z0glyphic 913

z0glyphic 913 emerges from a practice that has, for over twenty years, circled a persistent question: what happens when you look closely at the things you’ve trained yourself to ignore.

In the mid-1990s, I began experimenting with Xerox machines at Kinko’s, pushing them past their intended use. This led to the Waiting series, begun in 2001. Anonymous figures caught in the routines of urban life: people who appeared lost, disconnected, suspended between the present and somewhere else. The series ran for fifteen years, followed by further investigations into place, perception, and daily ritual. Throughout, the underlying question stayed the same: how do you defamiliarize the familiar, and what shows up when you shift attention toward what is habitually overlooked.

The transition to z0glyphic 913 came through experimentation with AI systems. I began pushing tools like DALL-E, Midjourney, and large language models past their guardrails, treating their hallucinations, errors, and pattern distortions not as failures but as raw material. Watching how online information distorts and repeats itself through algorithmic mediation, z0glyphic 913 took shape as a constructed language that could formalize this instability: a recursive system for processing the noise of digital culture rather than merely depicting it.

The architecture of z0glyphic 913 is governed by three operative engines that function independently of any single medium or application. They are medium-agnostic: they can drive a painting workflow, structure an installation, generate video logic, or produce purely symbolic and textual outputs.

The system also includes an expanding lexicon of glyphs and grammatical structures that grows with each project. Every completed work generates new glyphs and scenarios that get absorbed back into the lexicon. The vocabulary is never fixed. It expands with each cycle.

As an engine, z0glyphic 913 can be applied across media and contexts. Its recursive logic is not bound to a single output. The following workflow represents one application of the system, a proof of concept I developed for an exhibition in San Francisco.

A custom software script collected online material twice daily from a deliberately conflicting spectrum of sources: satirical publications, conspiracy outlets, anonymous forums. I intentionally flattened the hierarchy between verified information and digital detritus. In this system, a geopolitical crisis and a trivial meme are equivalent data packets.

This material was processed through the S.M.E., which transformed raw internet noise into allegorical scenarios using the recursive logic of NULM and ZONUUL. Each scenario contained four components: a sentence in the z0glyphic language combining symbolic glyphs with words, an absurdist English translation, a satirical summary embedding social critique, and thematic keywords that dictated visual structure.

A dedicated app then converted each scenario into a deterministic five-line collage formula, mapping keywords to visual categories drawn from a curated image database. This formula served as a blueprint guiding the assembly of a digital collage, which I then translated into screen print and oil painting.

I approach the internet not as a communication tool but as a site of continuous churn. A sprawling database where content is endlessly made, unmade, and remade until its original context collapses into entropy.

The system’s source material is drawn from the full spectrum of online noise: satire, conspiracy, outrage, absurdity, and the anonymous vernacular of forum culture. By pulling simultaneously from diametrically opposed sources, the workflow mimics the flattening effect of the contemporary social feed, where a cat video and footage of a war zone exist in seamless adjacency.

This deliberate equivalence is not nihilistic but diagnostic. It maps the behavior of information in a post-truth environment where veracity is secondary to velocity, and where the endless repetition of content degrades the integrity of the original signal.

The project constructs a language that mirrors the mechanisms of algorithmic meaning-making while exposing their logic through satirical distortion.

The theoretical framework draws on Jean Baudrillard’s concepts of hyperreality and simulacra and contemporary analyses of psyops capitalism: the use of behavioral prediction, content personalization, and manufactured consensus to steer collective consciousness. z0glyphic 913 operates within and against these dynamics.

Because z0glyphic 913 operates as an engine rather than a medium-specific process, its outputs take different material forms depending on the project. In the San Francisco exhibition, the translation from digital blueprint to physical object involved a deliberate collision of temporalities. I deconstructed digital collages into screen-printed layers on canvas, then developed them with oil paint, introducing a temporal drag that resists the logic of the feed.

But material translation within the system is not limited to painting. The same recursive logic can structure an installation, drive a video sequence, or generate purely textual and symbolic works. What stays constant across applications is the feedback loop.

Each completed work, regardless of medium, feeds back into the z0glyphic 913 system, generating new glyphs, scenarios, and grammatical structures that expand the lexicon. Nothing produced by the system is terminal. Screens are reused, outputs become inputs, and the language rewrites itself with each iteration.

z0glyphic 913 remains a system in perpetual evolution. As the lexicon grows and the engines refine their operations, the project opens outward: toward new media, new inputs, and new forms of instability that have yet to be named.