All right. I think we should do one, exactly one rapid fire and then end the episode cuz we're already very long. So Trinity, why don't you pick one? And then let's finish it up.

Speaker A: I think that there's only really one rapid-fire question that I want to hear about, and it stems from what we're talking about in terms of the future language worlds even. Do you have any science fiction recommendations? Books, movies, TV shows, soundtracks?

Speaker B: The WWW Trilogy by Robert J. Sawyer is one I really love, and I especially like the audio Um, they had several actors do it. Believe it or not, you can see I'm a romantic by all my choices. The Host, which is Stephenie Meyer, who wrote Twilight. It's her science fiction novel. I love it. It's like post-Invasion of the Body Snatchers, completely down to like the socialist aspects of the invaders, but then a love triangle within it. My favorite movies, sci-fi, again, very romantic, Arrival and Gattaca, hands down.

Speaker C: Maybe slightly stretching the boundary of sci-fi, but I want to recommend 2 texts that were written with AI in different ways. One is a book called Pharmaco-AI by K. Alado-McDowell, and it's billed as the first book really written with GPT-3. And I just, I find it so beautiful. It's, in a way, it's like nonfiction. It's sort of inspired by various aspects of California culture and the influence of psychedelics sort of as a metaphor for machinic hallucinations. And it's a really interesting early experiment in the way that you can sort of think with and through. A non-human collaborator. So I really love that book. And I also want to recommend another book by a friend called My Life as an Artificial Creative Intelligence, which is by Mark Amerika. And I actually had the privilege to write a review of it last year for Outland. But it's an incredible book that somehow like walks the line between nonfiction and critical scholarship and poetry and essay and fiction. And you kind of— it's a very sort of hybrid, like cross-genre approach to playing with language using an intelligent system again as a co-author. And it's a really brilliant book that covers a lot of ground and I think is a great introduction for people that are newer, but also for anyone who's like really well-versed in this space is absolutely fascinating. It just goes super deep on lots of areas that are, I think, important in working with AI models.

Speaker B: I think it's worth mentioning the www trilogy. I didn't say this earlier. It's about an emergent AI and it was written In '09. I just pulled it up on Audible here.

Speaker D: It's the first book called Wake.

Speaker B: That's right. Yeah. Okay. I loved it. I'd be curious what other people think, cuz my wife hates all my book choices.

Speaker D: All right. Well, I think that is a good place to end it. We got some excellent recommendations from the two of you. This has been a really informative and enjoyable conversation, and it was about time we got you both on. We've been talking about this for a really long time, so. Hope you enjoyed it. I hope it was fun for you too.

Speaker B: Oh, this was great. Such provocative questions and interesting dialogue. Thank you so much.

Speaker C: Yeah, such a pleasure. Thanks so much for having us.

Speaker D: The pleasure is all ours. And thank you so much for coming on. That's it for this one. That was Sasha Stiles and Nathaniel Stern. Check out their work on fx hash, on Art Blocks. I hope you enjoyed this episode. We'll be back again soon with another.

Speaker B: Bye.

Speaker C: We're waiting to be signed.

Speaker D: Always blessed.

Speaker C: We're waiting to be signed. The rail of the week. Could be time. We're waiting. Always.