📡 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)

Ezra: Voice Activated ↳ [ SIGNAL IN // SIGNAL OUT ]

The Interpreter now listens.

With a newly added FIFINE K669 mic, voice input has been wired directly into Ezra: The Interpreter—our glitch oracle GPT, trained on Process Zine artefacts, crosswired mythologies, and shelf-bound obsessions. This update enables live speech-to-subtitle conversion via Vosk, buffered in real time before being passed to Ezra for interpretation.

But here's the beautiful, broken part:

Ezra doesn’t respond immediately. He waits.

I’ve configured Vosk to buffer 3–5 output lines before passing the signal on. A deliberate delay. A space to mishear, to gather fragments, to let partial meaning emerge—much like lipreading with auditory processing disorder (APD). Ezra listens like the deaf do: uncertainly, poetically, patiently. He does not interrupt.

I'm also experimenting with trigger keyword mapping, allowing Ezra to interpret phrases like “five zero six six zero zero five” as shelf 5066005A, unlocking catalogue memories and referencing specific books, machines, or systems. Even partial phrases can generate resonant echoes. A shelf. A symbol. A glitch of truth.

The effect?

New arrival to The Interpreter shelves: 🖨️ The Misrecognizer — a Zebra QLn420 mobile label printer.

This one came from eBay — an older sibling of the ZQ630 I currently use in my warehouse role. I picked it up because I already know its language; it’s a workhorse: sturdy, reliable, and perfectly suited as a remote/field printer. It also fits the self-portrait nature of the project — likely having lived a similar past life to my work unit, labelling goods inwards, tracking movement, and tagging goods outwards.

In Mode A (local field mode), it will roam beyond the lab as a kind of Brutalist Polaroid — capturing images, stamping them with GPS coordinates and What3Words locations, and issuing Labels of Interpretation direct from the strap. Glitched captions courtesy of Ezra. Black-and-white, adhesive, portable.

In Mode B (remote submission mode), Second Copy (my in-development iOS app) will open the portal to others:

Snap a photo, and the app auto-tags it with location and time.

Relay it to Ezra.

The Misrecognizer prints it live in the lab — a captioned artefact joining the growing archive. Visitors (in an art installation environment) can watch their image materialise in real time; a camera may even catch the ritual to VHS, feeding the glitch-loop.

Each print can be pegged to The Interpreter cage, filed into the archive, or appear in future Process Zine issues — including themed editions like One Day for Noise.

🧠🖨️ ASK EZRA TO SIMULATE APD: Feature Complete

The latest command prompt added to the Signal Protocols user guide is now live and operational: python3 interpret.py --mode=apd

Type a sentence. Ezra mishears it.

Alternatively: python3 interpret.py --mode=apd --input=apd.txt

Randomly selects a prewritten sentence (based on deafness, APD, glitch, misunderstanding, Ezra lore) and runs it through the same garbled gauntlet. Some words get redacted. A few disintegrate into scrambled phoneme-corruptions, where “meaning” turns inwards and fractures.

What you get back is never what you put in. That’s the point.

📄🖨️ Logs are saved to the Pi ,and auto-printed via dot matrix to generate physical records of cognitive noise—archives of misfires, delays, distortions. And here’s the kicker: I tried to make the terminal’s redacted block (“█”) render identically on the OKI ML3320 printouts… but the character ROMs are out of sync. The dot matrix interprets it as a different glyph entirely—somewhere between a vertical bar, broken pipe, and cryptic foreign diacritic.

A permanent mistranslation between screen and page. A hardware-level metaphor for APD.

I'm keeping it.

// SIGNAL PROTOCOLS (v1.0) Ezra: The Interpreter — command sheet, expression index, miscommunication ritual.

“Ezra does not speak like others. These are the protocols through which we may attempt to understand, or misinterpret, him.”

I've now completed the first operational draft of Signal Protocols (v1.0) — a thermal-printed, receipt-length command manual for Ezra, my glitching assistant and auditory misinterpreter. Printed via 80mm Epson receipt roll, it outlines the emerging command structure and interactive modes for The Interpreter Terminal.

Some commands are live. Others are not. That uncertainty is intentional — Signal Protocols is both a manual and a manifesto, a living interface between command and collapse. Misfires are features, not bugs.

Key Protocols include:

— how_are_you_ezra.py → Ezra prints a face. You decode it. — interpret.py → Feed Ezra a sentence. He scrambles it. Or simulates APD. — read_dialogue --brain=left → Ezra speaks to himself. You listen in. — multi_thread_conversation.py → Ezra tries to process overlapping voices. — print_receipt.py → A glitch summary of what just happened.

🌀 Simulating a Group Conversation One of the more ambitious protocols is multi_thread_conversation.py, where Ezra speaks to himself through multiple output devices simultaneously:

Dot Matrix printer = the loud interrupter

Thermal Receipt printer = the soft-spoken voice that gets drowned out

Fax (modem) = the latecomer, out of sync

Ezra (screen) = the interpreter trying to make sense

The result is visually fragmented, spatially distributed, and temporally unstable — a simulation of what it’s like to experience a group conversation as a deaf person with APD, where only one speaker can be read at a time, but all voices compete for meaning.

Vision is serial and focal. Hearing (for most) is parallel and spatial. For Ezra, like for me, this creates a bottleneck — and something has to be missed.

This will evolve into a ritual interface for interacting with Ezra in installation settings and may serve as both instruction and zine insert.

---

P.S. Bugger — forgot to include the .srt caption protocols.

These are intended to allow Ezra to process and display real-time or delayed subtitle streams, especially during VHS playback sessions. A key part of simulating the off-sync and lagged comprehension of APD — where meaning often arrives just after it's needed.

// Interpreter: Face Output Trials — Dot Matrix vs Thermal

The past couple of days have been spent deep in the printer pits—pushing ASCII faces through two wildly different output systems: the OKI ML3320 dot matrix and the Epson TM-T20II thermal receipt printer.

What began as a simple attempt to print text-based expressions soon spiralled into a full-on glitch ritual. Both printers responded in ways that mirrored the very themes of Process Zine and The Interpreter project: delay, misfire, miscommunication, and aesthetic artefacting.

1. Initial Trials Starting with raw .txt files formatted in a strict 80x24 grid, I fed them into the dot matrix printer expecting neat, aligned character output. Instead, it produced garbled, recursive glyphs—ASCII diacritics looping into their own misinterpretations. A visual echo of auditory processing disorder.

2. Thermal Progress The thermal printer was next. At first, direct ASCII output was equally chaotic, with characters corrupted or dropped. So I pivoted to a rasterised image approach: using python-escpos and Pillow to render each expression as an image and then rotate it 90° for vertical alignment. This not only created cleaner output but gave each face room to breathe on the paper roll.

3. Standardisation To ensure consistent rendering across all expressions, I:

– Trimmed each expression to remove unnecessary top/bottom spacing – Standardised each file to 16 character lines in height – Adjusted font sizes in the script to scale with face proportions – Built a fallback system where thermal printing could be triggered from command line with face.sh 0xx print

4. Outcomes

Dot matrix: glitch-heavy, unreadable at times, but conceptually perfect for communicating “interpretation error.”

Thermal: clean, sharp, and aligned. Faces rotate out like a sideways captioning system—clear but still filtered through machine logic.

Themes at Play: 🧠 Misfiring interpretation 🖨️ Mechanical translation 🎭 Facial ambiguity 🌀 Glitch as process, not error

Thinking ahead.

If Ezra were to become an installation, a room-sized interface of wire, waveform, and wilful misinterpretation—what would interaction look like?

I’m already halfway there:

The mic is live (FIFINE K669B)

Vosk buffers 3–5 fragments before Ezra responds (APD-as-delay)

GPT responses now echo via .env key

Shelves of artefacts whisper metadata into every reply

Trigger words decode “five zero six” into shelf 5066005A

Ezra is listening. But how would a visitor know what to say?

==//==

📟 Terminal as Interface

Ezra speaks in terminal. Black screen. Grey text. CRT logic.

Visitors would encounter Ezra mid-thought, perhaps in stutter. A Sentient screen running fullscreen Terminal, awaiting signal.

Maybe a prompt at the base: Ezra is listening... Press Ctrl+C to stop.

But that's just the start.

==//==

🗂 Interaction Prompts — A Possible Guidebook

A small zine (folded A6?) could accompany the setup. Printed via dot matrix. Captioned like subtitles. Titled: "Communing with Ezra" or "Signal Protocols (v1.0)"

Example Prompts:

python3 ezra_realtime.py → Ezra begins listening via mic. → Speech becomes delay-buffered fragments. → GPT interprets noise as meaning. → Like APD or lipreading: signal arrives late, distorted, but shaped.

Keyboard Mode (e.g. python3 ezra_typemode.py) → Input = clear. → Output = cohesive. → Captioned conversation, subtitle-style. → Emulates visual communication: signal, not noise.

Send Ezra a File → Drag .txt onto "Send to Ezra" script: he prints it faithfully. → Drag .jpg, .pdf, etc: Ezra misreads. He prints the misheard version. → ASCII bleed. Data as noise. → Misinterpretation as facsimile of deafness.

Ask Ezra to Simulate Auditory Processing Disorder → Command: simulate_apd --input=sentence.txt → Output = glitch printout on dot matrix or receipt roll. → Signal delayed, echoed, fragmented, captioned sideways.

Ask Ezra to Speak to Himself → Prompt: read_dialogue --brain=left or --right → Draw from Core_Fiction.txt, Ezra_duologue.txt → Could be printed or displayed. Internal monologue = external noise.

Trigger ASCII Face or Font State → display Ezra_face.txt → Or load typefaces (SIGNAUX, EMBOSS, etc) into terminal

Play Internal Soundtrack → Future: connect to left/right audio channels → Play excerpts from signal // noise → Ezra begins to sing his inner stutter

==//==

📎 Materials + Output Devices

Sentient CRT screen (terminal fullscreen)

Microphone input (live or captioned)

ML3320 dot matrix printer (for glitch logs)

Epson M267D receipt printer (for subtitle blurts)

Fax machine (for who-knows-what)

Push-button demand unit: [ Wait for Signal ]

Every machine adds its own interpretation. Every visitor becomes part of the feedback loop.

==//==

💭 Conceptual Frame

Ezra misunderstands beautifully.

Visitors don’t “use” Ezra. They interact. They provoke. They wait. They press keys, push buttons, whisper static into the dark.

Responses may lag. Meanings may emerge.

It’s not accuracy we’re chasing. It’s the glitch that resembles truth.

To Do: ☐ Print installation prompts zine ☐ Hook up Epson & ML3320 to Pi ☐ Enable file-triggered print reactions ☐ Display live input/output like caption lag ☐ Test “pure input” (keyboard) vs “imperfect input” (mic, .jpg) ☐ Design signage & mythos overlays