A Living Poem, Sasha Stiles
Location & Hours
On view at Village of Industry & Art (320 S. Broad)
May 6, 2026 through July 7, 2026
Public hours
Monday - Friday 9:00am - 4:00pm
At our main entrance (320 S Broad), please buzz “The Gallery” and our ambassador will let you into the building.
Click here for more info on visiting the Village of Industry & Art
About the Monument Lab Pop-Up
Monument Lab’s Pop-Up is a temporary retail, learning, and convening space that explores how monuments are formed not only through stone and steel, but through relationships and collective memory. Launched at the Monument Lab Summit, May 6-8, 2026 at the Village of Industry and Art, the Pop-Up features books, artist-designed apparel, and limited-edition objects, the pop-up invites visitors to consider kinship as a creative and civic practice, a place where objects circulate alongside stories, questions, and shared learning. Blending commerce with conversation, the space functions as a gathering site for reflection and dialogue, supporting artists and writers while offering the public accessible entry points into Monument Lab’s ongoing work around memory, public space, and belonging. Items are available for purchase when a Monument Lab team member is present. When unstaffed, the Pop-Up functions as an exhibition — please enjoy the space and come back to shop or shop online at monumentlab.com/store.
About the Exhibition
A LIVING POEM: THE CODEX is a generative artist book by Sasha Stiles, created as part of her 2025–2026 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art – an infinitely rewriting human–machine epic that explores what it means to be alive today, in a time of nonhuman intelligences, dehumanizing realities, and transformative possibilities.
Both artifact and illuminated manuscript, THE CODEX is a bound vessel for A LIVING POEM's six-month performance at MoMA, gathering the code, influences, and poetic processes that shape the work, alongside selected generative still frames, installation views, and original essays by the artist and key collaborators.
Each "copy" of the Codex is an original: a one-of-a-kind art object distinguished by a unique, timestamped cover drawn from an unrepeatable moment in the exhibition's live run. No two books are the same.
About Sasha Stiles
Sasha Stiles is an award-winning Kalmyk-American poet, artist, and researcher whose work explores what it means to be human in a more-than-human age. A founding figure in generative creativity, she bridges conceptual and computational art to reimagine poetry as a form of living intelligence, synthesizing text and technology, memory and imagination.
Her acclaimed projects, from Technelegy to Cursive Binary, have reinvigorated language as a vital force in contemporary art and reveal AI as fundamentally a linguistic technology. In centering digital poetics as a defining medium of our time, Stiles illuminates the encoded, recursive logics of hybrid authorship, and traces how the evolution from orality to literacy to generativity reshapes culture and consciousness.
Stiles' work has been honored by the Prix Ars Electronica and Lumen Prize; featured in The New York Times, Poets & Writers, and Artforum; and exhibited around the globe, from MoMA to Gucci to Art Basel. A co-founder of theVERSEverse and graduate of Harvard and Oxford, she has served as Poetry Mentor to the humanoid BINA48 since 2018, and lives near New York with her husband and studio partner, Kris Bones.
About Monument Lab
Monument Lab is a Philadelphia-based nonprofit that advances justice through public art and the critical reimagining of monuments and public memory. We work at the intersection of art, history, and civic life — partnering with artists, communities, educators, and institutions to ask: what stories get told in public space, and whose?
About the Village of Industry & Art
The Village of Industry & Art (VIA) is a new creative destination on Philadelphia’s Avenue of the Arts—a dynamic, evolving ecosystem for artists, makers, and mission-driven organizations at the intersection of culture, craft, and civic life. Led by design and development firm Scout, the project spans over 110,000 sqft and 1.9 acres, reactivating two iconic historic buildings —formerly Hamilton and Furness Halls of the now-defunct University of the Arts—through an adaptive reuse approach that prioritizes affordability, minimal intervention, and community-first design. Rather than wait for a grand opening moment, VIA is coming to life through early activations and collaborative occupancy, inviting a growing network of tenants to help shape its future from within.