How this came about

Volume One: Neruda

I had no intention of doing any of this.

In the mid-2000s I wandered into a bookstore on vacation. I had been trying to learn Spanish and The Poetry of Pablo Neruda caught my eye — why not practise on poetry? Months later I actually started reading it, and loved the whole very long book. Most of the poems were already translated into English. Ninety or so were printed alongside the original Spanish, and I decided to translate those myself.

It did not go well. I gave up. Translation is hard.

But I had enjoyed the exercise, and I decided not to be so hard on myself. I started writing whatever came to mind as I read the Spanish. I knew enough of the language that some meanings were impossible to avoid; the rest of the words were only sounds and rhythms, and a sound can trigger any word you know, filtered through whatever else you happen to be thinking about at the time. As a cognitive scientist I found myself watching my own brain do it.

Then my brother suddenly died.

My whole world and worldview changed. The grief was immense and lasted many years. The process became both a distraction from it and an extraction of it, because the filter it ran through was now an entirely different filter.

Only after that did the thing get a name. I had been calling it mistranslating, on the model of mishearing — but a mishearing is an accident, and none of this was accidental. I settled on transbliteration: neither translation nor obliteration, and both.

The Numbers of Nature / The Nature of Numbers

after Gautama Cristo

Nature
    In particular
Numbers her representations
    Using the same
        1
    For Jesus and Christ
        According to recorded word of mouth

She assigns them
    7 to sadists
    8 to eaters
    10 to tentacles
    80 to ears
    40 to rivers
    20 to life
Like empty shells
    173
Awaiting hermits
    357

    Without asking
She touches these natural numbers
    Ignoring the irrational ones
        Like petals too-well-placed
And swims with them in the ocean of rationality
    That divides the Ordinary from the Cardinals
And by adding nothing
She makes them whole

While Nature provides these numbers
    For the best and the poor
        The clean and the dirty
    For Whites and Blacks
    For bloody assassins
    For enriched victims
        And those of sky-sent strikes
She leaves to the imagination
    How to represent the death of a brother

    As fewer and fewer transcendentals arrived on the shore
Men began
    To study the colors
        Of a drip of honey
        Of the lips of the anus
    To search with skepticism
    To hope for the knowledge
        Of what matters and what doesn’t
        Of a technique for laughter
        Of how to go farther
                Unlimited
            Without sleep

We find distasteful what the ages believed to be sacred
Our humanity succumbs to the cynicism of mortality
We are incapable of ignoring the mirage
    That we can safely subtract Nature’s numbers
    And cube them for our amusement

Our progeny will question us
    Confront us with a lyric
        Uniting our voices
    Confront us with the fractions
            Left by our living
        Their roughness stuck in our throats
            Such that we cannot swallow
                The Oneness of our Nature

I was filled with nostalgia and with memories, and trying to understand my brother better. There is a second poem for him in that book, Ode to George Carlin, after Neruda’s Oda a Walt Whitman.

Transbliterations, Volume One: Neruda runs to 170 pages. I shared it with a few friends and that was all. It got me through my grief. If you can’t turn tragedy into art, then tragedy wins. I did build an auto-tweeter that posted the entire book to Twitter — the hard part was cutting the poems into sensible 240-character pieces, which is part of why they are tabbed and unpunctuated: that shape let a machine break them without lying about them. I deleted all of those posts when I started using the account again. Maybe someone has an archive.

Volume Two: Shakespeare

Years later I wanted the practice back, and needed something to point it at. Shorter poems would be easier. Horace’s odes? Shakespeare’s love sonnets? But early modern English is not noise — I could understand it, which would make it too easy. So I made it Spanish first. Each sonnet went through Google Translate as it was then, came back mostly nonsense, and I ran the Neruda process on the nonsense.

Then my wife suddenly left me.

My whole world and worldview changed. The grief was immense and lasted many years. The process was once again both a distraction from it and an extraction of it, because the filter was once again an entirely different filter.

So these poems were written in real time, over 1,902 days: from 841 days before the day I learned my life was a lie, to 1,061 days after it. Just over five years. I have wondered since whether some part of me already sensed it, and that is why I chose love sonnets — which then came through my brain as hate sonnets, and after that as the sound of someone trying to get a self back after losing the two most important people in his life, and then of meeting people again (I had not dated in this century), and eventually of finding love again.

The twenty poems on this site are that arc in miniature. The book’s six Parts — Sensing, Knowing, Recovering, Loving, Rebelling, Accepting — are marked on every poem, and reading the twenty in order is reading it happen.

The pictures

All 154 were finished long before the image models arrived. As with Neruda, the work had gone to a handful of people and no further, and I had only vaguely played with the idea of publishing. But now I could see a way to illustrate the poems that might be more interesting to somebody else than reading my therapy sessions.

It took years of trying. Disco Diffusion in April 2022 was not good enough, and neither were Latent Diffusion, JAX CLIP guided diffusion, simplified Disco Diffusion, many versions of Stable Diffusion through Deforum, or SDXL Lightning. What finally worked was FLUX, and what finally worked was sculpture — not a picture of the line but a sculpture of it, standing in a garden you could walk through. Walk through the garden and you walk through the poem.

What should the sculptures look like? I had no idea. I am at best a photographer when it comes to art, and certainly no sculptor. But I could search the entire space of sculpture, including regions it would be impossible to sculpt in the real world. So I built a system that generated thousands of candidates, weighted the properties of the prompts by which ones I chose, and generated thousands more. I call these Aesthetic Experiments, and you can run your own in a Google Colab if you like.

Diffusion

Most AI image generators work by diffusion. An image of pure noise is made, then run through a neural network in the context of a text prompt to produce a slightly less noisy version. That version is fed through again for a less noisy one, and so on, until what is left is not noise at all but something like what the prompt intended.

When these techniques came out I thought immediately: that is exactly the transbliteration process. I give myself a noisy text and my own natural neural network tries to make it less noisy, over and over, until I have the poem my emotions were prompting.

Diffusion also depends utterly on the noise it starts from. That first image is random, made from a seed that sets the values of every pixel — a different seed is a different starting noise, and so a different final image. On top of a nearly infinite search through prompts, then, there are another nearly infinite images for any one prompt. That is why there are so many versions of styles here, and versions of versions.

Every image in a set on this site was generated from the same seed. That is deliberate: holding the noise still is how I find the styles that are most flexible, most reactive to the line they are given. It is also why you will often see the same pose, or the same spacing of objects, from one line to the next. They all started from the same noise.

I have always put some art in my science and some science in my art. Working on this I feel like a nineteenth-century explorer, finding art inside these models that has never been seen. Every day I see something that astounds me and want it to be real — to make a reality-twin of the digital, when nearly all of this work runs the other way.

Into three dimensions

A digital object gets me halfway to the real thing, and to a garden you can physically walk through. An image cannot be walked around.

In the summer of 2025 there was an open call on The HUG, using Illust.Space, for an augmented-reality artwalk in Vancouver, British Columbia. That sounded intriguing, and it made sense to do things in AR before trying to 3D print anything. So I went looking and found the image-to-3D models — Tripo SG and Hunyuan3D, and later TRELLIS. I was hooked. Some of the results have been shown by the Balanced Forces team, to whom I am very grateful.

The sculptures on this site are those models. What they are standing in is a maquette; the colophon sets out the terms of the real garden, which does not exist yet.

Zen Materialist

The sculptures are shown under that name. It is the handle I took on social media a long time ago and it has become my nom d’arte by use rather than by decision.

It came about decades ago, when I was into Zen. I travelled around the world in my early twenties and saw how much needed changing — how much there is that you should not be Zen about, and how the material world we have is a choice that can be changed for the better of everyone.

As a personal religion it deals, like most of them, with desire. I summarise it as: it’s okay to want. It’s also okay not to have. A friend of mine summarised that as “So — easy come, easy go?”

Is this art?

People like to compare AI images to the arrival of photography. Instead of sitting for hours while an oil painter does your portrait, along comes a guy — almost always a guy — who makes your image in a second.

I think it is closer to the arrival of the synthesizer. All music is waveforms, and all of a sudden waveforms could be made digitally. I am not a drummer, but I can make waveforms that sound like drums, or a violin, or a guitar, or a saxophone — and waveforms no physical system could ever produce. In my basement. Endlessly.

That did not take work away from violinists or guitarists or saxophonists. It let people like Tangerine Dream make new music — tracks, as they say, not songs — that others enjoy. A new genre, enabled by a technology and powered by people.

Every generated image is likewise just pixels, just numbers, and numbers can be modelled. A musician sits down at a company’s synthesizer and works every key, button and knob to find out what it will do — prompting the system and seeing what comes out. This is the same: play with the input, look hard at the output, and follow the leads worth following.