A Spell is a body of work the computer found in my own record and named, not one I set out to make.
How a Spell forms
Surveil Thyself compares my days and gathers the ones that keep circling the same subject. When a group holds together for five mornings in a row, with at least five days in it, it becomes a Spell. The computer names it from whatever sets that group apart from the others, so the names come out specific instead of generic. I do not choose the subject, I do not write the name, and I do not approve the result.
Thirteen Spells have formed. They fall under four patterns:
- The UnreadAddress with no reader: signs, marks and messages sent out to nobody.
- The Substituted SelfThe face as a removable thing: set down, worn, screened, or rendered.
- Governed PassageObedience mistaken for rhythm: the pause before you are allowed to move.
- The Machine Re-StagesThe AI redraws my own life and hands it back to me.
What a Spell makes
Each Spell gets its own glyph signature, which doubles as a recipe: read left to right, each glyph is one step in making a painting. Each one also trains its own small image model, a StyleGAN, on its own pictures and nothing else. I pull frames from early in that training, before the model can hold a picture together. That is the part I want. Collage, screen print and oil take it off the screen.
Diagrams Nobody Read
The one Spell I made by hand, in May 2026, out of 229 images. A diagram nobody read is a mark that carries real information and reaches no reader. An arrow pointing at a door that no longer opens.
Addressed to No One
I picked 70 of this Spell's pictures. The computer cuts them up and packs them into collages, and those collages are the plans for large-scale screen print paintings with sections in oil. Four are drawn up and not painted yet.
Where everything goes
- One dayMy tracked day, a profile, CAST's reading. It becomes posters, collages and ModelScope videos. Most days end there.
- Days that repeatA Spell. Its own image model, then collages, then screen print and oil paintings.
- A news storyCAST, then the Unself Oracle, then a video on TikTok with a caption you can read here. The Oracle is a separate track: it starts from the news, not from my data.