How did you get into making art?
I grew up skateboarding in the eighties, and I think that’s where it actually starts. Not in any romantic way, I just learned early that you build what you need and you use spaces that weren’t designed for you. That mindset stuck. I moved to San Francisco and ended up working at Kinko’s in the late nineties, and I started pushing the copy machines past their intended use. Not to make art, exactly, more just to see what would happen. That impulse came directly from skating, that instinct to test boundaries. Those experiments led to drawings, then to Photoshop, and eventually to painting.
The Waiting series, which I began in 2001 and continued for fifteen years, became the foundation for all my subsequent work. This collection grew to include over four hundred paintings of anonymous, figurative subjects, which I described as exploring “the transient temporarily.” The concept emerged from my experiences living in the Tenderloin in San Francisco and riding public transit, where I noticed a disconnect with people who were physically close yet entirely apart.
The paintings captured figures caught in the mundane routines of urban life—waiting for buses, commuting on trains, standing on corners, or stuck in traffic. These individuals often appeared lost, suspended between their immediate surroundings and somewhere else.
The series was fundamentally an exploration of invisibility, what we fail to notice. It focused on how habit and repetition render daily life, and even the experience of ordinary delay, completely unseen. I was interested in the disconnect between being physically present in a place and actually paying attention to it. I would photograph these anonymous figures engaged in their daily routines, and the resulting paintings grew directly from those observations.
What are you currently working on?
My current work is built around z0glyphic 913, a symbolic language I’ve constructed that deliberately resists stable meaning. It’s not a language designed to communicate clearly, it’s designed to keep mutating, to hold contradictions open rather than resolve them. The system operates through three engines: NULM, which is the overarching framework governing recursion and transformation; ZONUUL, which drives constant mutation at the core; and the S.M.E.—the Satirical Metaphor Engine—which converts collected cultural material into allegorical forms through irony and algorithmic distortion.
In practice, a custom script scrapes online content twice daily from deliberately conflicting sources—satirical publications, conspiracy outlets, anonymous forums—flattening the hierarchy between verified information and digital detritus. A geopolitical crisis and a trivial meme become equivalent data packets. The S.M.E. processes that noise into symbolic scenarios, each containing a sentence in the z0glyphic language, an absurdist English translation, a satirical summary, and thematic keywords. Those scenarios feed into a dedicated app I built, which generates deterministic five-layer collage formulas drawn from a curated database of around two thousand images. That formula guides my assembly of a digital collage, the point where human judgment re-enters the automated workflow. The digital collage then gets deconstructed into screen-printed layers on canvas, and I develop it further with oil paint. The whole thing is recursive: finished paintings feed back into the system, generating new glyphs and scenarios that expand the lexicon. Nothing is terminal. The language rewrites itself with every cycle.
For over twenty years the work has circled the same question: what happens when you actually look at the things you’ve trained yourself to ignore?
Brett Amory
What inspired you to get started on this body of work?
After concluding the Waiting series in 2016, I spent a couple years in genuine uncertainty. The subject felt exhausted, and I needed to figure out what the work was actually about beneath the figurative paintings. I went back to school, started my MFA in 2018, and that period cracked things open. I built installations, delved into phenomenology, and shifted my focus from simply depicting people to exploring questions about perception and systems.
The real pivot came when I started working with generative AI. My approach came from the exact same mindset I had at Kinko’s in the nineties, use the machine in ways it wasn’t designed to be used. I set parameters: write prompts using nonsensical language with existential phrases buried in the middle, run the same prompt repeatedly to see how the image changed, use the same prompt across different platforms to see how each dataset shaped the output, and push the models past their guardrails to see how far they’d hallucinate before breaking. In early 2023, I was invited into the artist beta program for DALL·E, and those experiments generated images that looked like alien advertisements, indecipherable typography, a fully hallucinatory aesthetic. That’s when something clicked. I started thinking about how language shapes human evolution, how everything we understand is structured through symbols, and how AI is beginning to rewrite that structure. Those early experiments became the seed for z0glyphic 913, a constructed language and recursive system for examining how meaning emerges, mutates, and loops back through technology itself.
Do you work on distinct projects or do you take a broader approach to your practice?
There’s a continuous thread. For over twenty years the work has circled the same question: what happens when you actually look at the things you’ve trained yourself to ignore? The Waiting series addressed that through figurative painting, anonymous figures caught in urban routines, people who appeared lost or suspended between the present and somewhere else. In 2012 I started a project called Twenty-Four, which I carried out in San Francisco, New York, and London over the next two years. Each series focused on twenty-four locations across a single day, documenting the life of a city within a twenty-four-hour window. I used social media to find the locations, choosing sites that revealed something about a city’s rhythm and its inhabitants. I’d spend a month in each place, filming, photographing, and collecting street ephemera—discarded objects that felt like fragments of lived experience. Cigarette boxes in Flushing, pacifiers in Williamsburg, drug baggies by Glide Church. Those materials became records of place, layered into paintings, installations, videos, and text. Together, Waiting and Twenty-Four marked a real shift, from depicting individual figures to studying systems of time, place, and repetition. Then during my MFA I built installations that pushed further into how environments and repetition shape perception itself, blurring the line between the viewer and their surroundings through mirrored fragments and repeated rooms.
z0glyphic 913 is the current form of that same inquiry, but operating at a completely different scale. Instead of depicting the overlooked, it processes the architecture of how overlooking happens, algorithmically, culturally, linguistically. If there’s a single concept that ties everything together, it might be latent space and I mean that in both senses. In machine learning, latent space is the hidden layer where raw data gets compressed into abstract representations before it becomes something recognizable. But there’s also a physical, phenomenological version of that: the indeterminate space between seeing and understanding, between being in a place and actually registering it. The figures in the Waiting paintings lived in that space. The street ephemera from Twenty-Four was pulled from it. And z0glyphic 913 operates entirely within it, processing meaning through layers of compression, distortion, and re-emergence where nothing resolves cleanly. The system is medium-agnostic. Its recursive logic can drive a painting workflow, structure an installation, generate video, or produce purely symbolic and textual outputs. What connects all of it is that commitment to staying inside the latent, the unresolved, the not-yet-legible, rather than rushing toward clarity. That impulse hasn’t changed since the first painting I made of someone waiting for a bus. What’s changed is the scale of what we’re ignoring, and the tools available to map it.
What’s a typical day like in your studio?
It depends entirely on what I have going on. There’s no typical day, there are phases. I had a show in November, so months leading up to that I was in the studio painting every day. Then I co-curated an exhibition with Shane Denson and Karin Denson at the Stanford Art Gallery that opened January 22nd, and for three weeks straight we were at the gallery building and installing. Right now I’m between shows, so the rhythm has shifted again. I’m building out my website and further developing the system architecture for z0glyphic 913.
That’s kind of the point, though. The work doesn’t live in one place. Some stretches are entirely digital: language development, research, or assembling collages. Other stretches are spent entirely in my studio making paintings. And teaching is woven through all of it. My teaching practice is inseparable from my creative work; the classroom directly informs my artistic thought process. Discussions with students, focused on perception, artistic process, and the act of creation in an era where machine-generated images are ubiquitous, directly influence the core questions driving my art.
Who are your favorite artists?
My interests are always shifting, so this is a hard one to pin down, it really depends on what I’m deep in at any given moment. Lately I’ve been spending a lot of time with the work of Howard Smith, whose practice I discovered recently and find really inspiring. On a completely different axis, I’ve been rebuilding my website and have fallen into the world of neo-Brutalist web design, which has its own visual logic that resonates with what I’m doing in z0glyphic 913.
I’ve also been geeking out on Wib & Wob’s work, AI agents making weird stuff. Not AI as a polishing tool but AI as something that generates its own uncanny output. And Petr Valek’s weirdness has been on rotation. There’s a strangeness that keeps pulling me back.
Where do you go to discover new artists?
Mostly online, unfortunately. Instagram is still where I end up finding a lot of work, even though the algorithm makes it feel like you’re being fed rather than searching. Beyond social media, I also regularly attend shows and rely on friend recommendations.
Learn more about the artist by visiting the following links:
