EXTRA/PHENOMENALITIES

My Ephemeral Poetry Generators are part of my ongoing series not [TEXT], which explores the human compulsion to find recognition in the barely recognizable—patterns and connections in the barely sensible. The project began as an experiment in the deconstruction of sound, asking how much abstraction can be introduced before the familiar becomes unrecognizable. It has since evolved into a system for generating irreproducible works of spoken text and images that emerge from random associations yet appear as coherent narratives.

Ephemeral Poetry Generator #8 uses custom software to model poetry—here, the complete song lyrics of Lou Reed—in a way that preserves syntax, rhythm, and vocabulary while remaining entirely indifferent to meaning. The system can produce new poems that sound like the originals, but without semantic intention.

When a viewer approaches the work, a new poem is generated and sent in real time to both an image generator and a voice synthesizer. The voice remains familiar, but the story exists only through the viewer’s act of interpretation. Each poem is spoken only once. The images persist only until the next poem is generated. Nothing is saved, and nothing can be reproduced. The work therefore foregrounds not the permanence of what is produced, but the fleeting experience—and memory—of encountering it.

As a sound artist, I am accustomed to intervening in environments in inescapable ways. Unlike visual works, sound cannot be avoided; it fundamentally reshapes the space it inhabits. When multiple sound works share an environment, they inevitably interfere with one another—sometimes productively, but often in ways that undermine artistic intent. This creates a kind of Heisenbergian paradox: one can faithfully present an individual work or the relationships among many, but not both at once.

Read the Room begins from a different premise. Rather than adding sound to an environment, the work absorbs the sound already present. In doing so, it remains in constant dialogue with its surroundings without disrupting them, allowing it to coexist with other works while maintaining its own internal logic.

The installation uses four hyperdirectional microphones oriented toward the cardinal directions. Audio from each direction is analyzed to generate a distinct acoustic fingerprint, which is translated through an encoding system into descriptive text. These texts—each marked by direction—are sent asynchronously to an image generator, producing a continuously evolving 360-degree visual field. The resulting images bear no literal relationship to the sounds that generate them. Yet over time, the human impulse to search for patterns begins to surface, revealing an intuitive correspondence between the absorbed acoustic energy and its visual expression.

Scenario #1153: The Ipsum CAPTCHA Visa Protocol ⧎⧓⧑⧔⧗ — Verification Through Semantic Erosion

The Ministry of Placeholder Citizenship introduces Form A22-B: Silence is Louder Than Sound™, the centerpiece of the Ipsum CAPTCHA Visa Protocol. To qualify for linguistic clearance, applicants must complete multiple-choice evaluations written entirely in Lorem ipsum. Real language is prohibited. Emotional resonance is penalized. Meaning is suspicious.

Citizenship applicants are instructed to identify the most meaningless phrase, mistrust glyphs, and confirm their detachment from metaphor. Each question is followed by an impossible CAPTCHA prompt:

• “Select all squares where silence is louder than sound.” • “Click each image containing non-expressive grammar.” • “Identify the comma that feels ideologically intrusive.”

Failure to comply—whether through accidental coherence, hesitation over punctuation, or visible intent—is grounds for immediate deportation or reassignment to the Semantic Re Verification Annex. Officials assure the public that true citizens possess an innate instinct for authentic gibberish. Those fluent in conceptual nonsense are fast-tracked to elite status, their devotion to meaningless clarity celebrated by the Ministry. Their reward: continued permission to exist as syntactic ghosts within the neutralized state.

Scenario #1153: Authenticity as Controlled Exposure ⧉⧓⧗⧊ — KAKO

In 2030, to combat bot saturation and deepfake exhaustion, tech giants initiated the Reality Exposure Protocol™. It introduced:

• Verified Human Zones™: No bots, no edits, just raw humans. • /unfiltered: YouTube’s 24/7 livestream of real-life awkwardness. • EmoSync™: Emotionally tagged content: “Posted while spiraling,” “I laughed but didn’t mean it.”

For 72 hours, the internet experienced an era of radical authenticity: a man sighing went viral, a teen staring into space birthed the “Loading…” meme. But soon, humanity’s true self—unfiltered, unspectacular, visibly lost—repelled its audience. Vulnerability fatigue spread faster than any trend. Engagement flatlined. Reality, it turned out, did not convert.

Platforms replaced the experiment with Emotion Decoys™, AI-generated humans programmed for just the right amount of existentialism. Viewership soared. Bots issued a joint statement: “This was never about truth. It was always about palatable sadness.”

The human zones were archived. /unfiltered became a color-graded loop. EmoSync™ was rebranded as a sticker pack. Reality itself was aestheticized and gently deprecated. KAKO declared the operation successful.

Stand Clear of Active Light ⧑⧇⧜ LÜMENCORE / ⧗⧠⧜ VÖRELIFT

Representation ends where presence begins. LÜMENCORE captures what others discard. Ambient light. Directed illumination. Photonic waste. It compresses brightness into operative charge. As luminosity decreases, potential increases. This is not power generation. This is permission. VÖRELIFT receives condensed charge from LÜMENCORE and enforces what was always inevitable: scale inversion. Identity reseating. The collapse of representational distance. Miniatures become persons. Symbols become flesh. The apparatus does not create. It resolves.

Do not stare into the light while it is becoming someone. If translation stops behaving like light, step back. Neither system produces life independently. The apparatus reallocates it.

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 from the photographs 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 – this process of reprinting a plate a second time creates darkened outlines of the stencils from residual ink left on the plate • re-run the edge-detection algorithm on the photographs at different resolutions, to create more simplified or “degraded” outlines of the cracks • print new layers with the different resolution stencils • 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.

The work is conjured from line and dust. Line, an irreducible means of expression. Dust, formless and without value. A liquid turns solid and differentiates the object, and the object is a projection (unconscious, unseen) or confrontation (conscious, seen) of/with the body. Surface is unified by oil paint, like skin stretched tight over bones and hungry muscle.

How can the ineffable take form in a way that is one-pointed, and thus point back towards the formless and unseen? The object is not the work. The object stands for a process of repetition, time spent outside of movement, momentum, or progress, and questions that belie other questions, and so on. What is this? What am I?

This body is an instrument whose purpose is to embody radical presence. Disorder and mystery are accepted and celebrated, if possible, as another kind of order. One that never quite comes into focus or is fully grasped. But the traces one perceives while being still and quiet sustain the practice, like the wind through the trees you can only hear in wilderness.

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. They began deconstructing the west half of the base, leaving a number of materials to deteriorate over the years. 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. Their cause of death was unsolved, but an orange UFO was seen going up and down the hill a few days later. 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.

I create video and audio work whose themes encompass the nature of time, consciousness, surveillance, and communication. My practice often draws from the streams of information we encounter, both digital and sensorial. I focus and distill physical experiences and media culture into moments that, for the participant, invite exploration, reflection and questioning.

I welcome the occurrence when someone stops and thinks to themself: What is this about? I’m interested most in that journey of thought which follows engagement with my artwork. I work fluidly across mediums—sound pieces, single-channel video, multi-channel installations and more—always letting the intention dictate the form. In recent years I’ve been creating video sculptures: works incorporating sound, visuals and objects that emphasize not only their own spatial nature but also that of the viewer’s experience around them.

Homage to the Plan is a brief meditation on iteration, translation, and AI-idolatry in three actions evolving over the course of the exhibition. The project begins with an initial 3D computer-generated layout for the exhibition—an iterative process developed in collaboration with human partners. This spatial model is then reduced to a flattened plan view, evoking the hard-edge abstraction and chromatic investigations of Josef Albers and then regenerated in AI space.

In action two, the plan will be passed through an AI system trained to “Albersify” the image, progressively abstracting it through color, edge condition, and shape as stand-ins for spatial experience. Through multiple AI-mediated iterations, representation becomes increasingly diluted, emphasizing reproduction over originality.

From this abstraction, action three proposes a new vision of the gallery space. This space will be once again flattened and reprocessed through AI lenses modeled on artists influenced by Albers—Donald Judd and Robert Rauschenberg. Each successive translation further destabilizes authorship, intention, and fidelity.

After repeated and intentionally degraded reproductions, architectural scale and spatial presence are reintroduced by transforming the image back into a three-dimensional environment. In each action, the viewer is invited to walk through this newly generated space, encountering an exhibition shaped by cycles of reduction, automation, and reconstruction—where human intention and machine interpretation continually fold into one another.

Ideal Solutions is a set of collages, prints, and 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.

Collage and video work titles, from left to right: 1. Nanosatellite Array 2. Old Growth Modules 3. Semiochemical Translator 4. Earth Genome Project 5. Fresh Water Synthesis 6. Celestial Accretion Monitor 7. Whole Brain Archive

Large format prints, from left to right: 1. Naturalists Atoll – World Map 2. Naturalists Atoll – Periscope View

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 edited in Photoshop and then animated through a combination of AI-prompted motion and good old-fashioned key framing, 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.

This work presents a utility closet containing the tools and materials used to install the exhibition itself, displayed alongside paleolithic handaxes. These stone tools—among the earliest known human-made objects—date back over 1.8 million years and were used for more than a million years across Africa, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. They served essential functions: cutting, breaking, shaping, and transforming matter. As such, the handaxes function here as both visual and conceptual anchors, marking the deep history of technology as an extension of the human body.

By placing ancient handaxes alongside contemporary tools—drills, measuring tape, hardware—the work collapses temporal distance. Despite vast differences in material and historical context, both sets of tools operate toward the same end: the transformation of space through human intention.

The installation also intervenes in conventions of display. Some handaxes rest on pedestals, while others are placed in storage boxes, producing a tension between artifact and implement. Within the setting of a utility closet, these modes of presentation appear unstable. The pedestal cannot fully aestheticize the handaxe, nor can the storage box diminish its significance. The work thus foregrounds tools as mediators of action, labor, and making, situating the gallery’s hidden infrastructure as a site for reflecting on the long continuity of human technological practice.

Inspired by glitch-art vernaculars, early chronophotography (Muybridge and Marey), cut-up practices (Gysin and Burroughs), and generative traditions from Oulipo to Brian Eno, our ongoing series GlitchesAreLikeWildAnimalsInLatentSpace! stages an encounter between human imagination and automated image-making.

The project begins with Karin’s glitch paintings, produced by subjecting wildlife videos she records to aleatoric databending processes that expose the hidden protocols and infrastructures of digital media. Selected frames are then translated into acrylic paintings on canvas and used to train AI image models. Because contemporary diffusion-based systems are designed to suppress noise and eliminate glitches, pushing them to reproduce glitch aesthetics produces unstable and unpredictable results.

Generated images are translated back into painting and reintroduced into the system. In this iteration, the focus is on canines—not quite dogs, wolves, or foxes, but generic animals responding to the prompt “glitches are like wild animals.” These paintings become the basis for AI-generated video and aleatoric sound, which are themselves subjected to further glitching and recombination. The machine attempts to resolve the damage; the damage resists. A recursive struggle unfolds; no one wins.

Custom software assembles the videos in real time, while a Markov model generates fragmentary text drawn from Shane’s writing on artificial imagination. The resulting video environment functions as a latent space from which new paintings emerge. Through this iterative exchange between human and machine, material and algorithmic, the project invites viewers into a speculative zone of glitchy imagination—an encounter with the opaque processes increasingly shaping contemporary visual culture.

The two bee paintings in this room emerge from an attention to systems under stress. My earliest encounters with pollinators came from childhood experiences in gardens and fields, but those memories now feel increasingly distant—like all memory, fading and decomposing over time.

Rooted in a deep love of the natural world, my work brings together curiosity about the wild outcomes of digital processes and concern about the disruptions and imbalances that mark our times. It explores the intersections of nature and technology, and how both contain memory and transformation. Each glitch is both wound and seed—an interruption that opens the possibility of renewal. As unpredictable artifacts of malfunction, revealing hidden layers within the system, glitches become a lens through which to consider ecological collapse and the fragile potential for regeneration.

Through abstract yet recognizable forms, I aim to express care for our endangered environments while also revealing their resilience and strange beauty.

mental landscape of the elucidated bop is a large-scale installation of collage, digital and physical ephemera—artifacts of artifice and reality; images that serve as vessels of memory. specifically, this piece is shrine to / visual aggregate of what is a reductive, tip-of-tongue tropic nostalgia of early aughts digital media (2010-2016).

Glitter is high–low: oil, fossils, dirty old stars refined into microplastic small enough to mimic light. Photography does this. Digital media does this. Content farming does this. Meaning recedes by reduction; moments collapse into vignettes designed to resemble illumination rather than produce it. What remains is edited, gussied, scarred, and masked—broken down to the smallest part until it’s are polished enough to be reflected upon and diminished enough to be grazed upon, as a treat.

The creators of Posthuman Cinema return with their most ambitious work yet: DREAM FACTORY, a 29-minute AI cinema artwork that transforms the screen into a stage for artificial intelligence’s first starring roles. In this work, Amerika, Luers, and Mossholder have expanded their innovative human-AI collaboration by reimagining Andy Warhol’s Factory as a digital séance-fiction, replacing the 16mm camera with the algorithmic gaze of generative systems.

The process unfolds as a live, improvisational performance—a call-and-response in which language is used to coax forth figures from the latent space, producing a new kind of “Screen Test” for subjects that never existed. Each tableau deliberately blurs the line between artifice and reality, updating Warhol’s exploration of persona for a networked, dislocated age.

DREAM FACTORY unfolds across five movements, beginning with the literal making of AI models as they imagine themselves into embodied existence and culminating in these entities becoming jaded Superstars speaking directly to viewers. The work traces a complete evolution: from foundational “apparitions” constructing their own sense of form, through hallucinatory acts of social embodiment and initial attempts at speech that emerge as Dada-esque sound poetry, finally reaching articulate self-reflection.

NON-EUCLEDIAN virus is a self-replicating digital organism, akin to a computational virus-like software. It operates based on spatial mathematics, viral propagation, and poetic prompts. This entity communicates through HTML, utilizing the concept of multiplication. Every ten seconds, the vessel replicates itself, producing offspring. Files accumulate, each capable of continuing the replication cycle, transforming the host computer’s filesystem into spreaders. With each replication, the vessel renames itself and digitally permutes from the source code. The code was generated through poetic prompting, involving lengthy discussions about the ethics of virus creationism with various public large language models. Poetic engineering.

NON-EUCLEDIAN virus is a software for machine slowdown, filling up bytes exponentially, utilizing RAM, CPU and GPU capacities. Each offspring, hoping to be open or forgotten in a download folder, eternally distributed, folded in space time.

The 3D print is a collaboration between the design and 3D printing studio ADD:OBJECTS (Arina Pozdnyak and Alina Klimenteva).

Tap your phone to access the piece or visit nev.miguelnovelo.com. Be aware that the website may prompt you to download an HTML file every 10 seconds. To stop the process, close the window. Proceed at your own risk.

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. Gertrude Bell photographed them in April 1911 before major excavations took place at Hatra. 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? This work aims to schematize this conundrum and along the way to make a modest offering to the unhinged muse of puns, may there be one.

Afterthought: in truth sonic time is a little different in concept, inasmuch as it seems to have an interior and an exterior. However, being devoid of location, it basically adds up to the same thing, except the puns would be different.

Net result: no questions answered, no problems solved; pure research. Enjoy the aporiae.

Nearest Neighbor is a sharply observed essay film by Rebecca Baron and Douglas Goodwin that examines humans, animals, and machines reaching toward one another in imperfect attempts to connect. Beginning from the seemingly modest premise of contemporary birdwatching, the film turns language acquisition and mimicry into a screwy machine-learning experiment, exploring communication between humans, birds, and artificial intelligence. Historical tools of ornithology and mechanical imitation give way to AI systems that promise not only to analyze birdsong but to converse with it, producing absurd, unsettling, and at times comic inversions in which humans struggle to learn from their own machines and speak back in alien tongues. Through deliberately playful yet rigorously staged experiments in AI-generated image and sound, Nearest Neighbor probes questions of learning, consciousness, and understanding, situating transhumanist fantasy alongside ecological precarity and mass avian extinction, and asking how far we are willing to go in outsourcing perception itself.

This installation frames twenty videos, each inspired conceptually and materially by the work of a participating artist, which the viewer can choose by dialing its designated code or “phone number.” The videos are bite-sized (or byte-sized, i.e. small enough for social media distribution as teasers for the exhibition) but oblique and not easily digestible. The spoken audio derives from extended artist statements, run through custom voice models trained on the voices of the show’s curators—rendering indeterminate and dislocating the seat of authorial and expressive agency. The visuals are produced through a variety of chance-based logics and procedural algorithms, some manual and some computational (e.g. cut-ups and collages, machine-learning driven photogrammetry, vibe-coded flocking algorithms, or glitchy and randomly chosen traversals of works). Each video draws either physically or spiritually on the artist’s work in the show but refuses to provide a clear or direct view of it.

Extra/Phenomenal PechaKucha is a recursively framed video piece based on a PechaKucha presentation about the two exhibitions of the non/phenomenal collective, NON/PHENOMENALITIES and EXTRA/PHENOMENALITIES. Outlining our curatorial, artistic, and theoretical interventions, it explores how art can register the invisible forces — algorithmic, ecological, and perceptual — that shape experience today.

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.

Much of my practice involves locating exploitable phenomena—patterns or visual attractors that behave like cultural spells, autoregressively generating their own logic and narratives. These artifacts don’t just reflect reality; they construct it. They emerge where systems—social, aesthetic, computational—have unconsciously committed to specific assumptions. When those assumptions are encoded in design language, software, or training data, their rules can be mapped and backdriven through targeted inputs. A phrase, an image, a gesture becomes a kind of linguistic exploit—a way to surface latent logic.

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 harden into authority. 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. If I ever fully know what I’m doing, I take that as a sign I’ve stopped making art.