CHAPTER IV — SOCIETY
Conversation I of III
How does intelligence become culture?
Sasha Stiles
Chapter III — Organism →
The preceding chapters traced the emergence of increasingly complex forms of organisation: first the cell, then pattern, then organism. Each explored how complexity emerges within individual systems. Society marks a qualitative shift. Intelligence is no longer understood as a property of an isolated entity, but as something distributed across language, memory, protocols and collective interaction.
The artists in this chapter examine the structures through which meaning is created, negotiated and preserved. Rather than asking whether machines can think, they ask how thinking becomes shared and how shared intelligence begins to shape culture.
CHAPTER IV — SOCIETY — CONVERSATION I OF III
The chapter opens with Sasha Stiles, whose work approaches language not as a tool for describing intelligence, but as the medium through which intelligence becomes collective.
“Language is our original artificial intelligence.”
Sasha Stiles, interviewed by Kate Vass — Milford, New Jersey
Kate Vass: Language existed long before computers, yet today it has become the primary interface between humans and AI. What changes when language is no longer only something we speak, but something we increasingly think with alongside machines?
Sasha Stiles: Language has always been something we think with: an epistemology, a way of knowing and moving through the world. A primary interface, the meeting point between subjective experience and shared reality, between self and other, between humans and other humans. It’s what enables us to connect and behave not only as individuals but as groups and communities. My own interest in AI grew out of my lifelong study of language, my love of and reverence for language, and my ongoing fascination has to do with how AI makes newly visible something that poets have understood since time immemorial: language has an intelligence of its own. You could even say that language is our original artificial intelligence: a system larger than any individual mind, built collectively across generations, that has taught us how to think, remember, imagine, and become more and more human. A technology we made together that began, in turn, to make us.
KV: Heart Mantras continuously generates new expressions rather than preserving a finished poem. Do you see meaning as something we create, or something that emerges through repetition, variation, and dialogue?
SS: We’re living through a rupture in meaning. The 20th century was dominated by declarative forms of language (the authoritative voices of broadcast media, advertising, consumer culture), but today, we inhabit a radically different linguistic environment. Information moves at astonishing speed through vast, often incomprehensible systems. Truth fragments into multiple realities. Code permeates everyday life. Language itself is becoming dynamic, distributed, multimodal.
A lot of my work, HEART MANTRAS included, explores meaning not as a fixed object or authoritative truth, not as something waiting to be deciphered or revealed, but as an emergent property of language. Not an objective thing, but a relational phenomenon that arises between words, ideas, voices, contexts, many truths. Much of my pleasure as an artist and poet comes from composing systems that create the conditions for this kind of emergence. I think of HEART MANTRAS as a kind of research lab, and I use it that way, too: a space for questions, what-ifs, and discovery, rather than, or maybe in addition to, an expression of my particular voice or point of view.
From the beginning of my work with LLMs, I’ve used poetry as a space for experimentation. It felt to me that there were subtleties, complexities, and epistemologies emerging through these systems that engineering or computer science, in the conventional sense, couldn’t fully capture. But poetry might. Poetry gave me a way not only to use these systems, but to think through and with them.
In the example of this project, a mantra means differently each time it is spoken, even when the words remain the same. In HEART MANTRAS, computation extends that principle: repetition becomes variation, variation becomes dialogue, and meaning is continually made and remade through the relationships that emerge.
Poetry has always understood this. Words matter, but meaning isn’t contained in words. Meaning happens between them. Poetry uses language to point beyond what language can say. And that’s uncannily close to the logic of large language models, where meaning likewise emerges not from words in isolation but from vast patterns of relationship between them.
KV: Throughout history, mantras have been tools for meditation and transformation. What happens when those same repetitive structures become computational? Can technology also become a spiritual practice?
SS: It absolutely is for me. I’m not religious, but I am deeply spiritual, and for me spirituality comes down to attention, presence, curiosity. Insight. That applies as much to coding and working with datasets, or entering into dialogue with a machine, as it does to dipping a brush into ink and practicing calligraphy, handling semi-precious beads, or reverently turning the pages of a book from centuries ago.
We often forget that technologies are ancient. Writing is a technology. Poetry is a technology. Prayer beads are a technology. Mantras themselves are technologies: systems of repetition designed to alter attention, memory, consciousness. The desire for insight, illumination, understanding is technology’s deepest root. So much of what we’ve invented is, in one way or another, an attempt to extend what we can perceive, know, remember, imagine. To reach beyond the limits of the individual mind.
I’ve been thinking about all this a lot in my recent work around Jangar, the Kalmyk-Mongolian oral epic, where I’m exploring oral poetry, mnemonic traditions, and prayer beads alongside code, encryption, and generative systems. I spent countless hours hand-coding analog binary malas as translations of what are, to me, sacred texts: bits of poetry that I come back to over and over and over again in order to find myself, to make sure I do not lose myself and my heritage and my endangered traditions. The process echoes the practice of Kalmyk women who, in the wake of Soviet religious persecution and the destruction of Buddhist temples and texts, covertly encoded prayers and sacred teachings into the patterns of prayer beads.
These malas are mantras, too. And it all feels increasingly urgent and, yes, sacred to me in a world where our attention is fragmented and our minds are continually pulled in different directions. Repetition becomes a form of resistance to fragmentation. We need something we can return to, handle, hold onto. A discipline. An anchor. A root.
And then there’s the paradox of repetition and individuality. We all pass through the same fundamental human experiences — being born, falling in love, losing the people we love, confronting our own mortality — but for each of us, each time, it happens as if for the first time. An experience is ancient, but our own experience is entirely new. There’s something profoundly consoling in that contradiction, and it’s inherent in the mantra. The words have been spoken before, perhaps thousands or millions of times, but the act of uttering them, reading them, receiving them is happening now, in this particular body, in this particular moment. Which is why we turn to familiar poems in times of great joy and great pain. Repetition doesn’t erase individuality; it gives individuality a pattern in which to belong.
Ritual and algorithm are both structures for this kind of recognition and renewal. They establish a pattern we can return to, but returning never means arriving at precisely the same place. I think that’s part of why I’ve felt compelled to let HEART MANTRAS unfold as an ongoing series over the years. The system repeats endlessly without repeating exactly. It returns again and again without returning to the same place: recurrence without sameness. Not repetition as redundancy, but repetition as presence and attention.
KV: The mirror introduces the viewer into the work itself. Is reflection simply metaphorical, or is the observer an essential component of the artwork?
SS: The observer is essential. If we’re talking about systems of relation, rather than fixed objects, the viewer or the reader must be part of that system. The mirror makes this literal: you don’t simply look at the work, you also enter its field. Your image becomes entangled with the language, changing what you see and how you read.
I also love the double meaning of reflection: to see oneself, but also to think, to contemplate. A mirror returns an image, but it also asks: Who is looking? Who is being looked at? Where does the work end and the observer begin? One of the first mirror pieces I ever made, which is still in my studio, behind the desk I work at every day, simply says: “Who am I?”
So I suppose the materiality of the mirror continues the logic of emergence in HEART MANTRAS. Meaning doesn’t reside entirely in the object or entirely in the viewer. The prompt or the output. The “original" or the variation. The “human” or the “machine.” It happens between them. The encounter, the entanglement, is the artwork.
KV: The exhibition ends with a single question: Can emergence itself become conscious Do you think language is where consciousness becomes visible, or is language itself another emergent phenomenon that continues to evolve beyond us?
SS: Language is one of the places where consciousness becomes visible, but consciousness extends well beyond language. Think of everything we know without words: sensation, intuition, grief, desire, awe, the body. The inchoate, the unspeakable. The unconscious. You can say something without meaning it, but you can also mean something without saying it.
There is so much happening to us and through us now that we can’t yet articulate. We are living through the transformation toward a hybrid, more-than-human existence. Our memories live partly outside our brains. Our eyes see through cameras and satellites. Our voices travel through networks. Our thoughts increasingly take shape in dialogue with machines. We regard the torrent of text, translations, glitches, hallucinations, and iterations pouring out of generative systems right now as “AI slop,” but I wonder if it isn’t babble: the awkward, unruly, frequently nonsensical beginnings of a language we don’t yet know how to hear, emerging from a body that is as much circuitry and code as it is flesh and blood.
Language is so much older, stranger, and more alive than we can possibly know.
Next: Society — Part II of III
— 26th August