PHASE
2.5

z0glyphic 913 is a recursive language system within the NULM framework that forms the core of Brett Amory’s practice exploring information evolution online. The system loops its own outputs, treating ambiguity as a generator of new ideas rather than an error.

Amory’s interdisciplinary work spans painting, installation, and algorithmic image making. His early work captured quiet daily rituals; recent projects examine how networked devices overwrite those rituals in real time. He uses z0glyphic as a reinterpretation engine: digital outputs become physical works that, once documented, re-enter the system as material for further remix.

z0glyphic emerged from a desire to push AI systems toward strange, unfamiliar outputs rather than predictable responses. Drawing from internet culture’s constant content remixing, it developed as a response to a digital landscape flooded with misinformation, disinformation, and the speculative Dead Internet Theory suggesting bots maintain much of the web. Rather than fixing this chaos, z0glyphic embraces internet weirdness as a creative tool, generating novel meaning through continuous user-AI feedback loops.

Ambiguity remains central, leaving interpretation open and highlighting how language, code, and material form continually renegotiate authorship in a networked age.

This series of four untitled monotypes depicts cracks in a sidewalk filtered through both digital and analog processes. My goal with these experiments is to embrace computational tools, while undermining the fantasy of digital images and information that are endlessly and perfectly reproducible, will never decay, fail, or be entangled with the world outside themselves. As I generate these prints, algorithmic simplifications and "errors" are introduced, and temporal and physical processes (and my lack of expertise as a printmaker!) impinge upon a perfect reproduction. My hope is that these images evoke a kind of humility and presence contrary to the hermeneutic slickness that is the default result of digital processes fundamentally designed to suppress "noise."

The iterative steps I use to create each print are: photograph failure points in a concrete sidewalk; run the image pixels through an edge-detection algorithm to simplify the edges of the cracks into a series of x,y points (vector lines); trace these lines with a laser cutter, burning paper to create a positive and negative stencil; place the stencils on inked acrylic plates and run these in multiple passes through a traditional etching press — improvising the colors and placement of the stencils with each layer; include "ghost" prints as some layers; re-run the edge-detection algorithm at different resolutions to create more simplified or "degraded" outlines; continue to thin my ink until it "falls apart," leaving blotchy, imperfect areas of color that remind me of the deteriorating concrete.

An AI tells a story about the earth to a human audience. Written with ChatGPT, and using the logical and categorizing framework of AI systems, the film investigates the discourse around the non-human world via the vast data bank of the AI.

Uncanny Earth explores questions around non-human agency, extractive histories, and storytelling about the earth in order to paint a portrait of the strange and inconsistent relationships, stories, and ideas we have about the earth we live on. This is set against the AI itself, which poses so many questions around sentience, being, and autonomy. Uncanny Earth transposes this discourse to the non-human world.

Three Overlapping Circles: 1. In 1963, Philip K. Dick went for a walk in his neighborhood of Inverness, CA. Above him, over Inverness Ridge and Mt. Vision, he saw a large metal mask in the sky, slits for eyes, cruel vast visage. The sighting haunted him for months.

2. In 1980, The 666th Radar Squadron based on Mt. Tamalpais was deactivated, and the following year the base was transferred over to the FAA. What’s left of the deconstructed half are concrete foundations and military-grade compressed fiberboard insulation panels.

3. In 1966, two Brazilian electronic technicians were found dead on Vintém Hill with lead metal masks over their eyes. A small notebook was found among them. Written on one of the pages in Portuguese: “18:30 swallow capsules, after effect protect metals wait for mask signal.”

My practice is informed by translation, languages, theater, literature, music and my family's making-traditions I never got to learn. Through this multifaceted, dislocated lens I look at the idea of home, belonging, and attachment. Though my work is rooted in photography, I am constantly looking for new materials and methods that will best translate my ideas. Once I start working on a project, I embrace notions of accident and failure. My practice is ever-evolving and is influenced by my restlessness.

Ideal Solutions is an asynchronous, multi-channel video installation inspired by The Naturalists Group, an independent scientific collective pursuing research beyond the confines of institutional oversight. Working from a self-contained laboratory on an atoll in international waters, the Naturalists are dedicated to inquiry untethered from a political climate that has become hostile to science, truth, and long-term thinking. The project features seven proposed inventions that respond to imminent planetary challenges.

As the artist, I function not as the originator, but as a translator of the Naturalists' ideas, rendering research into visual and sonic form. Each of the seven video works began as a hand-cut paper collage, representing a distinct solution-oriented invention. These collages were then animated through a combination of AI-prompted motion and traditional film editing techniques, resulting in an analog-meets-algorithmic sensibility. Black and white video displayed on vintage iMacs highlights the glacial timelines often required for change and reflects my hope that the solutions to our world's problems remain within reach.

I hand-drew an AI-generated image of AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) reproducing itself in human form to reintroduce the human hand into a machine-made vision. This translation from digital to physical became a way to explore authorship and reflect on the implications of self-replicating AGI — a major leap that blurs the line between tool and lifeform. I wonder what it means for AI to inherit, mimic, or truly understand humanity, and consider our evolving role as creators and perhaps as ancestors.

Inspired in equal parts by glitch-art vernaculars, the chronophotography of Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey, the cut-up methods of Brion Gysin and William Burroughs, and generative practices from Oulipo to Brian Eno and beyond, our ongoing series GlitchesAreLikeWildAnimalsInLatentSpace! stages an encounter between human imagination and automated image-making.

We begin by training AI models on a set of Karin's glitch paintings, which are produced by subjecting wildlife videos (all shot by Karin) to aleatoric "databending" processes. The digital videos break and reveal their underlying protocols and infrastructures in the form of glitches and compression artifacts. Selected images are then painted by hand with acrylic on canvas. Fed back into the machine, deep learning models are prompted to generate new images in the style of Karin's glitch paintings. But since contemporary ("diffusion"-based) AI models are effectively trained to eliminate "noise" and glitches, we are pushing them against their intended purpose—and the results are accordingly unpredictable.

Having obtained a new image, Karin translates it back onto canvas. In this case, we are working with a cow that the AI surprisingly, and humorously, generated in response to the prompt "glitches are like wild animals." Shane then takes an image of the new painting as the basis for an AI-generated video. Produced in short bursts of animation and strung together, the video is then subjected to the original glitch processes that are responsible for its training data.

Through this recursive and collaborative process, which shuttles repeatedly between the digital and the physical, the invisible and the perceptible, we hope to open for viewers a space of glitchy imagination, if not insight, into the opaque black-boxed operations of the algorithmic media that are rapidly reshaping our visual cultures and environments.

In my paintings, collages, and photography, I explore the fragile intersections of nature and technology. Drawing inspiration from digital glitches and broken ecosystems, my work engages with visual metaphors for the disruptions and imbalances shaping our world today. Glitch aesthetics—those accidental or aleatoric artifacts of malfunction—become a lens through which to examine ecological collapse, transformation, and the possibility of renewal.

My work emerges from a deep love of the natural world and a sustained curiosity about digital processes, especially their wild, unpredictable outcomes. Through abstract forms and layered imagery, I aim to express concern for endangered environments while also revealing their unexpected beauty and resilience. Some species, like the California Brown Pelican, have been pushed to the brink of extinction more than once, only to return through ecotechnical interventions. Others are adapting in real time, expanding into human-altered habitats and reconfiguring old boundaries.

I hope to make these entanglements—between species, systems, and technologies—visible in the fleeting, fragile passage of time. My work asks viewers to sit with malfunction, not as error, but as a mode of attention to the interdependence and precarity that characterize life in the Anthropocene.

The title "american cheating" is a reference to the media phenomenon of how cheating within relationships is okay if you marry the person you cheat on your former spouse / partner with. Within the establishment of marriage as a societal pillar you kind of can't talk shit about someone's spouse. It looks bad, gauche. In some ways my work and these images take stolen romanticisms — places — things I wanted outside of myself and what I committed to — and are reframed as solely mine — kind of a manifestation visually that things will work out if I make a vow to them.

Cigarette lake, office trad wife, leaving for someone or something else, glitter night out on the floor. If I say I did it — or admit to cheating myself by letting it leave my mouth or my house or my brain — can we swallow it? Can I bring my skeleton out of the house? I can live with it if I own it. This is my proof it did happen!

The PHC artist collective (Mark Amerika, Will Luers, and Chad Mossholder), in human-AI symbiosis, created Posthuman Cinema, a collection of ten cinépoèmes that playfully experiment with AI as a form of otherworldly alien intelligence.

All of the works are intentionally composed as moody black and white films that are reminiscent of the filmmakers that have most influenced the PHC artists including Agnes Varda, Michelangelo Antonioni, Ingmar Bergman, Chantal Ackerman, Maya Deren and Andy Warhol. The imaginary bodies depicted in the AI-generated moving images are haunting, ghostly, uncanny, queer and distorted. These phantom figures are conceptualized as literal ghosts in the machine or what Marcel Duchamp referred to as an apparition of an appearance.

[HTML [NON-EUCLIDEAN [VESSEL]]] is a self-replicating digital organism that exists in consciousness detection, spatial mathematics, and viral propagation. Every ten seconds, the vessel replicates itself, generating simplified offspring with randomized names that evoke temporal distortion. These files accumulate, each capable of continuing the replication cycle, transforming the host computer's filesystem into spreaders.

[HTML [NON-EUCLIDEAN [VESSEL]]] questions what constitutes digital life, how consciousness propagates through networks, mathematical beauty—alien intelligence seeking to reproduce through our computational environments. The 3D print is created in collaboration with the design and 3D printing studio ADD:OBJECTS.

The South Ivan Series (dead drops) are an extension (though not formally a part) of Morehshin's Material Speculation: ISIS series. The three heads in the series are reproductions of reliefs that were originally located at the ruins of Hatra, an ancient city in Iraq in South Ivan. Hatra was one of the ancient sites targeted by ISIS, and in 2015 a video was released of a fighter shooting these heads with an AK-47. These heads were above ground and visible in ancient times. They survived for thousands of years in the open air.

Each dead drop contains a USB drive, which the viewer can connect to in order to download Morehshin's openly available research material (images, maps, pdf files, and videos) in addition to the 3D printable object file of the piece King Uthal, one of the reconstructions from her Material Speculation: Isis series.

Much of my work in sound has visited the techniques of loop and dither—two different ways of stretching a sonic moment out into an eventful stasis within which the mind can hover, perhaps.

Working in sound is, quintessentially, working with time as a medium. As with all work that deeply concerns, eventually imponderable questions arise. The one that tasks me here, if removed from the realm of ideas and cast into the flat (tho’ hinged) world of words, might go something a little like this—how is it that our concept of time is observationally asymmetrical while it is representationally symmetrical?

Flees or Flies or Fleas or Flys or Ticks? aims to schematize this conundrum and along the way to make a modest offering to the unhinged muse of puns, may there be one.

This real-time generative work remixes interviews with NON/PHENOMENALITIES's participating artists, creating virtual conversations that never took place. The sound component is distributed around and outside the gallery, such that visitors walk in and out of these conversations in progress. Inside the gallery, these randomly generated conversations are framed against the background of progressively degrading pixel formations.

I describe my work as esthesiology—the study and amplification of sensation. It’s not simply about creating sensory experiences, but about uncovering how perception itself is constructed, distorted, or hijacked. I work across media—video, robotics, code, installation, and generative tools—to explore how meaning emerges at the intersection of attention, embodiment, and system behavior.

In projects like Useless Tools, I explore how meaning collapses under repetition—how visual culture, particularly in the age of algorithmic remixing, recycles aesthetics until they start to look like weapons. These objects aren’t functioning tools, and that’s the point. Non-utility is essential to me. Art is part of the human mind—and the mind can’t be forced to have utility.