Sasha Stiles. Lorem Ipsum Variorum 

Palazzo Citterio presents Lorem Ipsum Variorum, a site-specific digital installation by Sasha Stiles, a Kalmyk-American artist and poet whose practice unfolds at the intersection of poetry, language, and artificial intelligence. Through writing, generative poetry, and language models, Stiles explores how language technologies are transforming the way we communicate, remember, and produce meaning.

A project developed in collaboration with the National Museum of Digital Art
Curated by Clelia Patella

Original music composed by Kris Bones

Before a text reaches its final form, there is always a space of possibility. It is from this original moment of writing that Lorem Ipsum Variorum emerges. For decades, Lorem Ipsum has accompanied books, magazines, newspapers, and graphic design projects as a provisional text intended to be replaced. Yet behind this seemingly meaningless Latin survives the altered fragment of a text by Cicero, transformed over the centuries through copying, errors, and rewriting.

It is this survival that interests Sasha Stiles. Through Technelegy, her AI-based alter ego, the artist develops a series of Impossible Translations: interpretations generated from a text whose original meaning has been lost, opening up new possibilities for interpretation.
For Stiles, artificial intelligence becomes an interlocutor through which to question cultural memory, authorship, and the processes through which words survive over time. The works in the series evoke editorial pages, typographic plates, fragments of code, and luminous inscriptions, transforming writing into visual matter.

Created for the monumental LED wall of Palazzo Citterio, Lorem Ipsum Variorum enters into dialogue with the Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense, a symbolic place of written memory. Books, manuscripts, and typography re-emerge across the luminous surface of the work, where text becomes image, transforming the LED wall into a page to be read.
The term variorum belongs to the philological tradition and refers to an edition that brings together different versions and interpretations of the same text. In Lorem Ipsum Variorum, however, there is no original to recover. Errors, translations, and transformations are what generate meaning.

Sasha Stiles is a Kalmyk-American poet and language artist exploring what it means to be human in a more-than-human age. A pioneering voice of the generative era, she advances poetic intelligence — the synthesis of emotion and algorithm — as a vital artistic medium and enduring technology of memory and consciousness. Her multimodal practice traces a throughline from ancient orality and inscription to the technocultural conditions of the 21st century, where meaning emerges through code, complex networks, and hybrid imagination. Her work has been honored with the Prix Ars Electronica and Lumen Prize, featured in The New York Times, Poets & Writers, and Artforum, and exhibited internationally from MoMA to Art Basel. A graduate of Harvard and Oxford, she has recently served as Monument Lab Fellow and Google Arts & Culture Artist-in-Residence, and has been co-evolving with her AI alter ego, Technelegy, since 2018.