#39: Begin the Begin

This week: The email is dead. Long live the email. // On ghosts, glitch aesthetics, and the new aesthetics of AI // Signal boosts from the edges of culture and tech

May 04, 2025

There’s a moment in Maurice Blanchot where the dead don’t return as themselves, but as the echo of a voice still speaking.

This newsletter might be that: a message you thought was over, arriving again. Maybe it never ended? Maybe it’s just taken on a new form? A ghost medium for a ghost age.

Being honest, this thing flatlined. Five months without a pulse.

But something kept flickering. A fragment of signal, a line from a song — Begin the Begin, R.E.M., 1986. “Silence means security / silence means approval.” If that’s true, then let this noise be a refusal.

So what I’m saying is: We’re back. Not to resume exactly where we left off, but to test the frequencies again. To see what’s changed and track what’s next.

LET’S GO.

Signal Return: Glitch visions and haunted systems

Back in Issue #21: Delirious, I wrote about watching Demon Slayer with my son and being overwhelmed by its dissonant digital aesthetics — shifting frame rates, multiple light sources, composited perspectives. At the time, it felt like a new visual language — born not from clean minimalism, but from cultural overload, glitch, and collage.

A year on, that visual language is now everywhere.

This is, I think, the aesthetic of AI-age media. Unstable, layered, and discontinuous. Like the Erosion Birds meme — a cryptid-generating genre born on Midjourney and Reddit, now scattered across TikTok and YouTube. A faux-nature documentary of humanoid storks haunting snowy landscapes. But also a collaborative hallucination — part meme, part collective prompt ritual, part aesthetic experiment.

You can trace the same sensibility in the AI video work of someone like Goldweard — a digital sculptor creating hyperglitch AI fashion renderings that look like RuPaul’s Drag Race reimagined by William Gibson.

Or in the modular horror experiences of Monument Mythos, the viral YouTube alt-history by Alex Kister, where old monuments become sentient and terrifying, rendered in deepfake, VHS textures and YouTube-damaged lore. The glitch isn’t an error — it’s the medium.

This isn’t post-internet art. It’s post-signal. And the references aren’t gallery shows or biennials — they’re r/StableDiffusion threads, Discord drop folders, Twitch streams, and TikTok greenscreens. The medium is memetic. The glitch is intentional. And the artists are half-real.

What’s returning in all of this is the sense that culture is haunted again. That we’re building new vernaculars from broken software, corrupted memory, dead platforms and unstable tools. This is not the sublime. This is a kind of eerie immediacy — haunted by the speed of its own mutation.

Signal Return

What survived the lacuna? Looking back across the archive, here are a few of the fragments still vibrating:

In Issue 4, we explored how CIRCA is hijacking Piccadilly Circus at 20:23 every night with work from Ai Weiwei, Anne Imhof and others — a glimpse of how screen real estate could be reimagined as public media architecture.
Issue 9 picked up the strange momentum of Erosion Birds — generative cryptid memes made by thousands on Midjourney. Still maybe the most important AI aesthetic moment of the year.
Issue 31 found Aesthetics.fandom.wiki — an unstable wiki of net-native visual styles. Still the most honest R&D lab for how taste, chaos, and community converge online.
Issue 16 traced the spectral loss of Auriea Harvey’s early net art, and the fragility of digital culture when the infrastructure that supports it vanishes.
In Issue 10, we dove into LAS Art Foundation’s work on non-human spectatorship and Cronenbergian AI musicians — a project I still think defines the cutting edge of what a cultural institution should be doing.
And back in Issue 3, we found slow innovation in Marina Abramović’s haunted RA retrospective and Thomas Kole’s vast digital reconstruction of Tenochtitlan — both still burn with something mythic.

And yet, most things flicker. Blink and they’re gone. So what should we be looking at now?

What We’re Tracking Next

Here’s what’s pinging my radar — creators, coders, and edge-case experiments showing how new technologies are reshaping artistic practice:

JODI (Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans): Pioneers of net art, JODI’s work deconstructs and reimagines digital interfaces. Their website wwwwwwwww.jodi.org is a chaotic exploration of internet aesthetics, challenging conventional web navigation and design.
Tabita Rezaire’s AMAKABA: An artist and healer, Rezaire’s project AMAKABA is a center for collective healing in the Amazonian forest of French Guiana, blending spirituality, technology, and art. The initiative combines an agroecological cacao farm, a yoga center, and an astronomical observatory.
Marija Bozinovska Jones – Beginningless Mind: Exploring machine subjectivities and surveillance rituals, her work “Beginningless Mind” delves into the intersections of technology and consciousness, probing selfhood from subatomic levels to networked planetary presence.
Marija Bozinovska Jones’ Beginningless Mind
The New Design Congress: A research organization investigating the socio-political implications of technology. Their Substack offers critical insights into digital infrastructure, design ethics, and the politics of technology.
Rehearsing the Revolution: An initiative that uses storytelling games to experience reality from different perspectives, aiming to discover what connects us. More information: website.
Adriana Knouf’s TX-1 Project: An interdisciplinary artist, Knouf’s TX-1 project involved sending hormone replacement therapy into space, challenging norms around gender and space exploration. The project marks the first-known time that elements of the transgender experience orbited the Earth
HRT goes interstellar with Adriana Knouf

Let me know what else I should be seeing.

Constructs & Concepts

The reboot isn’t just a ghost in the inbox — it’s a way of preparing for what comes next. Over the next 10 issues we’ll track the best emerging work at the intersection of art, ideas and technology. Alongside the texture of creative practice, we’ll also continue integrating bleeding-edge research and speculation into the format.

The best research I’ve read this month? Edinburgh Futures Institute’s Infrastructure Futures project — a Creative Informatics–funded collaboration between designers, curators and foresight researchers that produced a set of speculative infrastructure scenarios for GLAM institutions.

The scenarios — Magic Elves, The Old Farm, Hybrid Futures — don’t just imagine technological change, but institutional rewiring. The PDF report is wild. Go read it here (direct download). Pair it with their work on reimagining universities or the Centre for Future Infrastructure’s ongoing research ecosystem.

Sign-Off // The Silence that is Not Silent

This week’s title comes from R.E.M.. But the real ending here belongs to John Cage, who knew that silence is never silent, and that presence often returns as hum, buzz, or flicker. In Silence (1961), he wrote:

“What we require is silence; but what silence requires is that I go on talking.”

That’s the spirit of Creative R&D. Even when it fades out, it leaves a trace. Consider this the start of the next phrase.

Let me know what you’re making. The ghost is listening.

❤️