Wednesday – Sunday: 11:00a.m. – 5:00p.m.
What happens when a room becomes a poem?
In STANZA, artist Sasha Stiles invites visitors into an immersive exploration of poetic language. The exhibition’s title draws on the word’s layered meanings: in Italian, stanza means a room, while in English it refers to a grouped set of lines within a poem. Here, those definitions converge. Visitors are invited to step inside a stanza—to inhabit poetry not simply as something read on a page, but as a deeply human form of information architecture.
Presented in CAM’s Nanula Digital Art Gallery, STANZA explores poetry as both an ancient, enduring art form and one of our oldest technologies of consciousness. Through text, sound, image, and code, Stiles traces language from oral tradition to written culture to computational systems, revealing poetry as a living framework through which we understand ourselves, and the world around us. More than a literary form, poetry emerges as a way of organizing memory, generating meaning, and imagining new possibilities: a hybrid of emotion and algorithm with much to teach us about co-existing with increasingly intelligent machines.
As visitors move through the gallery, words unfold as environments, voice transforms into structure, and individual works function as stanzas within a bigger composition–each standing on its own while contributing to a larger whole. In this way, the exhibition itself becomes a poem, —one that is experienced through movement, reflection, and participation.
At once intimate and expansive, STANZA is an invitation to slow down and engage with language differently. It asks what poetry can offer a world increasingly defined by speed and distraction, and suggests the power of poetic intelligence to nourish connection, curiosity, and empathy.
About Sasha Stiles
Sasha Stiles is an award-winning Kalmyk-American poet, artist, and researcher whose work explores what it means to be human in a more-than-human age. A leading voice in generative creativity, she bridges conceptual and computational art to reimagine poetry as a form of living intelligence, synthesizing text and technology, memory and imagination.
Her acclaimed projects, from Technelegy to Cursive Binary, reinvigorate language as a vital force in contemporary art and reveal artificial intelligence as fundamentally a linguistic technology. Stiles invokes poetry as a ritual of attention, empathy, and wonder on a planet at risk of forgetting what matters — a way to find words for a world that so often leaves us speechless and imagine new languages for survival.
Stiles’ work has been honored by the Prix Ars Electronica and Lumen Prize; featured in The New York Times, Poets & Writers, and Artforum; and exhibited internationally, from MoMA to Gucci to Art Basel. A co-founder of theVERSEverse and graduate of Harvard and Oxford, she has served as Poetry Mentor to the humanoid BINA48 since 2018 and lives near New York with her husband and studio partner, Kris Bones.
