#processzine

[playback]

An earlier golf film passed through CRT televisions, CCTV, room sound and Sony Hi8.

The image is not restored. It is received again.

Colour drifts. Volume becomes visible. Interference becomes weather. The observer appears briefly inside the observation.

What began as a quiet golf recording returns as something less stable: part memory, part transmission, part failed reconstruction.

The source remains recognisable, but no longer intact.

Another screen. Another machine. Another interpretation.

From Playback I / Auditory Weather, made for Winter Rules.

The first resin tests are in.

NULL block poured as a black monolith with the NFC card suspended inside. On first pass it reads almost too clean — just a dark sealed face holding a faint internal event. Scan works through the not-yet cured surface, which bodes well.

GRAFT-10 also went into resin: nested steel sleeve, black annular fill, somewhere between specimen, relay, and sealed host. More industrial than expected, which is promising.

Had excess mix left, so used it on a quick, unplanned AGAR-7 test. Shallower than intended, but useful: quick pour, NFC chip dropped in mid-stage, then normal charcoal and white charcoal dust worked through the body. Less “finished object” than material rehearsal.

Posted a new Narrata piece: THE BOUNDARY IS THE SELF.

It’s the fourth / final essay in a sequence that started with AI black boxes and ended somewhere closer — or stranger — than that.

The rough movement was:

we’re building systems we can’t fully define

the self can’t fully access itself either

the black box was already in the body

and maybe the self is not hidden behind the system at all, but appears at the boundary

That last part has been doing a lot of work for me.

Not “mind inside body looking out at world,” but something more like a moving edge between unreadable interior and inferred exterior — with memory as residue, perception as stress, and awareness never quite able to step outside the frame that makes experience possible in the first place.

The boundary string instrument on SUBSTRATE.HOST definitely fed into this one too. Watching that sealed line deform, smear, retain afterimage, and never quite open helped clarify something I’d only been circling conceptually before: the strongest image of self might not be a hidden core, but a live perimeter.

BOUNDARY STRING (v1.6) Built a hidden visual instrument for SUBSTRATE.HOST.

The starting point was pretty simple: I have sound files / albums (BLACK BOX LITURGY, BOUNDARY STUDIES, etc), but no visual correlate for them — and given my APD and general tendency to see hearing as much as hear it, I wanted a way to give the tracks some kind of boundary-image.

At first I thought that might mean sonifying the existing boundary-output modes. But that felt too derivative — too much like forcing one system to perform another system’s job.

What emerged instead was this single enclosed string / boundary.

A happy accident, really, but a useful one.

The audio doesn’t reveal an interior. It doesn’t decode content. It acts more like pressure applied to a sealed perimeter. The boundary twists, deforms, smears, zooms, accumulates afterimage, appears to break, then reconstitutes. It stays closed.

That feels closer to the thing I was actually after.

It also ended up resonating more strongly with GMB than I expected — not in some literal illustrative sense, but in terms of memory traces, expanding boundary conditions, dark and light as structuring forces, and reality as something shaped through participation rather than passively disclosed.

The ghosting is doing a lot of the work there. Previous states don’t fully vanish. The boundary leaves a residue of where it was a moment ago, so the image becomes less a clean contour and more a persistence field. Less “shape”, more trace.

That’s where it starts to feel adjacent to the GMB thesis for me: not interior revelation, but structured disturbance; not direct access, but an active boundary under pressure; not fixed form, but oscillation, residue, recurrence.

There’s also a useful superstring metaphor in there — a closed form whose meaning lies in vibration, stress, twist, frequency — but I think the stronger relation is still to participatory idealism, memory, and the way light/dark seem to operate here less as colours than as ontological conditions.

So this now sits on SUBSTRATE.HOST not as a Host or Token, but as a hidden side instrument (command hint: string) — more like the Protocol layer: a way of probing the boundary without pretending to pass through it.

Next planned Host for SUBSTRATE.HOST (documenting for now):

GRAFT-10 / LIGA — first form study TYPE: SYMBIONT FORM FACTOR: NESTED STEEL SLEEVE

This one started from a simple materials thought rather than a character thought: steel tube, inner tube, black resin, sealed ends. Less creature, more hosted relation. A body organised around shell, interval, and lodged core.

The working idea is a small cylindrical Host built from concentric steel sleeves with a dark annular field between them. One end remains the contact face: flat, sealed, with the NFC relay buried beneath the surface. The other becomes the active end: a slightly proud inner core, held above the annular field. Same object, two poles. Contact below, pressure above.

What’s interesting to me here is that the form doesn’t need to depict a parasite directly. The relation is structural. Occupation is implied by the way the object is built: inner and outer bodies held apart by a sealed boundary layer, with subtle disturbance registered at the shell. More interstitial than illustrative.

The steel/resin combination also pushes it into a different territory from VESSEL-9, SILT-12, and AGAR-7. Harder, colder, more industrial. Less plush, less specimen dish, more contained charge / archived cartridge / host under pressure. The generated references here may be a little too close to precision hardware, but they helped clarify the direction: slightly raised inner core, flush contact face, dark annular field, worn host surface.

Current working identity:

HOST CLASS: GRAFT-10 TYPE: SYMBIONT CODENAME: LIGA FORM FACTOR: NESTED STEEL SLEEVE INTERIOR: INACCESSIBLE ∅

SUBSTRATE.HOST update (0.4): Protocol layer now multi-host

Small but important system update.

The Protocol layer on SUBSTRATE.HOST has been reworked so it no longer behaves like a single demo shell tied only to VESSEL-9.

It now resolves against multiple hosts and instances.

That means if a Host or Token is instantiated into the system — VESSEL-9, SILT-12, AGAR-7, and so on — the Protocol can now address that specific instance rather than a generic placeholder. You are no longer probing “the concept” of the system. You are probing the boundary of that object.

A direct [ PROBE ] route has also been added to instance endpoint pages, so if someone lands on a specific identity page they can move straight into the Protocol layer already bound to that host instance.

The whole point of SUBSTRATE.HOST is not just to present objects, but to let each one hold its own remote identity, memory trace, and boundary behaviour. Once there are multiple hosts and tokens in circulation, the Protocol should feel less like a page and more like a live instrument interfacing with a fleet of archived entities.

It also makes each instantiated object more meaningful. A visitor can now scan or open a specific instance and probe that boundary directly, rather than being routed into a general-purpose shell that stands in for everything.

So the structure now feels more coherent:

identity layer = this object boundary output = this object’s correlate protocol layer = this object’s probe surface

Still no interior access. Still no claim of disclosure. Just a slightly tighter system.

∅

A new Host class added to the SUBSTRATE.HOST archive.

AGAR-7 shifts the system away from plush or fauna-like containment and toward something more specimen-like: a sealed microbial form, held as a dense black petri-puck / culture disk. Not a creature, not a device, not a disclosure. More like a contained event. A correlate. A surface under pressure.

The idea is simple: interior remains inaccessible, but the boundary carries trace. Bloom, density shift, low-field murmur. Something appears to persist within the object, without ever becoming fully legible.

Still in development physically, but the page and instance layer are now in place:

HOST CLASS: AGAR-7 TYPE: MICROBIAL CODENAME: VELUM INTERIOR: INACCESSIBLE