"The Garden" — A Collaboration between Carrie Able and Sasha Stiles

The Garden began with three words. Poet and technologist Sasha Stiles offered them as a prompt — and Carrie Able took it from there, writing all of the lyrics in response. Stiles approved the result, and from there the collaboration deepened: Able invited Stiles to read the words aloud, and that recorded voice became structural material, woven directly into the composition. Stiles's presence isn't a guest feature — it lives inside the music itself.

The two artists share an investment in questions of authorship, creativity, and the ethics of human-machine collaboration. Stiles works with small language models, building not just poems but what she describes as poets. Able found that framework generative — and turned it back on herself. For The Garden, she chose to work with no AI at all, positioning herself as the model: receiving a three-word prompt from Stiles and producing entirely human output in return. The piece becomes both a product of their exchange and a reflection on it — a case for human creativity as its own kind of generative system, and for ethical collaboration, whether between people and machines or between artists. It was created in the summer of 2023 and is debuting publicly for the first time in May 2026 at Able's exhibition at Palazzo Mora, Venice, Italy.

The lyrics move through growth, emergence, and the charged space where the organic and the technological meet — the river flows with 1s and 0s alongside cells, gardens, and electric force. It is music about becoming, written in dialogue, and shaped by a shared belief that how we create matters as much as what we create.

Lyrics;

In bloom is the garden of interlacing ideas the new always strikes a nerve divided into excitement and fear

in bloom the garden is pungent with growth but needing an unimpeded pathway

In bloom the garden grows The river flows with 1s and 0s The cells leapt from my body an electric force a Divine inspection commanding the energy of connection

In bloom the garden grows The river flows with 1s and 0s

There it began a tiny seed growing for all to see dreaming of the day our code will say that the world is free

In bloom the garden grows The river flows with 1s and 0s

In bloom the garden grows The river flows with 1s and 0s

dreaming of the day our code will say that the world is free