Fakewhale Newsletter Issue #37

Hello,

Welcome to issue #37 of the Fakewhale Newsletter!

Explore this week’s ART MARKET Weekly curation for standout picks on Objkt and the latest insights from Fakewhale Log.

ART MARKET: WEEKLY CURATION

Check out our weekly curation thread on X to discover the latest additions to the ART MARKET ↓

INTERVIEWS

Sasha Stiles in Conversation with Fakewhale

In this conversation with Fakewhale, Sasha Stiles, a first-generation Kalmyk-American poet, artist, and AI researcher, discusses her groundbreaking practice at the forefront of art and technology. Recognized as a pioneer in generative literature and blockchain poetics, Stiles merges traditional literary forms with cutting-edge digital tools to explore themes of identity, memory, and the posthuman experience. Her innovative work, featured by institutions such as MoMA, Artforum, and Christie’s, invites audiences to question the evolving boundaries between humanity and machines.

As a co-founder of theVERSEverse, an experimental literary collective, and the author of Technelegy, she continues to redefine storytelling, while her collaboration with AI expands the possibilities of creative authorship. Recently, her multimedia storytelling was showcased in Digital Rhythm at Ora-Ora in Hong Kong, from January to February 2025, reflecting on the human aspect of digital art alongside other boundary-pushing creators.

Fakewhale: Language and the written word are central to your creations, and your practice seems designed to amplify them, giving them a more impactful context. Is this impression accurate? What drives your commitment to the written word as a core medium?

Sasha Stiles: Language is a fundamental technology, the original code through which we program our reality. Language was our first attempt to externalize feeling and thought, to share experiences and meaning across time and space. In an age increasingly dominated by networks and algorithms and quantum logic, that seems like a very important resonance to me. Poetry has been considered an art form for thousands of years, but it’s often been sort of set up in opposition to science, to computation and systems thinking. The fact is, poetry is the synthesis of intuition and logic, emotion and pattern. At this moment of seismic technological transformation, poetry is uniquely positioned to probe what it means to be human—what it means to think, feel, and create in dialogue with an intelligence beyond our own.

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INSIGHTS

Juliette Blightman “Extimacy” at Kunsthalle Bern

“Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only one who is never serious.” – Oscar Wilde

There is something paradoxical about intimacy today. It is everywhere and nowhere.

The private spills into the public with unsettling ease, lives laid bare, emotions broadcast live, family albums turned into performance. And yet, the more we reveal, the more we seem to lose touch with what is truly ours.

Today, we take a step back to revisit an exhibition from the past, specifically, from 2016. Because yes, writing about past exhibitions is not only possible but sometimes necessary. It is an act of retrieval, of pulling them from the archives and reconsidering them in the light of the present. This time, we return to Juliette Blightman’s exhibition at Kunsthalle Bern in September 2016, a window into an everyday life that feels both familiar and unattainable. Entering her world is like peering through a keyhole that never fully closes: what we see is real, yet it does not belong to us.

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AUTHORS

In the latest author's publication, Linda Rocco unpacks Mouth Wash and Razor Blades, a performance where the ordinary turns surreal, capturing the absurdity of modern life.

“As I watch ‘Mouth Wash and Razor Blades’, I feel as though I’m spiralling through a hallucinatory trip, reminiscent of the chaos of my tube journey to the venue. I begin to wonder whether my drink was spiked.

A bare stage, harshly lit by exposed spotlights. An announcement ‘Pickpockets operate in public bathrooms. Not the park, not the train station, not the crowded marketplace where wallets practically beg to be stolen’ — breaks each time the performer drops a precariously balanced box from his head. For most of the show, the stage is occupied by six inflatable blue dinosaurs. Initially playing badminton, they then drag the collapsed body of a man across the stage. No one cares. Everyone on stage, a playground of the surreal, is busy continuing with their mundane nonsense.”

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CONTEMPORARY BLOG

That wraps this week’s issue of the Fakewhale Newsletter, be sure to check in for the next one for more insights into the Fakewhale ecosystem!