Podcast
TAAS presents Counterproductive, a podcast about how people live — authors, nomads, scientists, visual artists, and others whose ways of being bend against the ordinary. Each conversation lingers less on résumé and more on rhythm: how a life is made, how meaning is stitched together, how imagination might serve as a compass in chaotic times.
Hosted by Nato Thompson with producer Marisa Mazria Katz, the series drifts between art, politics, and the everyday, searching out voices that point to countless ways of living.
For the first episode of Counterproductive, it felt only right to begin with Sasha Stiles. Sasha first came into our orbit as a student at The Alternative Art School and later returned as an instructor, making her both part of the TAAS community and an example of the kind of artist-thinker the school hopes to support.
A first-generation Kalmyk-American poet, artist, and AI researcher, Stiles has been among the early voices asking what happens when poetry meets machine intelligence. Her work with large language models, including her ongoing AI alter ego technology, has explored how human voice, memory, language, and computation might collide, collaborate, and transform one another. At a moment when AI is reshaping nearly every cultural field, Sasha’s long-standing questions about poetry, authorship, and more-than-human creativity feel especially urgent.
Episode 1: Sasha Stiles
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