Sasha Stiles at MoMA

This show and New York’s Museum of Modern Art’s continued support for the digital with their lobby garden screen demonstrate institutional adoption of digital culture at the highest level. Stiles’s A LIVING POEM brings generative language and time-based media to a 24-foot-by-24-foot screen at its entrance for half a year through spring 2026. Stiles envisioned the work as a “poem in residence,” as the piece rewrites and performs itself on an hourly cycle, drawing on Stiles’s original poetry, fragments from MoMA’s text-art collection, custom datasets, p5.js code, GPT-4 and sound. Its multicolored text in Stiles’ familiar palette shifts across fonts, including Cursive Binary, which renders machine code in a handwritten register. An accompanying soundscape by Kris Bones was accessible via QR code, extending the work’s emphasis on sound and liveness.