Sasha Stiles | Repetae

REPETAE (2022 - ongoing)

REPETAE is a hybrid language art series that fuses algorithm and poetry to explore repetition as a powerful tool for generating new meanings, emotions, and insights. It is an ode to the transformative power of poetry, generative art and AI, inviting audiences to consider the endless possibilities that arise from revisiting, reimagining and reinventing the familiar.

Winner of the Prix Ars Electronica 2024 Award of Distinction in AI Art

Finalist for the 2024 Lumen Prize

REPETAE leverages a suite of generative elements — AI-powered language, code-based visuals, digitally looped and layered spoken word — in standalone works and longer, interconnected cycles that embody various ways in which emotion and perception are shaped by pattern, as well as the interruption or subversion of pattern. At its core, REPETAE seeks to illuminate how repetition shapes our engagement with art and the world around us. Uniquely, the project does so through the lens of verse, invoking repetition as a fundamental poetic device — layering Stiles’ pioneering approach transhuman co-authorship with visuals sketched in p5.js and digitally manipulated spoken word performance.

Rooted in poetic tradition, and inspired in part by an encounter with Herbert W. Franke’s “Ozsillogrammes,” REPETAE expands to interrogate the intersection of human and artificial intelligences, using innovative technologies to redefine the act of repetition not as mere duplication but as a creative and generative process, opening up fresh pathways of interpretation and experience.

REPETAE seeks to push the boundaries of generative art to consider the spatial, temporal and philosophical dimensions of repetition as reinvention, and aims to prompt deeper reflections on the role of algorithm in the deeply human act of making art.

Works from REPETAE have been featured by: