The diagnosis came with two immediate consequences. First, getting from the acute phase into remission requires an astonishing amount of time and discipline— basically, all of the free time I have. The second implication is more difficult to accept: I will likely need medication for the rest of my life.

I've always been a remarkably healthy person. Which, I've discovered, makes for an awful patient. When three doctors independently reached the same diagnosis, my immediate reaction was: What do they know?

Then I realised: crypto collectors often react to art criticism in the same way. One of the most common responses to art writing in web3 goes something like: I don’t need an art critic to tell me what to buy.

The funny thing is that art critics generally couldn’t care less what anyone buys. They don’t manage your portfolio. Their job is to look, think, build an argument and offer a way of understanding what they see. Whether you agree is entirely your choice.

I suddenly understood those tweets I'd spent years rolling my eyes at. They came from the same place my own reaction did. I had been healthy for years; who were three doctors to tell me otherwise?

But reality does not depend on whether we like it. The diagnosis named my condition, and without my doctor, I may have spent years wondering what was going on.

There is a difference between questioning expertise and rejecting it. Criticism does not tell you what to think; it gives you something informed to think against. Someone has to make the first diagnosis.

Now that I’ve made peace with crypto collectors—and everyone else who occasionally says spectacularly misguided things about writing—and explained what was going on (thank you to everyone who wrote to check how I was doing!), let’s move on to my summer reading.

I've been reading Hito Steyerl's The Wretched of the Screen, a collection of essays including In Defense of the Poor Image and In Free Fall. One passage from A Thing Like You and Me stopped me in my tracks:

Traditionally, emancipatory practice has been tied to a desire to become a subject. Emancipation was conceived as becoming a subject of history, of representation, or of politics. To become a subject carried with it the promise of autonomy, sovereignty, agency. To be a subject was good; to be an object was bad. But, as we all know, being a subject can be tricky. The subject is always already subjected. Though the position of the subject suggests a degree of control, its reality is rather one of being subjected to power relations. Nevertheless, generations of feminists—including myself—have strived to get rid of patriarchal objectification in order to become subjects. The feminist movement, until quite recently (and for a number of reasons), worked toward claiming autonomy and full subjecthood.

But as the struggle to become a subject became mired in its own contradictions, a different possibility emerged. How about siding with the object for a change? Why not affirm it? Why not be a thing? An object without a subject? A thing among other things? “A thing that feels,” as Mario Perniola seductively phrased it.

As someone who constantly struggles to be a subject—a subject-mother, a subject-professional, a subject-political, a subject-everything else—the idea of becoming an object, an image in this case, is strangely appealing.

Images can be copied. They can exist in several places at once. They can be edited, shared, compressed and expanded. A duplicate of myself would certainly come in handy. It can also falsely portray me as successful in everything and healthy.

By coincidence, I just finished Everything Is Someone, a collection of seven short stories—their authors, Joshua Noble and Simone Rebaudengo, call them “future fables”—focused on the status of non-human subjects such as a factory, vacuum cleaners (my favourite!), and natural elements. A boy decided to become an object (has he read Steyerl?), and a mountain was elected president. It's fiction, sometimes absurd, sometimes moving, but it keeps returning to the same question: how far are we willing to extend the category of personhood?

At the same time, I'm reading Jessica den Outer's The Forest Fights Back, which follows the global movement arguing that rivers, forests and ecosystems should become legal subjects with rights of their own. I'm completely sold. I'd happily vote for the Mediterranean to become an independent legal entity and sue everyone who dumps their shit into it.

Webb Keane’s Animals, Robots, Gods approaches the line between human and non-human from the angle of moral life. “Probing the limits of the human across all sorts of circumstances, we will see that the moral problems we find there shed light on the very different—and sometimes strikingly similar—ways people have answered the question: what is a human being anyway?” Drawing on anthropological fieldwork, Keane explores this question across different cultures rather than taking the Western understanding of personhood as universal. It’s a genuinely nuanced book—refreshing in a moment when so much writing about AI and humanity is just eager to prove a point.

Write back and tell me what you’ve been reading, where you stand on the personhood of your Hoover, and what you thought of Yesteryear.

As a person who works with language, I couldn’t pass by this headline quoting Trump’s comment on the destroyed school in Iran.

In his seminal essay Politics and the English Language, George Orwell lamented the deterioration of language (if only he knew!!!) and pointed to vague, passive, or imprecise language as one of the defining features of political speech. William Strunk Jr. makes a similar observation in The Elements of Style: language is often twisted to avoid responsibility, and politicians do it more than anyone else. We’ll come back to these essays later because, frankly, we can’t rely on ChatGPT if we ever want to move away from the intersection of art and technology, and because poor writing produces poor thinking. But today I want to talk about politics, or rather about two words: resistance and resilience.

Several weeks ago, I watched The Scent Remains on NOWNESS Experiments and enjoyed it immensely. The film, by Frederik Heyman and performer Milou van Duijnhoven, presents a hybrid mourning ritual in which physical performance is set within hyperreal 3D environments.

Frederik Heyman trained as a photographer and worked in fashion before gradually moving into something much stranger: a hybrid of photography, CGI, sculpture, performance and speculative world-building.

He has said that he became frustrated with the flatness of photography and turned to 3D to build impossible environments without enormous production budgets. In one interview, he explains that, instead of using professional photogrammetry studios—where a person or object is photographed simultaneously by more than a hundred cameras—he scans his subjects with a single camera, patiently walking around them. The process is painstakingly slow and meticulous, going against the capitalist logic of speed, efficiency and scale that governs large commercial studios.

Heyman’s work often looks disturbingly real. He describes it as creating “a speculative present,” somewhere between fashion editorials, Catholic relic culture, cybernetic mythology, luxury advertising and mourning rituals. It is a strange mixture that makes Milou van Duijnhoven an unexpectedly fitting collaborator.

Milou is a Dutch-Belgian performer, dancer and actress working across Antwerp, Brussels and Amsterdam. Most traces of her practice online are connected to experimental music and performance programmes such as Fade Into You in Antwerp, where her performance Soft Sticky Stamina Song has appeared repeatedly since at least 2023.

She describes her main research interests as the line between pleasure and destruction, ambiguity, sensuality, stamina and the endurance of the body.

Which is, in many ways, very Marina Abramović. What isn’t Abramović at all is the title: Soft Sticky Stamina Song. There was nothing soft or sticky about Abramović.

The Scent Remains inherited the aesthetics of endurance from the 1960s and 1970s, yet it feels like van Duijnhoven drifts away from the heroic, almost ascetic figure of the performer. While Marina Abramović, Chris Burden and Vito Acconci focused on pain, risk, discipline/restriction, and confrontation, after 2000, and especially after 2010, a different vocabulary entered contemporary art through feminism, queer theory, disability studies, affect theory, therapy culture, somatic practices and, inevitably, social media. Suddenly, words such as “vulnerability”, “care”, “softness”, “healing”, “resilience”, “embodiment” became ubiquitous to describe performances that were messy, emotional and bodily.

This new lexicon marked a shift from conflict (resistance) to maintenance (resilience).

The heroic avant-garde artist used to put themselves at risk, attack institutions and break things. Many younger artists became interested instead in support systems and survival.

The problem, of course, is that resilience is also a deeply neoliberal word. I know perfectly well what the dictionary says. What I don’t understand is what the word has come to mean.

I know one of the word's most common uses is in the phrase "resilient to stress", which is clear enough—and certainly a useful quality in everyday life. But outside that context, I can't help wondering: resilient against what?

Political violence?

Economic precarity?

Climate collapse?

Or simply the expectation that individuals should endlessly adapt to worsening conditions?

Critics have pointed out that resilience sometimes functions as a depoliticised version of resistance. Instead of changing the system, we celebrate people’s ability to survive it.

I’m not a critic, and I’m hardly in a position to lecture anyone. I wish I were committed, brave and fair. I wish I had done more to resist the Russian government, to oppose the war in Ukraine, to speak out against corruption and abuses of power wherever they occur. But I hardly know what resistance looks like in practice. I don’t go to protests. I don’t organise campaigns. I don’t call out injustices I encounter. My politics often feels closer to conviction than to action, even though I have never compromised on the principles that matter to me. Sometimes I wish there were a blueprint for resistance. But if there were one, perhaps it wouldn’t be resistance after all.

Then Scott from Teia sent me the first issue of Voices of Iran, a zine created to support artists still living in the country.The artists remain anonymous for their own safety. As you can imagine, it is hardly summer beach reading. The texts are raw and intimate, almost like diary entries: attempts to process, and perhaps make sense of, atrocities and unbearable grief.

What struck me most was that people who had witnessed imprisonment, torture and death, who had lived through the brutal repression of the Woman, Life, Freedom protests, still found the capacity to make art, to write and—most importantly—to demand freedom. Not “freedom” as an abstract political ideal or a slogan borrowed from the West, but as something concrete, essential and worth risking everything for. As a basic human right.

The zine raises money for Iranian artists, but it also creates something just as valuable: a protected space to share experiences that are too dangerous to voice publicly. When speaking out carries real consequences, creating the conditions for others to speak becomes a political act in itself. For that alone, the Tezos art community deserves recognition.

There is something else, too. During the protests, internet access in Iran was repeatedly restricted. When your words cannot leave the country, giving those voices a way out is a reminder that someone, somewhere, is listening. It is a way of saying: we know you exist. Sometimes that matters more than we realise.

Which brings me back to Orwell, and to my own inability to topple the Russian government, patriarchy in Web3, or any of the other systems. Perhaps resistance is not simply surviving oppression, but refusing to let power dictate what you can think, imagine or hope for.

I still don’t know what resistance looks like for me. But I know that language matters. It matters when politicians say mistakes were made. It matters when exhibition texts are the same handful of phrases endlessly reshuffled. It matters when journalism becomes so timid that criticism is replaced by access, and difficult questions disappear altogether.

As I continue to wrestle with Russia, with the art world, and with my own place in both, perhaps the least I can do is insist on precision. To call things by their names. To resist euphemism. To keep writing truthfully, even when it changes very little. Now, do me a favour–read Orwell’s essay.

This month’s links:

Interview with Daria Rastunina

Interview with Ilya Bliznets

Interview with Asal Khanjani

Emi Kusano’s Office Ladies

Profile of Sümeyra Yüce

Profile of Aether Cavendish

Profile of 0009

The Scent Remains (film on Nowness)

Voices of Iran zine

I’ll give you some context. I’m a mother of two, and I struggled with several aspects of motherhood. I wrote about Danielle King’s MOTHER and an essay on online motherhood, and it helped me systematise some of my thoughts. But I felt I needed a totally different, perhaps more radical way of expressing what I was going through. That’s how I started thinking about performance.

I kept questioning whether critique on Instagram makes any sense, considering that Instagram has become a monstrous machine that digests everything — critique, anti-critique, sincerity, irony — within seconds. Worse still, it instantly commercialises all of it.

I think almost everyone, even slightly interested in digital art or internet culture, knows Amalia Ulman’s Excellences & Perfections. More than ten years ago, she performed a fictional version of herself on Instagram: a young woman trying to make it in LA while ticking every imaginable aspirational box — strict diets, cosmetic enhancement, Instagrammable restaurants, a carefully curated relationship with the right guy and roses. She even pretended to undergo breast surgery, to the sincere bewilderment of her real-life friends.

Or take Leah Schrager, who essentially performed a celebrity on Instagram (with a million dollars somewhere in the equation). Andy Kassier radiated what in Russian we call “successful success”. If not outright performance, almost everything Arvida Byström does is conceived with social media in mind as a condition of living in the 21st century.1

I initially thought about motherhood online through the same framework: identity, politics of visibility, femininity, aspiration, the performance of self. A decade ago, social media provided space to stage something as a performance, because reality and truth were still lurking somewhere in the background. In the last issue of Spike, AI Hassan Elwan reminded us that it’s been a decade since post-truth was selected as the word of the year: “Today this mode of existence has become so normalized it almost stopped inducing psychosis. If you’re still asking what is real you must be stuck in 2016. The belief that something, somewhere beneath the surface of appearances lies a stable, recoverable truth. It’s like believing in the messiah.” Not much to add, really. Welcome to the age of endless performance.

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Fun fact: my first job after relocating to Barcelona was being an Instagram influencer. I “quit” once I got my papers and a writing job and never returned to Instagram. IDK, shall I be back since I’m jobless?

A week ago, Shl0ms — an anonymous artist who could effectively be anyone — posted on Twitter asking why his “AI-generated Monet water lilies” were inferior, and everyone jumped into the debate. The irony, of course, was that the image was authentic.

At first, I dismissed the piece as one-dimensional. Fine, Monet is real, Shl0ms proved the point, I have nothing to add. (To be fair, a year ago, when I tried explaining $nothing to people, I didn’t know where to start. )

But considering that Shl0ms’ entire practice revolves around anonymity, Twitter as a tool/medium, manipulation, and market psychology, I think, in the end, it was an extremely successful social media performance — just not the kind I’m used to.

He wanted people to talk. People simply could not stop talking. (Can we stop already, please?).

What fascinated me was the speed and form of commentary: people wrote articles (!!!), then debated those articles. And almost immediately, the machinery of legitimisation kicked in, shoehorning Shl0ms into art history.

I’m not particularly political — truthfully, I’m disgustingly and irresponsibly apolitical, which is arguably irresponsible for someone with two children. (I justify myself by not having voting rights.) But recently I listened to a conversation between ContraPoints and Joshua Citarella discussing how the right managed to build enormous audiences through ruthless, edgy and often genuinely entertaining content across YouTube, Twitter and podcasts. They mastered social media as a tool, aggressively setting agendas, mocking opponents and radicalising audiences. They also discuss how right-wing ecosystems tend to protect their own through loyalty, while left-wing spaces often implode through internal critique.

Obviously, politics operates on a much larger scale than niche art scenes or subcultures. But in the aftermath of the “inferior image,” I found it fascinating that Shl0ms managed to stage a miniature version of the same dynamics single-handedly. Assuming, of course, Shl0ms is actually one person and is actually a human being.

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We no longer own discourse; discourse owns us. Some topics ignite collective obsession, others disappear without a trace, and the mechanisms behind this feel increasingly out of control. And I find this quote from their interview with Anika Meier very telling:

I would call myself an extreme power user in terms of familiarity with the product and its mechanics. I created a group chat with Twitter’s CTO and Head of Product, where I and other people give feedback, report bugs, and complain about the website. Twitter is, if not the medium itself, then the substrate for much of my artistic practice. I take it very seriously.

And since I’ve just launched my own magazine/media/whatever you choose to call it, and I’m now expected to produce weekly opinions about art, I’m unsure I even have enough opinions.

The older child just returned to school after three weeks with otitis. At the younger child’s daycare, intestinal worms were reported. This week there is a picnic. The tube on our terrace broke, and we spent two evenings mopping.

That’s my eternal problem with social media: I have (better?) things to do in real life.

And I don’t possess enough rage, self-importance or community fervour to share opinions. Sincerely, do people need to hear that I think it’s significant that Trevor Paglen will co-curate this year’s Zero.10 in Basel? The galleries that can afford to participate will participate. The galleries ideologically opposed to fairs — or simply unable to foot the bill — will not. Regardless of whether I personally think Zero.10 is important because it attempts to historicise early computer art for collectors. (The traditional art world loves legitimising things.)

Anyway, I’ll never win the speed-posting race. I won’t even compete.

I’d rather move toward some form of slow journalism — like slow food, although I find the term itself kinda ridiculous — where I write newsletters in the mailing-list style. And since I don’t have enough opinions, I’d love to publish the writings of others. Humans, preferably, not Claude — although I’m interested in experimenting with it.

I even asked Mario Klingemann to prompt me instead of Claude. He told me my approach was slightly too direct and that I could enhance my humanity a little. I explained that I’m a journalist, and unfortunately, this is how we are.

Let’s see how it goes. Plus, I’m working on those digital painting interviews for you.

My readings:
Anika Meier interviewed Shl0ms
Strange Rules in Ocula
Vice is baaaaaaaack!

I wrote about Michelle Thompson
I have an interview with Dasha Rastyunina, but I need to fix my website a bit to publish it – does anyone know how to use Tilda?

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That’s it for today. I promised gelato to a little person. I now have to deliver.

Curiously enough, both tendencies were very visible last week, with Strange Rules opening in Venice (yes, I am still your trad art girl and will continue measuring everything against biennials and art fairs), alongside the online exhibition New Bad Image on Verse, curated by sssluke.

I would argue, however, that there is a third tendency quietly gaining force (oh yes, I am already arguing with Brian).

Landies and Gentlemen, please welcome: Protocol Art

Strange Rules, on view at Palazzo Diedo until 22 November 2026, is curated by Mat Dryhurst, Holly Herndon, and Hans Ulrich Obrist with Adriana Rispoli. Timed to coincide with the Venice Biennale, it is, quite simply, major news for the digital art ecosystem.

The exhibition builds around the concept of Protocol Art: “a practice that engages with the underlying rules that dictate how culture is produced, distributed, and perceived in a digital age.” These rules take the form of algorithms, AI models, platforms, and broader technological infrastructures.

It feels like a clear attempt to contextualise—and, inevitably, legitimise—digital and blockchain-based practices within the contemporary art system. And it makes sense: code-based works, as well as AI training processes, are inherently governed by rules. Protocol Art expands beyond blockchain formalism while neatly removing the element that still makes much of the traditional art world uneasy: crypto.

It is also, unmistakably, safe. The project reads almost like a Furtherfield publication from a few years ago (which, in blockchain time, is practically archaeology)1—but more institutional recognition certainly wouldn’t hurt the participating artists.

Hans Ulrich Obrist possesses admirable energy. He mentioned conducting “more than one hundred studio visits over the past eighteen months, gathering very regularly. […] Through our research, we saw that these practices share a fundamental shift: the artwork is not merely a final object, but a process governed by instructions. In a way, it’s a décalage, a shift, from object to system.”

(So if Mario Klingemann is wondering whether he qualifies as a protocol artist, the answer is yes.)2

And the fact that even Alain Servais—a major collector of video and media art and a longtime blockchain critic—tweeted about it makes me think the exhibition will have a real impact.

Also on view in Venice: Personal Structures with works by James Bloom (UK), Fernanda D’Agostino (US) , Terry Flaxton (UK), Will Pappenheimer (US), John Sanborn (US), Nina Sobell (US), Nataša Prosenc Stearns (SI) Tamiko Thiel (DE, US), and As Above, So Below with works by Marshmallow Laser Feast, Yoko Shimizu, Antoine Bertin, Almagul Menlibayeva with Suad Gara, Andrea Crespi, Elnara Nasirli and Orkhan Mammadov.

And if you feel the urge to tell me that crypto art was never meant for palazzi—please refer to the paragraph above: I am a trad art girl. Take it up with someone else.

Oh, that was really bad

Meanwhile, New Bad Image on Verse largely features so-called avant gay artists—those producing trait-maxxed schizocollages on Solana. Brian Droitcour has already written extensively on this tendency, so I won’t attempt to summarise it here. I’ll simply leave a few links: his text on New Bad Image for Right Click Save, another for Le Random, and the original newsletter essay now published at bianjie.systems. I particularly enjoyed his article in the latest issue of Spike Art Magazine, though unfortunately, it is not online.

I would also recommend this critique by lowbie, who has closely followed the avant gay scene through his writing for exchange.art. He argues that the exhibition feels safe—that little remains genuinely unpredictable—and that, when placed within the white-cube logic of Verse, the works appear displaced from their natural habitat: the chaotic, highly customisable environments of platforms like VVV.

I won’t pretend to fully grasp the scene yet (though I am becoming increasingly interested in it), but again, the same pattern repeats: this feels like a translation. Avant gay, reframed for Ethereum. A form of mid-career survey, if you will.

And I can’t help thinking that, if these works are ever shown offline, they should not be installed in a pristine white cube. They should be shown in a barbershop in a slightly run-down neighbourhood—somewhere around MACBA in El Raval, perhaps. Or somewhere even less appropriate.

I also suspect that, just as blockchain formalism can be folded into the broader category of Protocol Art, schizocollage is only one manifestation of a wider tendency towards producing deliberately “ugly” images. Dean Kissick calls them “vulgar images”: works that reject refinement in favour of excess, awkwardness, visual density, and occasional outright stupidity (YAY!).

So what’s missing?

I mentioned a third tendency—one that seems to be quietly gaining momentum: digital painting.

I am more familiar with the Tezos scene, and what I increasingly see there is a younger generation of artists actively researching digital painting as a medium in its own right: something native to screens and pixels, rather than physical painting translated into digital form. And yes, this is hardly a new trend, but it feels like there is new energy.

Arguably, one of the most influential figures right now is RJ, whose visual language has shaped a surprising number of artists. What astonishes me is how little is actually known about him—or perhaps how little I know. One detail from his biography stayed with me: RJ studied classical literature and holds a PhD. His thesis focused on metamodernism and intercontextuality.

In March, ahead of his release on Verse, Jerry Saltz—yes, that one; I don’t think there are many Jerry Saltzes—posted RJ’s works on Instagram. As your trad art girl, I gasped. It felt like an important moment, not only for RJ but for the space more broadly, where he is both widely respected and almost synonymous with the Tezos ecosystem.

And yes, you can tell me that Saltz is losing it, and I will partially agree. Still, I think this may be one of the first instances—perhaps the first—of a major established critic publicly recognising the work of a web3-native artist.

What also interests me is that many digital painters gravitate towards similarly “challenging” aesthetics as avant gay. But instead of relying on PFP-style generative systems and algorithmic randomness, they construct these images manually. The overload, awkwardness, and deliberate “ugliness” are built by hand. The works often resemble collages, simply because so many textures, references, and visual fragments are forced into collision.

Coming back to Venice, I was very happy to see the accompart’s event. Next week, I’ll publish interviews with Dasha Rastyunina and Ilya Bliznets, and I would love to speak with another participant, Asal, whose work I deeply admire.

(Bear with me. I am not Hans Ulrich Obrist, and I have not yet conducted one hundred studio visits.)

To finish this week’s newsletter:

I enjoyed reading this article by Anika Meier and learned that the much-discussed Austrian Pavilion apparently features robotic dogs. Please send pictures.

I also wrote an article on Intervals, one of the leading media art festivals in Russia, featuring Quayola, Sasha Kojjio, and PANTERRA, because I increasingly think festivals are among the best entry points into the institutional art world for digital artists.

And finally, the queen McKenzie Wark guest-edited the latest issue of e-flux magazine. I’ll use the occasion to point you towards her now-seminal essay on digital collectables.

Subscribe, send this newsletter to your friends, collectors, curators, enemies, and anyone still convinced digital art begins and ends with apes.

And if you’d like to support this project financially, donations are very welcome:

Solana: 9ex2khSV15nE2NUQAL29JBXXDQTmpEgSUJFLBp2wgUaq

Eth: 0x09c013f760A6CD7806Ae9cFeb9EF6646DCAa26B4

TEZ: tz1UAXpPSLoUTwinJ7Zg3yAhti3sP4i6iXYe

It started as usual. I had a very hard time in college — mostly because I couldn’t sleep. That was, in fact, my first connection with the narrator. Remember “Everything is a copy of a copy of a copy”? You can’t describe the feeling of sleep deprivation any better. And just as the narrator was crumbling inside his consumerist bubble, drowning in IKEA furniture and corporate routines instead of real connections, I was crumbling too — trying to keep everything running, studying and working because my family had fallen into trouble.

The book had a profound influence on me. Either because I’m not a man, or because my survival strategy has always been to adjust rather than to fight, I read it through a capitalist lens only. I never took it as a manual for rebellion — only as a reminder that consumption doesn’t define who I am. And I actually liked the part about soap. It was the era when everything handmade and craft-like was having a revival, and I even considered making soap myself. Not from the fat of rich people, of course — gross. I also liked I Am Jack’s Inflamed Sense of Rejection. But the parts about violence, fighting, and undermining daily operations never appealed much to me. Instead of fighting the system, I was far more interested in staying untouched by it.

That’s how my relationship with Tyler — the darker side we all must embrace to become whole — started. It was not a romance; I’ve always been indifferent to Brad Pitt. My lifelong crush is Edward Norton — which I’m sure you all need to know. Another influential figure was Marla, the female counterpart to Durden in the narrator’s life, and as he falls in love with her, they take on equally important roles. Yet she’s neither a muse, nor a comrade, nor a girlfriend — she resists every role prepared for her. Every relationship, once it deepens, becomes a transaction: we give something and expect something, material or not, in return. Marla’s fucking the main hero is free of any expectation, though. She is simply there. And for a woman, the right to just be — without holding space, without performing any emotional labour — is not a small thing, my friend.

I think you need to grow up in the Third World to understand what I mean when I say “a woman should be nice.” It means being humble, quiet, agreeable, submissive, supportive — or you won’t get “a man.” Back home, you could only be “difficult” if you were breathtakingly beautiful. The rest of us had to behave.

And with Tyler, I didn’t have to be nice to be liked.

I even had my own alter ego: Tanya (my name plus T for Tyler). She was great fun for me and my friends. When I tell stories about my younger self, people are often confused — they can’t quite map those situations onto me: a very respectable-looking person who writes serious things about art and other complex topics, has children, and a job. (After two days of scaring some friends and confusing the others, I discovered that only my university friends know about me, Tyler, and my alter ego.)

Tyler and Marla were perfect for straightening one’s — in my case, my — relationship with the system. But they fell short when my problems went beyond the system. I always say there are two things you can’t prepare for: death and birth. Even if you know they’re coming.

I was watching Se7en in London on 8 November. My husband was in Berlin on business. My aunt called and said, “There is no your mother anymore.” That’s how we say it in Russian — not “she died,” but “she is not there anymore.” I called my husband, booked tickets, applied for his visa to join me in Russia, wrote to my job, went to the airport. I flew through Stockholm — I’ll never set foot in Arlanda again.

My best friends were driving that night from Moscow. We met in the morning at the police station to give testimony — as if I knew what had happened — to get permission to retrieve the body, prepare the funeral, prepare papers, go there, go here.

I didn’t realise my mother was gone until I saw her in the coffin. Then everything collapsed.

The night I got the call, something in my brain flipped a switch to protect me: it erased my memories of her. It wasn’t the first time — it had happened before, but never like this. I know what she looked like, I can describe her, but I cannot recall a single moment together — by “recall” I mean “to see.” I know what we did and where we went; I can give you the list as facts, the same way I gave it in testimony at the police station.

When that “this account is run by” trend went around on X, where people posted their childhood photos, I realised I had none. There are probably some photos of me in my twenties on a friend’s Facebook page from my university days in the US — she was an avid social media user. But here I am: a person with a part of her memory gone, and no photographs to prove she existed before 2014.

Becoming a mother without my own mother around was the hardest part — the only hard part, actually. We were happy to become parents. I felt well throughout the pregnancy, just a bit swollen. Because of that, my doctor often asked me to take blood tests — so often that the glue from the band-aids stayed on my arm permanently. I didn’t even have to go to the clinic anymore; they’d just call me with the results.

Then my doctor went on holiday, and another one called (another call that cut me open). She looked at the data and said the situation was critical. She called her colleagues for an emergency consultation. They decided to induce. I told them they didn’t understand — I WAS FINE. I felt fine. My blood pressure was normal — something I’d been asked to monitor closely. I saw no lights. I had just launched an NFT marketplace the night before. I was working, walking, shopping, doing everything as usual.

That was Thursday evening. The next days went by in routines and preparations. I called all my female friends because I didn’t know what to do. On Monday, at 35 weeks, I gave birth to my first son.

They injected everything they could: hormones to induce labour, antibiotics because there was no time for tests, vitamins to help me, anaesthetic in case a C-section became necessary. I couldn’t move because even the slightest movement would mess up the monitors. When labour finally started and the doctor arrived (they couldn’t find an available one), I was vomiting. I gave birth in five minutes — three pushes, propelled by sheer terror of the wires, the monitors, the surgeons, the thought of being cut open. It was my nolite te bastardes carborundorum (read it if you haven’t) — in the most intimate moment, marked by systemic violence over my body.

I often joke that it’s easier to explain the internet to someone who’s never used it than to explain what it’s like to have two children to someone who doesn’t. And there is absolutely no way to explain what it means to have a premature baby. I’ll never even try to explain what it feels like to be a mother who believes she failed her child before he was even born — whose body failed. I was crying on my way to intensive care, where my son stayed for five days.

So when I saw that tweet by Ana Marìa Caballero (which I can’t find now) — the one that took me back to that moment — I felt pain, desperation, and guilt all over again. And then, relief. Because there was at least one other person who had taken ten years to live through this experience and managed to turn it into art. To overcome. One person who knew.

She knew what it means to lose a parent. She wrote in El Patit Mal about how the death of her father haunted her during early motherhood. She knew the terrifying uncertainty of a child who is unwell — she was that woman running to the hospital with her son, not knowing what exactly was wrong. She knew exactly what I felt. And I knew what she did. Except I don’t know any witch doctors in Colombia. The witch doctors I knew in Russia aren’t there anymore (which, in case you’ve forgotten, means dead).

And then I saw Pace.

If I had to choose a female protagonist who lives openly outside the system, it would be the girl in Ever Is Over All — Pipilotti Rist’s iconic woman in a blue dress and red heels, ecstatically smashing car windows with a flower, while a policewoman cheers her on with matching joy and approval.

I suspect not everyone knows the story behind Rist’s work. She created it after a moment of intense anger towards her male editor, who had forced her to change her piece. She remembers a vivid image of herself smashing his car — and instead of doing it, she made a video. In interviews, she often speaks about how meaningful it was to take a destructive impulse and turn it into a creative one.

So yes, the work that many read as a celebration of female rage — elevated by the protagonist’s graceful, natural performance — was, in fact, about transforming rage into something productive. Because the first thing that rage destroys is ourselves.

Caballero builds upon Rist’s work. Her projects Echo Graph and Ropa Sucia became ways of processing grief — of facing both the loss of a parent and the sense of having failed one’s own child. In Ropa Sucia, she literally hangs dirty laundry out to dry (the paper on which the poems are printed was handmade from the artist’s old sheets). Pace is her recovery and celebration.

If you haven’t seen the video, please do. In it, Caballero walks through AI-recreated Madrid’s Calle del Barquillo in red shoes, moving to the rhythm of salsa, surrounded by the shards of broken car windows. Cheerfully undoing the damage, she shows that piecing ourselves back together can begin with something as radical as joy. And please, my friends, do not underestimate how rebellious that is in the age of candy-land niceness — or how difficult.

What I love about her work is its deceptive simplicity — how honest and profound it truly is. And how, to me, this woman, this artist, this mother of two, became my personal witch doctor. Art has done many things for me, but for the first time, it helped me heal.

I especially love her reference to dance. In Western culture, without the strong social dance traditions found in South America, dance has largely been shaped for the male gaze — framed as spectacle for others rather than experience for oneself. Caballero reclaims it, speaking of salsa as her personal form of resilience. I remember seeing people in Spain dance in protest — an act whose lasting impact felt far stronger than the fury of a typical demonstration. Rage has become the background noise of our lives, sustained by social media and news cycles, so much so that it’s become mundane. To dance simply for joy in a public space becomes, in this light, a quietly radical act of resistance.

I recently saw a similar joy in dance and togetherness in Yatreda’s work — which I won’t describe here for fear of never ending this text— so I’ll leave you a link to the article I wrote instead.

And where does that leave me — someone whose longest relationship is with Tyler Durden, a man I don’t even love, but who somehow makes me love myself when we’re together? Someone who never did fully overcome — and probably never will — her mother’s death?

I wish I were an artist. I wish, like Caballero, I could process loss and grief through the art I create. But instead, I wrote this very long text — in quite an agony — because it’s hard to be personal, hard to be honest, hard to hang your dirty linens out. Yet even though I can’t make art, it is there for me.

What art can do is transmit a kind of knowledge that is usually shaped by emotion and experience. To teach maths, you use special symbols to write formulas. You can’t express emotions with those. That’s where art comes in.

Caballero once told how an elderly man bought an edition from Echo Graph because, years earlier, he hadn’t listened to what the doctors told him, and that was why he was still alive. That is the power of art: my story and hers are both stories of giving birth ahead of time, yet they translate universally, across experience and gender.

And that’s why I never understood the “digital art has no aura” argument. I think it’s generally agreed in art criticism that great art is not a closed system — it’s a dialogue. It speaks to you and makes you reconsider what you thought you knew — what people like to call a paradigm shift. It either touches you or it doesn’t.

A book once did that for me — and then another. When I saw Three to Max by Ohad Naharin, I was speechless for days. I simply couldn’t believe such a thing could exist. I always say it changed my life (this is the part where people usually roll their eyes). And I cried for weeks when Lilyillo released her DATA/SOIL series, because I knew she was right — the garden will bloom long after the gardener is gone. (I’m finishing this in a café, and I’m crying, and it’s getting embarrassing.)

I asked Dario what he saw in Durden, and he said: “For me, the act of our mutual friend Tyler represents a parodic and anarchic version of the hidden persuaders: instead of manipulating to sell, he manipulates out of provocation — perhaps to awaken awareness, through a perceptual shock, of the continuous deception operated by the images.”

And it made me think that there are many ways not to let the bastards grind you down.

Neither of my grandparents was a member of the Communist Party — an unthinkable thing in the Soviet Union. My grandfather refused on ideological grounds, and it cost him at times. My grandmother simply didn’t want to pay the membership fees, so each time they invited her to join, she said she wasn’t mature enough. (She was ravishingly beautiful, which I assume helped.) So there are ways and ways to stay outside a system that will always try to fit you into a box.

After all these years, we’re breaking up with Tyler. Because Tanya — the crazy alter ego everyone loved, not despite her lack of niceness but because of it — isn’t an alter ego at all. She’s just me. And not even a darker side — just my normal one.

I’m roofless, as my mother used to say. I’m hilarious. I’ll send GIFs of cats with laser eyes to my Chinese friends during an important work meeting. I’ll get into all sorts of dubious adventures — and still be a good writer, a good mother, a good friend. And somehow, I’ve arrived here — realising that what truly matters to me is to find happiness, and to dance my way towards it, through art.

And now I’m going to get myself those heels I need for work.

Surrealism emerged just over a century ago, in the aftermath of the First World War, when many blamed rationalism for the devastation that had unfolded. Around the same time, Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis introduced the notion that beneath reason lies a powerful subconscious realm, governed by desire, repression, and irrational impulse.

Drawing on Freud’s ideas, a group of artists and thinkers began to question the supremacy of reason. They argued, in essence: look where rationality has brought us—it’s a terrible place. Instead of logic and order, they turned their attention to the irrational, the subconscious, and the world of dreams. There was method to their madness: to reach the mind’s darker, ungoverned spaces, they practised free assosiation and automatism—a way of creating without conscious control, allowing the subconscious to dictate form and meaning. Politically, the Surrealists were connected with Communists and Anarchists.

The movement was formally established in 1924, when Breton published the Surrealist Manifesto. This was a time of profound upheaval, as revolutions, civil wars, and other seismic events reshaped Europe. Empires collapsed. The dreams of that period were, in truth, nightmares. Out of these nightmares emerged the now-familiar Surrealist iconography: distorted bodies, improbable juxtapositions, impossible perspectives—images deliberately unnatural, designed to provoke, often with some unsettling undertone.

This overreliance on visual contradiction played a cruel joke: once the initial shock wore off, the viewer was left with an easily reproducible, decorative imagery that quickly slipped into kitsch. Later, as the movement’s psychological and political depth was forgotten, only its surface endured—dreamlike, irrational, vaguely erotic, yet stripped of context. It is far more difficult to shock a twenty-first-century viewer, oversaturated by images and visual noise, and so Surrealism gradually lost its zeal.

Though I should be fair to Dalí—Warhol thought we’d each get fifteen minutes of fame; Dalí predicted we’d drown in absurd, indigestible nonsense, for far longer than that.

Surrealism 2.0: many happy returns

A century later, Surrealism has re-emerged (oh shit). Historically, this revival owes much to Cecilia Alemani’s Venice Biennale The Milk of Dreams—a title borrowed from Leonora Carrington’s book—which revisited the movement through a feminist lens. At the same time, artificial intelligence’s inability to render the human body correctly echoed the visual language of early Surrealism.

However, there is another, deeper reason for this comeback. A century later, the world is once again marked by instability, fear, and moral exhaustion. The number of catastrophic events may be smaller, yet our awareness of them is constant and inescapable. We can watch, in real time, the bombardment of cities, the suffering of civilians, and the political hypocrisy that sustains wars. It is difficult to remain sane when you realise your taxes finance the weapons that perpetuate conflicts you wish did not exist—and there is barely anything you can do about it. These are the same conditions under which Surrealism first emerged: when reality becomes unbearable, and when humanity—having believed that progress and reason had secured stability—faces its own disillusionment. When the mind can no longer bear reality, it seeks refuge.

From my own experience, many artists and viewers have turned to Surrealism once again. Yet the term is now used so loosely that it has almost lost its meaning: anything that departs from realism — an imaginary landscape, a dreamlike scene, a place that doesn’t exist — gets labelled “surreal.”

But Surrealism, as I’ve said before, was never just about unreality. It was a political and social movement: Surrealists wanted to change the world, not simply paint elephants on mosquito legs. It had a method for creating from the subconscious, and it developed a distinct visual and psychological vocabulary. It looked insane, but this insanity was pragmatically calculated. Today, when artists call their worlds “surreal,” what they usually mean is “invented.” (Indulge the generalisation: there are artists whose practice—at least visually—can be considered Surrealist, and others who analyse their dreams and pursue a coherent inquiry into the subconscious, but describing trends requires some degree of simplification.)

This contemporary “Surrealism” is safe. It is escapism stripped of intensity, of danger, of visual shock—and again, when reality is so unbearable, who can blame artists for wanting to retreat into a peaceful universe? But whether “true” or “false,” I’d argue that the staged theatricality of Surrealism is no longer the right visual language to express the confusion and disillusionment of the twenty-first century. Randomness is.

Surrealism 3.0: but can we just call it gay?

And this is where avant gay or schizocollage enters the picture. I use these terms because they are already established within the digital art community, though, like many people I’ve spoken with, I’m not entirely comfortable with them. Still, I have argued before that this visual language represents the proper iconography of our time — and I will explain why.

These chaotic, layered compositions come from the same mental state as the original surrealists — a mind overwhelmed by trauma — but the trauma now is informational. We are bombarded with news, images, and stimuli every second. The scale of suffering that reaches us is unbearable. The mind cannot process it. To protect itself, it distorts, abstracts, and blocks.1 And beyond being unbearable, it just doesn’t make any sense – why all this cruelty?

To me, avant gay is the visual form that emerges from this condition and embodies both external chaos and mental confusion: randomly arranged, overlapping layers; visual overload; pop imagery; geek references; and a deliberate rejection of aesthetic refinement. Improbable juxtapositions are no longer staged—they occur through PFP-style trait generation, by chance, somewhat tweaking the role of the artist. Adrian Pocobelli, in his latest Artistic Journal, described avant gay as having “challenging aesthetics,” which captures it precisely. The same resistance to polish extends beyond maximalist collages that are associated with Solana and VVV: many artists on Tezos consciously turn toward the chaotic, the abrasive, the visually dense—or, conversely, the childlike and deceptively simple.

For me, to qualify as Surrealism 3.0, a work must deliberately fall outside conventional aesthetics—because it can be an overloaded collage and still remain harmonious—and make the viewer stumble over its apparent nonsense. It should function almost as shock therapy, forcing a pause, a question: What is happening here? Why is it so complex/so simple/so ugly/so naive? That moment of confusion—that what the fuck reaction—is precisely where its power lies.

These works mirror our fractured, overloaded, perpetually online psyche, contradictions that define our time, and our inability to make sense of what we see. They lack pretence, and that frankness is refreshing in contrast to the lulling escapism and ethereal beauty of so many other works piggybacking on the resurging popularity of Surrealism. (I also prefer them visually).

Whether this constitutes a movement is an open question, but challenging aesthetics may well be the defining language of our era. Can a movement be defined purely by its rejection of aesthetic harmony? Maybe yes, maybe no — but probably yes; there are precedents. Bad Painting deliberately rejected polish, technical virtuosity, and aesthetic hierarchy, proclaiming its disdain for prevailing styles and its resistance to commodified “good taste.” The artists (Neil Jenney, William Copley, Joan Brown, among others) weren’t painting badly out of lack of skill — they were painting “badly on purpose,” exposing the absurdity of art-world decorum. The parallel with avant gay and “new challenging” is clear — even if we still don’t quite know what to call them.

I’ll end this essay abruptly — my son got sick, and I won’t be back to writing for a few days. I’d rather wrap it up today and continue in Part 2, where I’ll look more closely at avant gay and the “new challenging” artists emerging across Solana and Tezos. In the meantime, I’d love to hear your thoughts — what should we call them?

I recall asking ChatGPT about six months ago to generate an image of a 35-year-old mother of two young children. What appeared was a cartoonish depiction of a teenager-looking blonde, rail-thin, but with a prominent bosom, immaculate in dress and make-up, radiating manic cheer. It is easy to point fingers at the technology, but the bias pre-exists the algorithm. It reflects a prescription of what a “mother” should be—accomplished, moisturised, blissful, slim, preferably white, ideally blonde—and, just as insistently, what a mother must not be: tired, lonely, emotionally complex, anything but gleeful. The AI regurgitates what Instagram feeds, lifestyle blogs, stock imagery, and visual culture at large have already decided to be a default: motherhood as polished, happy, stripped of depth and complexity.

This default aligns with the new, algorithm-enforced beauty standards of social media validation loop, deep fakes and biased AI models. The algorithm decides who is worthy to grace our suggested feeds, and who is to be fenced off—quarantined like in times of plague. And yet, on Instagram, I do see different women, however limited their representation may be. Mothers remain fixed in a narrow frame. When I tried again more recently, the prompt returned a 35-year-old mother whose face bore wrinkles, whose body carried more truth. Yet emotional nuance still slipped away: she smiled blankly while posing, hoovering, washing dishes. When asked to visualise “mother’s guilt,” the algorithm resorted to a cartoon. Guilt was permitted to be mentioned only in text under the picture, never to stain the glossy surface of the motherhood image. In this visual economy, the mother herself disappears, replaced by a pristine stand-in.

It is precisely this absence of accurate representation that makes King’s project so jarring. A year in the making, her series insists on corporeality. Pain and discomfort press against the viewer, leaving us claustrophobic, desperate to step outside for air. That breath is what every mother craves: the recognition that struggle is part of the experience, that there is no permanent escape, sometimes not even a short break. This is your life now. King’s images convey how motherhood feels—its darker registers as well as its tenderness. The stitches after a C-section ache, while the newborn demands strength. Exhaustion is relentless. Loneliness is profound. And when culture insists that the child’s future rests mostly on the mother, the bond itself is warped by fear and guilt.

The poet Ana Maria Caballero has reflected on her first C-section more than a decade later, acknowledging the guilt that lingered long after her body healed. The sense of failure—of betrayal by one’s own flesh—remains, intertwining with new guilts accumulated over the years. King’s work refuses to allow such experiences to be airbrushed away. It restores to motherhood its scars, its suffocation, and, in doing so, its presence.

MOTHER was released on verse.works on 23 September.

I gave him life. It is quite a lot to give. It is the opposite of nothing. And the opposite of nothing is not something. It is everything.

The Mars Room. Rachel Kushner

Early 2000s: mommy blogger

Around two years ago, just after my second son was born, I watched a talk by Washington Post reporter Taylor Lorenz about her book Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet. I’ve linked the recording here. Lorenz argues that the first content creators who shaped today’s influencer economy were mothers. In the early 2000s, a generation of mothers turned to the internet for information, support, and community (motherhood is a lonely business when all your friends are single and working 9 to 6).

What they discovered was a glaring knowledge gap. Nearly everything written about pregnancy and raising children came from men. In a small but revolutionary act, mothers began documenting their daily experiences in blogs. Immediately, they were called narcissists and accused of profiting from their children.

Maternity Ward by Danielle King, which I shamelessly right-click-saved from verse. If the owner prefers, I’ll take it down

Discussing publicly what had traditionally been left behind closed doors — postpartum depression, difficulties with breastfeeding, drinking wine during playtime, hating their husbands — was considered shocking, even distasteful. And let me remind you: this was 2003, not 1903. What is now a common part of online discourse was then almost unthinkable.

Still, that small group of mothers persevered and built a remarkable readership. It was the first real case of women speaking directly to women. Then one blogger announced she couldn’t keep up with childcare, paid work, and writing, so she decided to make the blog her job and ran ads. Predictably, all hell broke loose. (Needless to say, men had been running ads on their tech blogs for years.) She dared to profit from motherhood! Motherhood was supposed to be free, unpaid, unrecognised.

Gradually, she became the family’s main breadwinner (even more indecent), then her husband stepped down from his job to help run the blog (downright shocking — forgive me for unloading all this indecency on you, dear friend). She went on to be the first to introduce sponsored content and product placements, laying the groundwork for the monetisation tools that are now second nature.

Up to this point, I’ve leaned on Lorenz’s research into the origins of content creation and the influencer economy. What follows is based on my own first-hand experience and anecdotal evidence — and I’d love to hear yours too.

Instagram & AI: mommy blogger gets blond, blissful and moisturised

Fast forward to the rise of Instagram and the modern creator. Content shifted from text to image, from reading to looking, with a growing bias toward video. Suddenly, the algorithm no longer rewarded what was best researched or honestly written, but what was most pleasing, beautiful, or funny. The raw, candid mother was replaced by a blonde, slim, hyper-energetic and manically cheerful figure who dispensed endless advice — advice that almost always boiled down to what to buy to fix your motherhood “problems.” (Which, I suspect, are your un-Instagrammable house, child, husband, or self.)

Fast forward again, and we enter the AI era. AI trained on images of cheerful mothers from social media, lifestyle blogs where everything is cosy and hygge, advertisements and deepfakes. Six months ago, ChatGPT wasn’t able to generate a realistic depiction of a 35-year-old woman with two children. Now it can. However, the results are still hollow: the mother is always smiling, even while washing dishes or hovering. (My toddler would first throw all the clean dishes on the floor and then happily dive into the sink.)

That glossy vision leaves no space for anything messy, tired, or ambivalent. And because variation is absent, the “deviant” mothers — that is, anyone who didn’t miraculously return to pre-pregnancy weight within a week — are erased altogether. The ideal is now the norm. Motherhood, one of the most beautiful, complex and meaningful phases in life, is flattened and packed into lists of what to buy, what to say to your child, what never to say, what not to do (and there’s a lot of not to do). Social media leaves a profound sense that attempting to be a good mother is a losing game.

An Instagram feed of a “good mother” as per ChatGPT (based on my existing Instagram account). Child is the ultimate prop.

You could argue that the solution is simple—avoid Instagram; it’s not essential. The thing is, it is. When you become a parent, your social world contracts: you see your friends only on weekends, if the baby allows, and loneliness creeps in. Sometimes you scroll in search of company, sometimes for advice—and that’s when the endless lists appear and consume you.

When mommy blogger is an artist

So if the algorithm of social media and AI flattens everything into a single standard, there must be human input to counterbalance it. What, then, is the realistic way to grapple with the mythology of motherhood in art?

Mia Forrest. Image taken from the Australian Photography Award website

One of the strongest counter-voices came from female photographers. A group of Australian artists documented how the world shrinks once you become a mother: the gaze moves inward to you, your child, and the immediate surroundings. Small things instead become monumental. They weren’t staging the extraordinary; instead, they focused on the mundane. As trained photographers, sensitive to light, composition, and colour, they presented the routine, messiness and haziness of the first months of motherhood in a beautiful, but honest way. Reviewing their works, I feel validated and understood, I feel seen and present. However, the reception was anything but warm. Mia Forrest (known for her flower works) wrote that she was censored and threatened for posting maternal images, eventually deactivating her Instagram account. Another photographer, Amy Woodward, privatised her Twitter, and Lily Callisto stopped posting altogether. Any mother would say that nothing these photographers capture goes beyond what we encounter every day (apart from the goat—Betty is a bit cringe).

Writer, literary artist, and mother of two, Ana María Caballero, is rightly praised for her revolutionary approach to poetry and for bringing it back to a wider audience, but not nearly praised enough for the subject of her work. The blurb for her forthcoming book captures precisely what makes her writing so profoundly resonant for mothers–her poetry was a tremendous support to me:

Ana María Caballero’s Material twists between the biological and social spaces women inhabit, and raises a feminist paradox–the demand to be present in multiple spaces–in one body. These poems are corpus both in bleeding body and art-making: “the world of the body and the world of the mind brought together on page.” Mother, poet, friend, lover, and wife vie for energy after the exhaustion of each role’s attending labors. Public ceremonies and committees fade to private fears and grief while Caballero holds a steady mirror. Formally evocative, with language that sears and sculpts, Material is a splendid testimony of poetry’s ability to occupy love and grief, self and other, artist and art.

The simple way Caballero presents feelings as facts can seem almost cruel. Not because she is cruel — she is as much a victim of the system as any of us — but because she has retained the clarity of mind to expose the unspoken pressures placed on mothers. When laid out so plainly before you, they are almost shocking. For example, she describes soothing a child who has hurt himself while her mind drifts to the meagre prospects of returning to meaningful work and the zero economic value we assign to raising children:

THE OPEN DISHWASHER

Today, you fell face first into the open dishwasher

One plastic prong bruised your nose
Another gave you your first black eye

I rushed to cradle you
And sing your falling down song

Then I took you outside to show you
The birds, the lizards
The cloudless blue sky
And the moon, your moon, visible today at noon

The moon made you calm
Luna, luna you said
And pointed up
At the cloudless blue sky

I sat you down close to me
Ready to hold you
If you still needed my arms

But you looked at the white powder moon
At a lizard that dashed from the bush
And at crests of neat waves rise from the pool

After a moment, you sighed
Your first veteran sigh

Just yesterday
I checked the classifieds
For work I might be paid to complete

I do this sometimes
To confirm I remain hireable
And am more than some lullaby mother

Who sits with her child
To be soothed by the moon

MOTHER by Danielle King, which I shamelessly right-click-saved from verse. If the owner prefers, I’ll take it down

Among the artists working with AI, Danielle King jolted the algorithm by feeding it photographs of her own body—marked with stretch marks and scars. In return, AI produced images that, at times, resembled torture, but at other times grasped what motherhood is made of (I wrote an essay about Mother, the latest series by King).

In a different register, Lilyillo uses AI to foreground deep attachment and tenderness — dimensions that were equally swept away in Instagram’s purges of maternal imagery. I love how her mothers feel complete, as if there is nothing to add — they carry the entire world within them (and for their children, they truly do). These women are accomplished; unlike their neurotic Instagram counterparts, they are not one-dimensional. They embody the complexity of someone who has not been reduced but remains whole: a person, a mother, a professional, a friend, a wife, a daughter.

Noortje Stortelder, body cast

I’m also closely following Noortje Stortelder, a digital artist and sculptor. During pregnancy, she cast her changing body (and the body, my friends, doesn’t lie) and kept Pregnancy Archive — a visual diary that began as a private document. Now, it helps her return through time, reliving transformation, pain, uncertainty, love, and frustration that form basis for her project on pregnancy.

Two months ago, I began researching motherhood in preparation for an exhibition proposal to Load, a gallery I collaborate with. I was struck by how few artists systematically explore the subject, and then the proposal was declined. If there is an opportunity to curate a motherhood show in your space, I would welcome it.

As 0009 explains, he has always been fascinated by fabric and the way it can signal status, reflect culture, or even decorate someone’s personality:

“I am especially drawn to nylon, the material that made up The North Face Steep Tech jackets. In the ’90s, these technical mountaineering pieces became the uniform of NYC graffiti writers, and at the same time I was deeply influenced by that culture as a writer in LA.”

Patterns and textures of fabric have appeared in many of his recent series, but nowhere did they become as central as in Synthetic Bloom. The series explores the familiar dichotomy of urban versus natural by creating landscapes out of garments. From afar, the works read akin to impressionistic paintings; up close, they reveal themselves as an assemblage of clothes and human figures, forming flowers and vegetation.

You may have seen my Tweet about the series:

What Chris did is dear to my heart: taking something considered “low” — something the art world might look down on, like sportswear or urban culture — and elevating it into a complex, layered, and refined image. It’s a milestone in how digital art can allude to painting without being one, and without blindly copying one.
The way I see it: the volume, the brushstrokes building up layers of paint, the overall impression — and yet, at the same time, I’m fully aware of what the image actually is. A patchwork of synthetic fabric, something we see so often we barely consider it at all.
That, my frens, is a masterwork.

It is a commentary on our longing for nature, which 0009 himself faced despite his deep fascination with city life. On a deeper level, it reflects how ‘constructed’ and man-made the nature we encounter in urban landscapes truly is, shoehorned in patches of land to make way for roads and buildings.

Worn Currents uses the same technique to a very different effect. If Synthetic Bloom looked outward, offering wide and busy landscapes, Worn Currents turns inward. Instead of broad vistas, we are given close-ups where details dominate: logos, zips, hoods, recognisable parts of garments that act as metaphors for shedding old skin. Paired with water, a symbol of flux and transformation, the works become a poetic commentary on how identity shifts over time—sometimes gradually, like ripples across a water’s surface, and sometimes suddenly. In one image, a human figure is carried away, an old self destined to vanish as its owner is reborn.

For 0009, a worn textile is a carrier of lived experience:

My fascination with the idea of Fabric Logic comes from this sense of being worn. It’s like having a favourite piece of clothing you’ve carried through the years, something that absorbs memory and resonates with lived energy. For me, it was a jacket I wore all through high school. It fit perfectly, and every crease in it carried moments of my life. The same goes for the belt I have worn since my early twenties, a single piece of leather that has travelled with me through decades. To me, worn is more than fabric. It is a collection of memory, time, and presence.

As garments, logos, and details become more visible, and the folds of fabric take on a fuller, more sculptural volume, the series carries a “heavier” impact of corporality and presence. Seams and textures normally overlooked function as a nod to the inner workings beneath the surface. Like confidences shared only with those closest to us, these details expose a more private, vulnerable dimension of the work. To better define the movements of water, 0009 introduces contour lines to his Impressionism-inspired synthetic model, along with references to Nihonga painting. In doing so, he shifted the works from the urban realm toward a more subtle, intimate revelation of inner transformation.

Worn Currents was released on verse.works on 23 September.

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