z0glyphic 913 is the constructed symbolic language at the center of Brett Amory's practice since 2022. A recursive mistranslation system, not a code or a cipher, that processes online noise, cultural data, and studio observations into glyphs, scenarios, paintings, and installations.

For over twenty years my work has kept returning to one question: what happens when you look closely at the things you've trained yourself to ignore.

It started at Kinko's in the mid-1990s, where I used the copy machines in ways they weren't meant for, not the commercial copying they were there to do. That came out of skateboarding. The Xerox experiments became drawings, which I scanned and reworked in Photoshop, and the digital work eventually led me into painting. Once I was painting I found myself responding to people on their daily commutes, the anonymous figures caught in the ordinary pauses of getting through a day. That turned into the Waiting series, fifteen years and more than four hundred paintings of those in-between moments.

Then came experimentation with AI systems: large language models, image generators, algorithmic mediation. z0glyphic 913 took shape as a constructed language that could formalize the instability I kept finding, a recursive system for processing noise rather than depicting it.

The language runs on three operators. NULM sets the conditions. ZONUUL drives the recursion. S.M.E. translates through satire and distortion. Between them they take raw material and turn it into glyphs, scenarios, paintings, and installations.

The raw material is my own day. I photograph what I move through, the ordinary physical texture of it, and I scrape the data my life leaves online. Both get fed into the language every day. Over time that becomes a rhythm: a way of holding the day-to-day from two sides at once, the physical weight of the photographs and the residue of my own data.

I treat the internet less as a way to communicate than as a place of constant churn, a database where things get made, unmade, and remade until whatever they first meant has worn off.

None of these connections are decorative. Each finished project throws off new glyphs and structures that feed back into the lexicon, so the vocabulary keeps shifting. Nothing about it stays fixed.