REPETAE is an ongoing series exploring the relationship between poetic repetition and generative art, written and visualized by poet and artist Sasha Stiles and her AI-powered alter ego, Technelegy.
REPETAE is an ongoing series that explores the relationship between algorithmic art and poetic recursion – informed in part by Edward Hirsch’s statement in “A Poet’s Glossary” that “meaning accrues through repetition.”
“Repetition—the use of the same term several times—is one of the crucial elements in poetry… It is one of the most marked features of all poetry, oral and written, one of the primary ways we distinguish poetry itself. Repetition, as in rhyme, is a strong mnemonic device. Oral poets especially use it for remembering structures. The incantatory magic of poetry—think of spells and chants, of children’s rhymes and lullabies—has something to do with recurrence, with things coming back to us in time, sometimes in the same way, sometimes differently. Repetition is the primary way of creating a pattern through rhythm. Meaning accrues through repetition. One of the deep fundamentals of poetry is the recurrence of sounds, syllables, words, phrases, lines, and stanzas. Repetition can be one of the most intoxicating features of poetry. It creates expectations, which can be fulfilled or frustrated. It can create a sense of boredom and complacency, but it can also incite enchantment and inspire bliss… Repetition can be so insistent that it spills over into obsessiveness…” – Edward Hirsch, A Poet's Glossary
Sasha Stiles is a first-generation Kalmyk-American poet, artist and AI researcher probing the intersection of text and technology. Her cross-media work seeks to decipher the hidden language of the dawning Novacene, fusing elements of semiotics, translation, computer science, speculative design, visual poetry and conceptual art.
Stiles' binary-based series, such as 'Cursive Binary', challenge reductive thinking, merging biological and mechanical, analog and digital, historical and modern to explore transhuman communication and transcendent possibility. She often incorporates elements of nature, investigating nonhuman intelligence and the ethos of consciousness.
