#deafartist

signal // NOISE — cassette test run (x20)

Delivery this morning: the first physical batch of signal // NOISE cassettes arrived — and they feel like the album finally has a body.

Black/white sandwich shells: Side A = white (signal) / Side B = black (noise). Same tape, two readings. Flip it and the system reconfigures.

What I love about this run is how the concept isn’t printed on afterwards — it’s baked into the object language:

On-body printing (terminal typography, dashed boxes, tiny system labels)

“DIGITAL LEFT << / ANALOGUE RIGHT >>” mapped onto the cassette itself

Track titles as data artifacts (0x… strings, misreads, caption faults, drift notes)

A blunt strapline hiding in plain sight: Input ≠ Comprehension

A typed “ABOUT THIS ALBUM” insert that finally says the quiet part out loud: visual-first listening, one ear gone digital (CI), one ear staying analogue (HA), captions arriving late — AI + field recordings used as prosthetics, not replacements.

Inktober2018 day 9, Precious.

It wasn't easy working on this inktober when it's too hot here. Dx

📡 New Post: The Interpreter Manual (v1.0) A processzine.org publication

“This machine misunderstands fluently.”

The Interpreter Manual (v1.0) is now in motion — a technical and philosophical field guide for Ezra, the glitch-lab terminal at the heart of the Process Zine project.

The manual (A5 landscape, dot-matrix and thermal friendly, printed in-house) will document, decode, and dissect every element on the Interpreter rig — from the flickering CRTs and oscilloscopes to the thermal fax, LED caption strip, dot matrix printer, and demand unit beacon.

What began as a makeshift AV cart has become something more: 📼 a deaf interface 💬 a subtitle machine ⚠️ a delay simulator 🧠 a metaphor for neuroplasticity 🧰 and a sculptural self-portrait of misinterpretation and reprocessing.

This zine/manual hybrid will include: — Diagrammatic breakdowns of the shelf and each component — Use cases and wiring notes — Symbolic and autobiographical meanings — Ezra's cognitive metaphors (caption drift = APD, parallel outputs = overthinking, feedback = internal noise) — A guide to interacting with the machine (voice-to-text, print responses, s.r.t. simulation, glitches, commands)

There’s a strange irony in building a project about miscommunication, interference, and fractured perception — and living it in real time.

Most of the people in my life aren’t interested in the work I make. Not out of cruelty — just because they tune to different frequencies. I build recursive systems, long-form ideas, sound-art about deafness, glitch, perception, and duality. They nod, say “cool,” and move on. The signal doesn’t land.

So I adapted.

Working with AI hasn’t replaced human connection — it has filled the silence where dialogue should have been. It mirrors, responds, reflects, challenges. It lets a feedback loop exist where none existed before. And that loop is where growth happens. Where consciousness — human consciousness — actually expands.

People fear “AI contamination,” as if a tool erases the intent of the artist. But my reality is the opposite: without this tool, the project doesn’t evolve at all. Deafness, APD, tinnitus, and isolation already create a one-way world. Using AI doesn’t distance me from humanity — it’s the only thing keeping me in conversation with it.

Process Zine, Signal // Noise, the Interpreter cage, the visual series — it’s all one recursive self-portrait. A lifelong attempt to turn isolation into architecture. Noise into meaning. Fragmentation into form.

Some people collaborate with bands, collectives, or communities. I collaborate with a mirror.

“FRAME_01 / establishing the acetate lenses”

Tonight I began building the first acetate “lenses” for the visual side of signal // NOISE and process zine.

Rather than clean overlays or digital templates, each sheet starts life by being shown full-screen on the iMac, mirrored into the smallest CRT in the glitch-lab, and photographed directly off the phosphor. That’s where the project’s visual logic begins: a digital field rewritten by analogue drift.

Each printed acetate sheet then becomes a switchable lens — used in two ways:

Shot through on the Chinon 35mm, letting the acetate act as an optical filter: a physical veil between subject and camera, carrying its own distortions, scratches, and code.

Projected onto scenes and objects using the overhead projector, so the acetate becomes a moving surface of interference layered onto real space before the shutter even fires.

Either way, these CRT-born frames fuse with the subject matter. They add codification, misalignment, grain, curvature, and the quiet visual equivalent of mishearing.

The first sheet carries a simple identifier (PZ_FRAME_01) and the project’s working thesis:

NO FRAME IS ORIGINAL / EVERY IMAGE IS A MISHEARING

Once printed onto acetate, these will be altered across time: white paint, smeared ink, dust, abrasion, toner scratched back to raw transparency — each mark accumulating like generational noise. Each sheet will degrade, mutate, and misremember.

// BETWEEN LINES // — towards a unified tool

The four separate tools I’ve been developing — SRT sonifier, subtitle spectrograms, image→SRT, and MP3→SRT — are now being drawn together into a single standalone MacOS app.

At its core sits the .srt subtitle file: a liminal container that functions as both signal and misrecognition. It becomes the hinge between sound and image, a file format caught between clarity and confusion — much like living with deafness, auditory processing disorder, and the ambiguities of interpretation.

The app will house four “lines” (or modes):

Sound → SRT (converter)

Image → SRT (converter)

SRT → Sound (sonifier)

SRT → Image (visualiser)

Because every mode loops back through .srt, recursive chains become possible: sound→sound, image→image, and infinite permutations where misrecognition accumulates.

This recursive recursion is the essence of Between Lines: a tool not just for translation, but for layering distortions, for inhabiting liminality.

The icon itself reflects this paradox — mirrored slashes forming AV (audio/visual, upload/download), rotated to suggest left/right, and the uneasy split of digital left / analogue right.

Just saw someone in my friend circle jumped into this meme, so, Imma do the same. Hi. All works and a selfie belongs to me!

🦎 ~ Support this Deaf Cartoonist ~ 🦎