With digital immortality making headlines, stories about robot companions going viral, and crypto upending reality as we know it, it’s time to ask: what does it mean to be human in a nearly post-human era? Weaving together masterful human verse, captivating AI language experiments and full-color art images, Technelegy captures the thrill and peril of our intimate relationship with technology in a profoundly original and provocative hybrid text.
What does it mean to be human in a nearly posthuman era? How are universal truths like birth, sex and death changing in the context of technological innovation? These are the questions probed by poet, artist and AI researcher Sasha Stiles in her highly anticipated debut. Both groundbreaking and heartbreaking, the collection explores our intimate relationship with the digital through the lens of poetic elegy — a thematic fusion of the zero-one rhythms of binary code with the pulse of elegiac couplets, alternating between elation and lamentation. An urgent investigation of love, creativity and nature in an age of artificial replication, reflecting on themes from cyber-spirituality to digital immortality, TECHNELEGY is a transhuman manifesto with poetic soul.
Sasha Stiles is a first-generation Kalmyk-American poet, artist and creative strategist working at the intersection of text and technology. Her practice seeks to decipher the hidden language of the dawning Novacene in projects that merge biological and mechanical, analog and digital, historical and modern, exploring modes of transhuman communication and envisioning transcendent possibility.
“Sasha Stiles’ TECHNELEGY is the most comprehensive expression I’ve seen of our anxiousness for and angst about human-extending technology, as well as its cultural advocacy known as transhumanism. With preternaturally accurate phraseology, and a deft braiding of poetry structures and graphic textuals, Stiles has uniquely managed to create a book of poetry that is as momentous in its reach as are the prospects of AI and digital humanity in theirs. This book will never get old; it is an instant techno-classic.”― MARTINE ROTHBLATT
