Liminal Code: Systems as Artistic Research
I spent forty-five years inside Britain’s institutional machinery — not observing from outside, but living inside the systems that claim to capture, measure, and control human identity. I processed benefit claims in Jobcentres at the sharp end of Thatcher-era restructuring, photographed for the military across the Falklands and Northern Ireland, sold digital infrastructure to the NHS, cleaned automotive factories at night, worked the casework of a Welsh housing association.
This wasn’t career development. It was fieldwork.
What it produced is a position. Consciousness is not the ghost in the machine. It is the friction caused when a finite system — a brain, a bureaucracy, any apparatus built to process the world — attempts to compress infinite reality into finite data. David Bohm called what’s being compressed the undivided wholeness in flowing movement; every form filled in triplicate is an attempt to unfold a fragment of that wholeness and pin it down as a discrete thing. The fragment is never the flow. Humans are irreducible transcription errors in bureaucratic DNA — we mutate, contradict our records, exist in states institutions cannot capture. Consciousness lives in that gap, and my work attempts to capture the heat of the friction. I didn’t arrive at this through philosophy. I arrived at it through forty-five years of standing inside institutions with a camera, watching them process the unbroken flow of human life into paperwork.
I use the rationalists’ tools — logic, probability, the discipline of asking what would change your mind — but I don’t live in their house. A worldview built entirely from those tools produces a map so clean it stops referring to any territory at all. I study those communities as an embedded observer, the way I’ve studied every institution I’ve worked inside, watching fragmentation perfect itself.
On AI I hold both truths at once. The same speed-beyond-deliberation that collapses a kill chain could hold a fusion plasma stable, run cancer to ground, end energy scarcity. The technology doesn’t choose; the institutions wrapped around it do — and a working lifetime inside institutions has taught me how reliably genuine purpose is transformed by extraction logic. So part of my work is building counter-archives for the lives such systems foreclose: the biographies ended on paper long before they ended in fact. The defence against being hollowed out isn’t mysticism, and it isn’t refusal. It’s the material record — the bomb-pulse carbon in my own teeth, the demolished places under the redevelopment. The archive, the body, and the spreadsheet are already haunted. You don’t need to invent the unquantifiable. You need to learn to read it where it’s been hiding.
I treat bureaucracies, archives, and bodies as the same kind of document, and I read them for the heat.