My practice — long statement
Length: about 330 words.
Status: current authoritative. Wins over every pre-July-2026 statement in Wiki/raw/Statements/.
For over twenty years I've paid attention to the stuff most people tune out: riding the train, waiting for a bus, sitting in traffic. That became Waiting, fifteen years of painting anonymous figures caught in routine.
That same instinct now drives z0glyphic 913, a speculative recursive language system I'm developing to look at how meaning is built, fragmented, and reformed inside digital culture, and what that does to the rhythm of an ordinary day.
I point it at myself. Every day, trackers log what I searched, what I watched, what I wrote, where I went, and the photographs I took. That gets assembled into a profile: interest clusters, a behavioral archetype, intent signals, affinity scores. It's built in the exact shape an ad company would build it, because that's the point. Most days it decides I'm an information seeker.
Then the profile goes through the language. z0glyphic 913 reinterprets it rather than translating it, reading it once and then reading its own reading and letting it drift, the way anything moves through a network and comes back changed. What returns is a remixed version of my day, written in glyphs.
That remixed day is the seed. It gets printed as posters, generated into short silent clips, and collaged, and the same material eventually reaches the paintings. The words and the counts on a poster are always from that date. The pictures are pulled from standing pools, my own photographs and generated grounds, with the day's reading deciding which ones surface.
The Oracle videos are a separate track and I want to keep the two straight. Those start from a news article I choose myself, not from my own data. The language reinterprets that article into a spoken scenario. My tracked day never enters them.
Most days it ends there. One day, one set of objects.
But the same things keep coming back, never quite the same way. When enough days cluster around a single pattern, it stops being a day and becomes a Spell: a body of work I didn't choose, surfaced by mining years of my own material until a compulsion becomes visible. Twelve have formed so far out of thirty-eight thousand images.
Every platform you use is already listening to the rhythm of your day so it can sell it back to you as an ad. I listen to mine, and what comes back is the work.
Rules for using this
- Get the ad-tech line in early. Cold-read, "Spell" lands as witchcraft without it.
- "I" and "you." Short sentences. No marketing verbs. No baited question at the end.
- Say the concrete thing: the count, the year, the material.
- Never invent a venue, date, or number.
- The self-surveillance project is Surveil Thyself in public. "Navigating Everything" is the internal name.
- A body of work is a Spell in public. "Loop" is the internal name.