NON/PHENOMENALITIES

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.

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.

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 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.”

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.