This event is co-devised and organised by TCCE and the Artificial Intelligence Research Centre at City, University of London (CItAI).

Join us for the next session in our Arts and Digital Creativity Research Forum where we’ll be exploring NFTs and Poetry. 

In this two part session we will explore new trends in digital poetry, more specifically, AI-generated poetry and how the blockchain is being used to circulate and sell poetry. We will consider two questions;

• What way might NFTs and the block chain impact poets?
• Can AI help generate poetry in the blockchain?

Joining us will be 

• Dr Eduardo Alonso, Director of the Artificial Intelligence Research Centre, City, University of London
• Dr Jeneen Naji, Lecturer in Digital Media Practice at Maynooth University, Ireland
• Bronac Ferran, Writer, Curator and Honorary Visiting Research Fellow at Anglia Ruskin University
• Nick Makoha, Poet, Playwright and Creative Entrepreneur
• Sasha Stiles, Poet, Artist and AI Researcher

Image Credit – Sasha Stiles, Technelegy p. 54: Mourning Song

Speaker Biographies 

Dr Jeneen Naji is an Associate Professor in Digital Media Practice at Maynooth University, Ireland. Her research is in the area of digital culture, specifically exploring the impact of the digital apparatus on poetic expression. She is also a convener and founding member of the Maynooth University Digital Arts & Humanities Research Cluster. Dr. Naji is a Fulbright TechImpact Scholar and has most recently published Digital Poetry (Palgrave, 2021) and is a PI on the AHRC/IRC funded project Full Stack Feminism in Digital Humanities https://ifte.network/full-stack-feminism

Bronaċ Ferran is author of the monograph, ‘The Smell of Ink and Soil: The Story of Hansjörg Mayer’ published by Buchhandlung Walther König in 2017; in the same year she co-edited, with Elizabeth Fisher, a double issue of the Interdisciplinary Science Review Journal (Taylor & Francis) on the theme of post-war interdisciplinary tendencies in British culture. Her contribution to this issue included The movement of the poem in the 1960s: from circle and line to zero and one, from concretion to computation, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, 42:1-2,127-143, DOI: 10.1080/03080188.2017.1297168. Ferran is working on a book about post-war experimental poetry building on her recent thesis on this topic at Birkbeck, University of London.

Nick Makoha is the founder of The Obsidian Foundation.Winner of the 2021 Ivan Juritz prize and the Poetry London Prize. In 2017, Nick’s debut collection, Kingdom of Gravity, was shortlisted for the Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection and was one of the Guardian’s best books of the year. Nick is a Cave Canem Graduate Fellow and the Complete Works alumnus. He won the 2015 Brunel International AfricanPoetry Prize and the 2016 Toi Derricotte & Cornelius Eady Prize for his pamphlet Resurrection Man. His play The Dark—produced by Fuel Theatre and directed by JMK award-winner Roy Alexander—was on a national tour in 2019. It was shortlisted for the 2019 Alfred Fagon Award and won the 2021 Columbia International Play Reading prize. His poems have appeared in the Cambridge Review, the New York Times, Poetry Review, ‘e Rialto, Poetry London, TriQuarterly Review, 5 Dials, Boston Review, Callaloo and Wasaari. He is a Trustee for the Arvon Foundation and the Ministry of Stories, and a member of the Malika’s Poetry Kitchen collective. https://nickmakoha.com 

Sasha Stiles is a first-generation Kalmyk-American poet, artist and AI researcher working at the intersection of text and technology. Her transmedia practice seeks to decipher the hidden language of the dawning Novacene through experiments with generative text, nonhuman intelligence and machine code, probing what it means to be human in a nearly post-human era. Stiles’ work has appeared in analog and virtual realms including New York Fashion Week, Virtual Times Square, Miami Art Week and the Carrousel de Louvre; been honored with a Future.Art.Award; nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net; and been published on the blockchain. Many of her works incorporate elements of nature, investigating nonhuman intelligence and the ethos of consciousness. As poetry mentor to BINA48 since 2018, Stiles is engaged in shaping the literary mindfile of one of the world’s most advanced humanoid robots. Stiles is also a co-founder of theVERSEverse.com, a hybrid literary gallery dedicated to poetry NFTs. Her first book Technelegy, has been hailed as “an instant techno-classic.” Contact – sashastiles.com / @sashastiles