Four Core Texts

To celebrate International Poetry Day and U.S. National Poetry Month, MakersPlace has teamed up with luxury audio brand, Bang & Olufsen, to announce the world premiere of “FOUR CORE TEXTS: Humanifesto and Other Poems”, a quartet of media-rich works written and performed by award-winning poet, language artist and AI researcher Sasha Stiles with original music by collaborator Kris Bones.

Coinciding with NFT NYC, the partnership will see the Bang & Olufsen flagship store in New York turned into a web3 digital art gallery of sounds and visuals, powered by MakersPlace, starting April 3 and ending April 10, 2024. The exhibit builds on Bang & Olufsen’s entry into web3, which started with their launch of the B&O DNA Collection in 2022.

Stiles – who has been described by curator Hans Ulrich Obrist as “the great visionary of AI art and poetry” and whose AI-powered artwork has recently been featured at Art Basel, Christie’s and Gucci flagships worldwide – will debut four transhuman poems in an immersive, site-specific installation co-created with Bang & Olufsen, paying homage to spoken word and the musicality of verse. Informed by Stiles’ Kalmyk-Mongolian heritage as well as by T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets”, the new collection augments Stiles’ acclaimed approach to algorithmic authorship with AI-powered translation, custom voice clones and myriad sonic elements, weaving the ancestral voices of shamans and nomads together with the digital whispers of contemporary codes and creators.

“As a poet exploring the evolution of language from antiquity to futurity, sound and technology are integral to my practice, even more so as I endeavor to use AI to help document and reconstruct family stories and voices,” said Stiles. “FOUR CORE TEXTS is a celebration of oral tradition and aural innovation, using cutting-edge tools – text generators, transcriptions and translations, synthetic audio, etc. – in concert with Bang & Olufsen’s beautiful instruments to transcend my own human tongue and transform the experience of a poem.”

The artworks from “FOUR CORE TEXTS” will be available for sale beginning on April 3, 2024 on MakersPlace (learn more). There will be a celebratory opening event at the Bang & Olufsen gallery, hosted by Sasha Stiles and MakersPlace, on April 4, 2024. RSVP required.