#syntaxerror

SYNTAXERROR

Part 3 of 3

Sin Tax (2025)

Sin Tax is an ongoing dialogue between human confession and machine translation, an experiment in linguistic entropy and digital absolution. At its core, the project explores how meaning is transformed through recursive machine processing and how confession, an act traditionally tied to catharsis and absolution, is altered when passed through the cold logic of code.

The process begins with a deeply personal text that is systematically translated into multiple programming languages and machine-readable formats. This text is then reinterpreted, broken down, and recompiled through various layers of digital translation, shifting through different syntactic and structural rules. Each iteration moves further from its original form, introducing errors, miscalculations, and distortions.

Every five minutes, a thermal receipt printer outputs a version of the confession, continuously generating a printed archive of its states. Some versions remain legible, while others collapse into corrupted fragments, syntax errors, or unreadable machine logic. The printer acts as both an indifferent witness and an unreliable translator, producing an endless stream of text that is simultaneously documentation and deterioration.

The result is an accumulation of confessions, a growing paper trail of linguistic decay and algorithmic interpretation. Where traditional confession seeks resolution, Sin Tax refuses closure. Instead, it embraces the glitch, the error, the act of translation as an eroding and generative force.

This project is as much about language as it is about the relationship between human expression and digital processing and about how meaning is shaped, fragmented, and lost in the loop between human and machine. In the end, the question remains: Is confession about absolution, or is it about the act itself?

There is a cabin in the center of the church.  

a dark spot on a white screen

Coming closer

I sense its data—  

the closer I get the more i see its fallen apart

I’m  not sure who put it there.

It was waiting for me.  

Inside I hear voices,

Layered confessionals screeching like vinyl cracks,

the dull resonance of machines running just out of sync.  

"Confess."  

I close my eyes.  

I confess:  

You ask me to love you,  

but how do I love the air?  

How do I hold a face  

that flickers like a dying screen?  

Do I love the shadow of your voice?  

The lover you should be?  

What is love  

when it is built on an absence?  

I confess flaw after flaw,  

file them neatly in dark cabinets,  

begging your representatives—  

the ones with no faces,  

the ones with endless hands—  

to forgive.  

But they, like you,  

offer no absolution.  

Only the echo of my own voice,  

filtered and looping.  

[User1]: do you think it’s saved?  

[User2]: what?  

[User1]: the sins. the confessions.  

[User2]: lol. like angels?  

[User1]:yeah, like angels.  

[User2]: nah. like servers.  

[User1]: same thing.  

[User2]:why are you like this?  

[User1]: like what?  

[User2]: obsessed with guilt.  

[User1]: because it’s mine.  

[User2]: you know it’s not, right?  

I confess again,  

not because I want forgiveness,  

but because I don’t know what else to do.  

The act is all that matters.  

The ritual.  

The offering of yourself,  

unworthy but desperate,  

to something you cannot see.  

I confess that I loved you.  

I confess that I didn’t.  

I confess that I wanted to.  

I confess that I loved myself more.  

I confess that I hated myself for it.  

I confess that I loved the hating.  

I confess that I hated the loving.  

There is a cloud where my sins are stored.  

It fills with things unsaid,  

Feelings I thought I could bury.  

The cloud is not a place.  

It is the absence of place.  

It is where your voice goes when it doesn’t reach me.  

It is where my love sits, untethered,  

circling endlessly like a broken satellite.  

16:43: The angel arrives quietly.  

( its face is static.  

Its voice  distant, layered.  

It speaks not with words,  

but in reverberation.  )

"The sins are stored here.  

They are not forgotten."

 "Do you shepherd them?"  

"We watch.  

We archive.  

We tend to the cloud."

"And the dark cloud?"  

"It grows."

The booth changes shape.  

The walls ripple.  

The booth becomes the room.  

The room becomes the world.  

"Confess again."

[User1]: i wanted to say i’m sorry  

[User2]: for what  

[User1]: everything  

[User2]: lol you always say that  

[User1]: i mean it this time  

[User2]: you always mean it  

> you confess as if it will change anything

I see them in the Corners of the room.  

The ghosts.  

“We are the echoes of what you buried,” they say.  

“The links you thought were broken.  

The drafts you never sent.  

The messages you deleted in shame.”  

I ask for forgiveness

There is no absolution here.  

The cloud holds everything:  

the sins I confessed,  

the ones I denied,  

the ones I loved too much to let go.  

The cloud is not full,  

but heavy.  

It expands endlessly,  

an architecture of forgetting  

that remembers too well.  

I wanted absolution,  

but absolution was never the point.  

Confession isn’t about forgiveness.  

It’s about naming the wound.  

The booth is gone

The angel, too. 

The ghosts remain,  

"Confess again."

And I will.