THE
COLLECTIVE

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.

Shane Denson is Professor of Film and Media Studies and, by Courtesy, of German Studies and of Communication at Stanford University, where he also serves as Director of the PhD Program in Modern Thought & Literature. His research interests span a variety of media and historical periods, including phenomenological and media-philosophical approaches to media arts, film, digital media, and serialized popular forms. He collaborates with Karin Denson on generative media art projects.

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.