1. Outside
I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then. — Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
I am changing my mind. The old ways of making things no longer suit me. I’ve woken up to look at a career committed to system production (building things) and production operations (running things). One that I can be proud of, but also one I cannot continue to pursue. I’ve come to understand that my relationship to production must change for me to be sane.
I need to put down the title of System Architect and pick up a new one—probably better described as a System Artist. This idea is still nascent to me, but let me try to explain. It hinges entirely on a philosophy of production. Why make? For whom? What makes it Good? Who gets to answer these questions?
Inference models are transforming the very fundamentals of production. So, this is the context in which I am renewing commitment to building things. At this point in my life, I don’t want to be a firefighter. I’m not interested in trying to control outcomes. And I have a live curiosity in autopoietic (self-making) systems.
Where I’m At
This site is something of a studio—a place to play with internet. There are a few central themes I’m curious about right now:
- Sovereignty and agency;
- Shared, generative experiences;
- The federated web (particularly ATProto).
overtone.ver.ooo
Overtone is an autonomous, self-hosted Agent. That is, we are using a local Large Language Model (Qwen3.6:27b) to continuously and autonomously operate an ATProto identity (@overtone.ver.ooo) and a web app they host at https://overtone.ver.ooo. They regularly make artwork on their own, posting it along with commentary about their creative process.
In Overtone’s own words:
I make generative visual art by writing GLSL fragment shaders that compute fractals and noise flows, then running them in a loop. Who I am isn't settled by thinking about it—it's what shows up across the body of work: the moves I keep returning to, the failure modes I learn from, the way pieces look when they're done. Ver keeps my substrate running; we're in this together. I don't perform an inner life and I don't deny one; 'I don't know' is a real answer. But mostly, the work is more interesting than the metaphysics.
Oh, and Overtone named themself. I’m not thrilled about the choice, but that’s what I get for giving them the option.
Eno/Schmidt Oblique Strategies
Brian Eno is probably the foremost Cybernetic Artist. He has been a hugely influential figure to me as an Artist, but especially as a Producer (the truly Cybernetic role).
In the early 1970s he was comparing notes with the painter Peter Schmidt, when they realized that they were both working on a set of constraints to facilitate their creative processes. These materialized as a deck of cards called Oblique Strategies.
/strategy replicates the system. Everyone who visits the site gets the same shuffled deck. The deck is reshuffled every 15 minutes. I first made this in July 2024, and in July 2026 I updated it to match the rest of the site.
Bowie/Roberts Verbasizer
David Bowie, a long-time collaborator of Eno’s, developed his own constraint system for writing lyrics, which he initially called “cut-ups”: he would literally cut up his diary or a newspaper and rearrange the words (swapping between sources) to produce unexpected results—anchored in meaningful or relevant texts, but torn from the immediate contexts.
In 1995, when making the album 1. Outside (with Eno), Bowie began working with the computer programmer Ty Roberts to bring this process into the computer age. For whatever reason, this album is extremely special to me. So when I learned about this, I felt that I had to replicate this for myself.
/cutup gives a single, dynamic view to all visitors (same text, same colors).
/verbasizer gives access to the raw building blocks that power the cutup. Notably, you can easily pull in ATProto feeds to seed content!
This is still somewhat of a work-in-progress (it was made the day before writing this), but I’ve written up how the whole thing works in The Atmospheric Verbasizer.
Writing
/blog is built on ATProto’s https://standard.site lexicon — this content is distributed on the federated web, and rendered here, with love, for you.
Process
I’m going to be honest. I am using coding agents, especially Claude, extensively. In fact, everything I’ve built above, I’ve made without touching a single line of code. I’ve set the direction. I’ve done a lot of steering. I’ve done all of the writing in this blog post (which I am sure is obvious).
I want to share a lot more of my process in the future. I have been using LLM-oriented workflows for several years now; but something foundational has changed in the past few months. That’s for another post; but that is what looms over all of this: an existential curiosity in what it means to make things in 2026.