Sasha Stiles, Sagan’s Cosmos and the Commissioned Work
The Herbert W. Franke Foundation is delighted that the great AI poet Sasha Stiles has taken on a commissioned production for the project „CONTACT ATTEMPT – the 50th Anniversary of the Arecibo Message“. The project combines this work with an open call for generative artists around the world. Sasha is a Kalmyk-American first generation poet, language artist, and AI researcher probing the intersection of text and technology. Widely recognized as a pioneer of generative literature and blockchain poetics, her work has been featured among others by MoMA and Art Basel, she got prizes from Poets & Writers, won a Prix Ars Electronica, the Lumen Prize and received a Future Art Award.
The full dome premiere of Sasha’s commissioned work takes place at an event Nov 18th in the Planetarium Bochum.
That alone would have been reason enough for the foundation to select Sasha Stiles for this project. However, Sasha’s relationship with the Arecibo-Message is very personal and goes back to her childhood. She explains: “My earliest memories are cosmic — chasing Halley’s Comet with my dad, peering through a telescope at the Griffith Observatory, and winning a raffle at The Planetary Society’s holiday party. My parents, both science documentary filmmakers, worked on projects like Cosmos with Carl Sagan and developed a series called Live from Mars with NASA JPL; I even co-hosted one of their shows with Neil deGrasse Tyson, filming in the Hall of Meteorites at the American Museum of Natural History. As a “welcome to the world” gift from Mr. Sagan, I received a star in my name, and ever since, I’ve held a deep, personal connection to the poetics of astronomy. The Voyager Golden Record was on constant repeat in our home — a foundation for my work today, which considers how our stories and technologies journey far beyond us. I have thought often, too, of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence and the Arecibo Message — a binary code missive flung toward the unknown, attempting, like poetry, to communicate across impossible distances. It was a formative influence that shaped my Binary Code series: Cursive Binary, Ancient Binary Code, Analog Binary Code. It feels destined — quite literally written in the stars — to compose a poem on the occasion of Arecibo’s 50th Anniversary, for “publication” in planetariums via a syntax of light and sound and code. I wish for my contribution to be a 21st century signal of the infinite reach of language, for any intelligence listening across the void.”
Nobody else but Sasha is so predestined to dare the creative CONTACT ATTEMPT again!
The three-minute Arecibo message digitally encoded by Francis Drake can be seen here on the right. For the first time in history, humans have thought about how communication with alien intelligences could be designed. It contains coded information on important scientific parameters of life on Earth:
+++ the number system from 1 to 10
+++ 1, 6, 7, 8, 15 – the atomic numbers of the elements carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, forming life
+++ the double helix structure of DNA with its nucleotides
+++ the human being with coded size and number of people on earth
+++ the radio telescope with coded size information
+++ the solar system with the planets
On the occasion of the Generative Art Summit, Sasha Stiles also presented her work for the Tribute to Herbert W. Franke in her conversation with Catherine Mason. Here we show the cut of the reading of an extraordinary lyric that was “penned” by an artificial intelligence. The language model used for this was previously “personalized” by Sasha with her own t poetry and also trained especially for this work with passages from the classic SF novel “The Orchid Cage” by Herbert W. Franke. It had been written in 1961 and was republished in a new English translation by Springer-Verlag in 2024.