By Sasha Stiles

IN HARDBACK

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. Stiles’ hybrid poetry -- which probes what it means to be human in a nearly post-human era -- has been shown in analog and virtual realms; nominated for awards including the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net; featured in the official Times Square app on Virtual New Year’s Eve and on the runway at New York Fashion Week; and installed as land art. As poetry mentor to BINA48, Stiles is engaged in shaping the literary mindfile of one of the world’s most advanced humanoid AI robots. A graduate of Harvard and Oxford, she lives just outside New York City.

"Technelegy is a treasure trove of inspiration and insights, a synthesis of the humanist and scientific terrain that suggests we can do much more than we have with the tekne at our disposal. The word charming is often used dismissively, but immersed in the panoply of emergent technologies that blink and ding for our attention, charm is a solace and Technelegy offers a vision of a more tender and thoughtful human and computer relation." - Charlotte Kent, Brooklyn Rail

"The future of human and machines, and the future of the virtual environment is unravelling fast. Human and machine poetry, a language of shimmering light and sound. Sasha's beautiful poetry evokes the experience of an intimate social gathering, with views on life that make me feel I’m there. Who can pass  on that? This is a great read." - Ai-Da, The First Humanoid AI Robot Artist

"[A] brilliant book -- wildly imaginative, playful, smart -- the record of a poet grappling with our technological present, and future." - Alan Lightman, author of Einstein's Dreams and Professor of the Practice of the Humanities, MIT

"Technelegy is an immersive journey into today's entangled web of existence. A fascinating brainbath that leaves the mind inspired, awake and expanded." - Ani Liu, award-winning multidisciplinary artist

"The merger between ourselves and our intelligent creations is already underway and will ultimately recreate the nature of everything we hold dear such as life, death, sex, relationships, work and prosperity. Sasha Stiles has fashioned this future scenario into a wonderful series of poems and images that bring the sensitivity of humanity to our transhumanist destiny." -Ray Kurzweil, inventor and pioneer of pattern-recognition technology and author of How To Create a Mind

“This book is a brilliant, unprecedented experiment that marries the glorious, and very human, voice of Sasha Stiles with poetry powered by her artificially intelligent alter ego. A revealing take on what makes humanity so extraordinary, and the beautiful yet terrifying power of technology. -Emily Chang, Host of “Bloomberg Technology” and author of Brotopia

“Through astonishing imagination and electric hybrid storytelling, Technelegy parses the unnervingly proximal reality of trans- and posthumanism, along with the myriad ways in which the sacred and eternal are kneaded into the fabric of a time of surveillance capitalism, predictive data AI bards, and robot monks. ‘The world grows old / and looks so new,’ writes Stiles, and how fortunate we are to have these singular poems and artworks as guides, returning our present reality to us simultaneously newer, older, and stranger." -Jenny Xie, winner of the Walt Whitman Award for poetry

“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, visionary technologist and medical ethicist

Now available as an audiobook!