In conversation I sometimes joke that I’ve finally entered my verbal phase of development. Whereas my creative efforts in the past have been directed towards (wordless) music and ceramics, the impetus for this inaugural newsletter is to announce three recent pieces of writing (not including this newsletter itself).

I’m still sorting out what writing means to me, but that said, I do know that I resist Vilém Flusser’s claim that the written word is a linear medium. I frequently have the following experience: within the first ½ second of encountering a block of text, I already know if it contains a specific word of interest before I’ve “read” anything; and then it is when I linearly scan the text that I confirm its exact location within the text. You might associate this phenomenon to the larger practice of speed reading (which I cannot do).

In the context of writing, the operational modality of contemporary LLMs gestures towards this in another way. Token generation is linear, but works within an n-dimensional latent space of possible token generations.

My mental model of contemporary culture tends to fall back into a fundamental hypothesis about the DJ as archetypal figure, one that simultaneously assembles an audience and creates a socio-cultural context. The USB stick they arrive with is the latent space from which linear temporality is structured just-in-time.

In the larger context of the creator economy, the more successfully you refine your latent space, the more you subject yourself to audience capture. The perennial adage “you are what you eat” involves a reciprocal axiom: you eat what you are.

Somewhere within this ouroboros of corpus and hallucination, writing, like all non-linear media, may be a strategy for enacting the autophagic ritual of delimiting latent space.

News

Every year gets shorter the older I get. But each winter stays the same, which means each year is proportionally more winter than the last. This last winter I listened to Jessica Pratt’s Here in the Pitch almost every day, but to my ears, nothing screams transition to spring louder than Khan Jamal’s Infinity; aside from the peeping of frogs, of course.

Quiet Time - My essay on background music and environmental attention has been published online by Are.na Editorial as part of the Naive Yearly series.

Airs - A collection of poems accompanied by recordings of the wind has been published in the Spring 2025 issue of The HTML Review. I’ve also written a bit more background on this project here.

Surface Tension - My essay on the aesthetic experience of surfaces was published in the 2025 Are.na Annual which is available for purchase and you can download a PDF of my essay individually here.

And to return to my original impetus for starting this newsletter, I’ve added a few more items to my online ceramics shop. I’m finally getting back in the ceramics studio, so stay tuned for a bigger shop update later this year.