Hereafter the art

Sasha Stiles is a first-generation Kalmyk-American poet, literary artist, AI researcher, and author of the “instant techno-classic” Technelegy, as well as co-founder of theVERSEverse. A pioneer of algorithmic authorship, blockchain poetics and publishing innovation, Stiles became the first writer to bring AI-powered literature to a major auction house when her poem, “COMPLETION: When it’s just you,” sold at Christie’s in 2022. Recent honors include a Future Art Award, nominations for the Forward Prize, Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and finalist status for the Christopher Smart Prize and Palette Emerging Poet Prize. Stiles has been invited to speak at Art Basel, The Brooklyn Museum, SXSW, Digilogue Istanbul, the Ai4 Summit, Miami Art Week, NFT.NYC and VCA Invites: London, and has exhibited at venues around the globe including Annka Kultys Gallery, Galerie Brigitte Schenk, Art Cologne, SuperRare Gallery, SCOPE Art Show, Superchief Gallery, the Carousel de Louvre, New York Fashion Week, the billboards of Shibuya, Tokyo, virtual Times Square, and elsewhere. A graduate of Harvard and Oxford, Stiles has served as Poetry Mentor to the humanoid android BINA48 since 2018, and lives near New York City with her husband and studio partner, Kris Bones.

Sasha Stiles is a first-generation Kalmyk-American poet, literary artist, AI researcher, and author of the “instant techno-classic” Technelegy, as well as co-founder of theVERSEverse. A pioneer of algorithmic authorship, blockchain poetics and publishing innovation, Stiles became the first writer to bring AI-powered literature to a major auction house when her poem, “COMPLETION: When it’s just you,” sold at Christie’s in 2022. Recent honors include a Future Art Award, nominations for the Forward Prize, Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and finalist status for the Christopher Smart Prize and Palette Emerging Poet Prize. Stiles has been invited to speak at Art Basel, The Brooklyn Museum, SXSW, Digilogue Istanbul, the Ai4 Summit, Miami Art Week, NFT.NYC and VCA Invites: London, and has exhibited at venues around the globe including Annka Kultys Gallery, Galerie Brigitte Schenk, Art Cologne, SuperRare Gallery, SCOPE Art Show, Superchief Gallery, the Carousel de Louvre, New York Fashion Week, the billboards of Shibuya, Tokyo, virtual Times Square, and elsewhere. A graduate of Harvard and Oxford, Stiles has served as Poetry Mentor to the humanoid android BINA48 since 2018, and lives near New York City with her husband and studio partner, Kris Bones.

Bay Backner is an artist working at the intersection of fine art and metaverse technologies. The theme of digital identity vs sociocultural identity is central to Bay’s work. Her pieces use oil paint, AI and metaverse installations to pull cultural archetypes into the exploratory space between physical and digital worlds. In her ongoing body of work on ‘the muse’, she paints real-life portraits of her ‘muses’ – women she has generated using AI technology – then disrupts their images through digital-physical interventions. Bay sees this as a way to disrupt her own relationship with the legacy muse-artist narrative.

Bay is co-founder of Vueltta, an international art collective producing immersive installations in the Decentraland metaverse. In 2022, her work was featured by Metaverse Art Week, NFT Show Europe, NFT Liverpool, ETH Barcelona and The Financial Times Digital Asset Summit. Bay has been active in decentralized technology since 2006, when she produced the first conference on open source mobile software in Silicon Valley. She still regularly consults on metaverse and web3 growth strategy for brands including DeFi ICOs, NFT platforms, social protocols and decentralised social enterprise. Bay both creates and collects NFTs on the Tezos and Polygon chains. As a collector, she focuses on emerging women artists, and her own work was selected for the Women’s Museum’s genesis NFT collection.

Forming a career through critiquing elitist rules of the art world, artist, art dealer, curator, writer, and critic Kenny Schacher navigates the monetary circulation of art in his work. Maintaining the role of both an insider and outsider in the contemporary art world, Schachter offers what he calls a different, atypical viewpoint of the art world as a person who didn’t learn its systems, including the secretive relationships, pricing, and silence. Through his work, Schachter makes clear the machinations of the art market, disintegrating the barriers for people not on the inside. Influenced by artists like Paul Thek and Vito Acconci, Schachter humorously exposes the good, bad, and ugly nature of the business with blunt candor in works like The Larry Joke (2018). He incorporates humor to direct stark critiques and subvert the seriousness that the art world upholds in an unpretentious manner.