Sasha Stiles: First Pages From A LIVING POEM
A solo exhibition presented by SuperRare x Objkt
Developed for the Hyundai Card Digital Wall at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 2025, A LIVING POEM is a bespoke language system that integrates verse, voice, and visuals to enact an infinite, ever-evolving poem about what it means to be human in a more-than-human world.
This curated selection, First Pages From A LIVING POEM, presents 24 timestamped still frames drawn from the live generative system – unique moments from its genesis performance.
The works are offered via SuperRare as hybrid artifacts: acrylic-mounted archival prints produced in collaboration with Brooklyn Editions, each unique and signed as a 1/1, accompanied by a high-resolution digital file with provenance metadata serving as a certificate of authenticity.
Photo courtesy Noah Bolanowski
24 Hybrid, Modular Works
Acrylic-Mounted Archival Print + 1/1 NFT
Available in four square formats, each edition priced by scale:
12 × Small (12" × 12") — 1 ETH
9 × Medium (24" × 24") — 2 ETH
2 × Large (36" × 36") — 3 ETH
1 × XL (48" × 48") — 4 ETH
For inquiries: inquiry@superrare.com
"I’ve always been interested in how language is both visceral and virtual – how it emerges from the body as breath and voice and yet is also ephemeral, infinitely reproducible, a material that can be carried by memory as meaningfully as in tangible forms. I often shift between analog and digital, such as in my Cursive Binary series, which began with the desire to take computer code out from behind the screen and render it visible, palpable. This collection started with the desire to grab onto a few moments from the continuous, ephemeral stream of A LIVING POEM’s generative performance and hold them tight – to carve them in stone, in a way, as a highly curated set of pages composed by the system running live.
Each work in my new collection with SuperRare is an unrepeatable, timestamped moment from A LIVING POEM, my solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, which ran from last fall through early spring – a bespoke language system that integrates verse, voice, and visuals to enact an infinite poem about what it means to be alive and human in an increasingly more-than-human world. Like John Giorno’s Dial-A-Poem or Refik’s Large Nature Model, A LIVING POEM is not a single artwork but a cross between a studio-workshop, a research laboratory, and a continuously evolving entity. At MoMA, it ran as an ephemeral, browser-based performance, without ongoing documentation or a complete record; I wanted it to behave like a live human performance that invites presence and attention, that is never the same twice, and exists mostly in memory.
These 24 works are timestamped traces of the poem’s emergence from its genesis codebase, the original MoMA incarnation, before it began to evolve into its second life at ZKM in Germany. Unlike the live poem always unfolding in real time, I envisioned these archival acrylic-mounted fragments as offerings of stillness and focus – a meditation, or a haiku, or a mantra. Each square, glossy-faced physical is a kind of very slow, very patient, very poetic screen: a surface operating at cosmic speed, simultaneously immediate and eternal, resisting the typical cadence of our modern lives. To me, the format honors what’s essential in poetry: the capacity to slow and hold time, to let us sit and be still with an idea for as long as we want or need, revisiting and repeating it until it begins to change, and change us. The distillation of extraordinary complexity into something achingly simple. More than artifacts or outputs, these pieces are acts of attention, proof of presence, proof of readership, drawn from my personal archive."
- Sasha Stiles
Collection
