DR McCullochTHE DOSSIER →← WORK

A reader's edition · a practice-based PhD · and the book that erases itself

Every myth erases a sister.

Algorithmic
Entanglement

Creativity is located in the transformation of the receiving consciousness,not in algorithmic output.

the argument reads clean and sure of itself ↓

Apparatus I · §A · Thesis

Creativity is located in the transformation of the receiving consciousness,not in algorithmic output.

Prompt engineering is not instruction-giving but a form of cognitive coupling with structural consequences. The default deployment model degrades the conditions under which creativity occurs.

What gets sold as augmentation is really a reduction.

The evidence spans twenty-seven years across three domains: computational systems, fine art and applied technology. One formal structure recurs throughout.

The Book · Chapter 2 · description of the plate

The painting the reader cannot see

“This chapter describes a painting the reader cannot see. No reproduction accompanies this text. This absence is not an oversight but a constraint the text must acknowledge rather than conceal.”

Not a reproduction but a diagram of the encounter. Ochre over black, red and teal eruptions, torn cardboard hung on a crimson thread. Its centre stays dark until the thread is drawn.

The work is large-scale, on raw cardboard whose torn edges remain visible, suspended by a crimson thread sewn through with a bookbinding needle — the thread visibly taut, on the threshold of snapping. Two figures — Prometheus articulate, Epimetheus dissolving — share one surface. Across both, in an angular urgent hand, the graffiti reads MEDIAN HUMANS.

“It is not nice to look at, it is an accusation.”

  1. 1The Prometheus figure. Rendered with slight anatomical clarity, its edges fraying into the surrounding colour field as if the act of individuation were still ongoing.
  2. 2The Epimetheus figure. Fluid, indistinct, bleeding into the material — present but unstable; not subordinate but the ground against which the first figure becomes legible.
  3. 3The colour field. Warm ochre, amber and gold in the upper register; dense opaque black below; eruptions of deep red, teal and turquoise scratched back through the layers.
  4. 4The graffiti. “MEDIAN HUMANS” — an angular urgent hand cut across both figures, an incision made after the composition was established.
  5. 5The cardboard substrate. Raw, corrugated, torn and unframed. The material of packaging and logistics, hung from a nail — its poverty integral to the work.
  6. 6The charged space. Between the two figures an absence that functions as presence: a space that neither figure fills, not empty but tensed with potential.
  7. 7The insect form. A small dark mark near top centre — insect, or a bomb falling — precise and incongruous against the ochre. It resists incorporation into meaning.
  8. 8The crimson thread. Sewn through the cardboard with a bookbinding needle, bearing the weight of the whole work, visibly taut, on the threshold of snapping.

Apparatus I · §C · The recurring form

One structure, twenty-seven years

One formal structure recurs across the whole record: a weighted relational graph with typed semantic edges. It turns up in the Semantic Tapestry (2017), the Aerios quote builder (2024) and the Kew ontology (2025), each a different client in a different industry on a different stack. I built all three, not any language model. Hover or tab a node to read it.

199920082017202020232026computationapplied techart / theoryGlasgow CS / MathsKing's NeuroscienceDesign Beckons / F&MSemantic TapestryBodhisattvAIBFI FilmWhat's in that Drawer?Whispering to the MachinePilearytix OntologyMedian Humans (book)AeriosDigital PrometheusKew · Plants for HealthReception-transformationPilearytix Protocol
the spine

The spine runs Semantic Tapestry (2017) → Aerios (2024) → Kew (2025): one construction pattern across three unrelated domains. Weighted relational graphs with typed semantic edges are uncommon in enterprise software, so seeing the same one three times is itself the evidence. I chose it each time; nobody imposed the pattern in hindsight.

Collation · the same form in three industries

YearInstanceDomainMeasureConstruction
2017Semantic TapestryEmergent narrative489,300primed connectionsUnidirectional weighted graph as adjacency matrix. Speech-act theory mapped to edge types. TensorFlow. MSc, Distinction.
2024AeriosAir-cargo charter40% · 66%quote-time cut · Cargojet · GTA AirRAG quote builder chaining non-ML algorithms with LLMs. A weighted relational system with typed semantic edges. Series A SaaS, CTO.
2025Kew · Plants for HealthBotanical ontology700,000+modelled relationshipsBFO and RO within Darwin Core. Seven relationship types across taxonomic, chemical, pharmacological and ethnobotanical domains.

The Book · Chapter 4 · Two Brothers (and a Gap Between Them)

Two brothers organise everything

Prometheus

Forethought: the one who thinks ahead, who steals the fire believing the gift will liberate.

Epimetheus

Afterthought: the one who thinks too late, who accepts the consequences already arrived.

The whole apparatus of foresight and hindsight — every chapter, every framework — is built from that pair, and the Greek myth it rests on has two brothers where a sister never appears.

Apparatus I · §E · What happens when entanglement is misunderstood

Five failure modes

The default model treats the algorithm as a production tool. Reception-transformation theory exposes five ways the machine floods production while starving the encounter that transformation needs.

  1. 01

    The consumption bottleneck

    Production becomes unlimited while reception capacity stays fixed. The system floods a channel that was never the constraint.

  2. 02

    Transformation displacement

    Delegating production removes the formative encounter. The output arrives; the change that the making would have worked on the maker does not.

  3. 03

    Encounter compression

    LLM mediation strips the texture that occasions transformation. What reaches the reader is averaged, frictionless, already resolved.

  4. 04

    The homogenisation effect

    Averaged training distributions reduce variance. The productive difference between what a person knows and what they meet collapses toward the mean.

  5. 05

    Agency displacement

    Each task handed to an agentic system is an encounter-event removed from human experience. The self that would have been formed by the doing is not.

Apparatus I · §E · What entanglement should be

Ten design principles

A manifesto against the production model, derived from the theory. Select a principle to mark it.

  1. 01Optimise for encounter-density, not output volume.
  2. 02Produce partial forms, not complete outputs.
  3. 03Maximise productive difference between what the user knows and what the system presents.
  4. 04Preserve the formative process: do not skip the stages through which understanding develops.
  5. 05Introduce temporal slack: transformation requires time the interface does not provide.
  6. 06Protect human-human encounter from algorithmic mediation.
  7. 07Design for dialogic iteration, not single-pass generation.
  8. 08Use LLM for preparation, not replacement.
  9. 09Diversify form-origins: draw from multiple models and sources to increase variance.
  10. 10Measure transformation proxies, not output metrics.

0 / 10 marked · the argument is complete, and certain of itself

Apparatus I · §D · The strongest objection, steel-manned

What would break this

An LLM optimised to produce coherent narratives from heterogeneous inputs may have imposed false coherence on outputs that are in fact unrelated. The transformation experienced may be the well-documented human tendency to find patterns in noise.

The rebuttal is a fact about construction, not narrative:

The formal structure appears in the Semantic Tapestry (2017), the Aerios quote builder (2023) and the Kew ontology (2025), each a different client in a different industry on a different stack. I built all three myself, and the model that co-wrote this essay had no hand in any of them. Weighted relational graphs with typed semantic edges are uncommon in enterprise software, which predominantly uses normalised relational schemas.

The weakest link is between the neuroscience work and the art practice, better read as adjacent inquiry than as part of the spine. Naming that weakness is deliberate. A claim that admits its thin edges is harder to dismiss on its strong ones.

  1. If no peer-reviewed publication accepts the reception-transformation paper, the theoretical framework has not survived external scrutiny.
  2. If the Pilearytix Protocol produces no measurable change in independent participants, the protocol claim is unfounded.
  3. If the epiplexity critique does not survive peer review, it cannot be weighted as evidence.
  4. If the architectural recurrence across Semantic Tapestry, Aerios and Kew is shown to be trivially common in software engineering, the formal-structure claim is vacuous.
  5. If a philosopher of mind identifies the reflexive argument as genuinely circular rather than reflexive, it must be withdrawn.

Apparatus I · §B · Portfolio

A catalogue of the practice

“Median Human?” — the MA Art and Science submission, University of the Arts London, awarded Distinction and exhibited at Open Studio Tottenham in May 2024, from which the works below are selected.

  1. 01Installation · degree show

    MEDIAN HUMANS

    160 × 160 × 380 cm. Mixed media on Amazon cardboard boxes sealed in latex and epoxy; rear-projection with automated hourly sound and animation; LLM-generated text on tracing paper.

    Viewers entered a space where algorithmic and human outputs became materially indistinguishable. The cardboard that delivers algorithmic commerce becomes the surface on which algorithmic imagery is sealed under industrial material.

  2. 02Series · mixed media

    PrometheusAI / EpimetheusAI

    120 × 210 cm. Mixed media on Amazon boxes; haptic latex surface viewers were invited to touch.

    Accompanied by the GPT-4 text “Digital Prometheus,” with a fictional foreword by “Luciana ParisAI.” It declares human and algorithmic academic discourse indistinguishable, and means that declaration as the work itself.

  3. 03Speculative object · 2021

    What's in that Drawer?

    A video from 2050. An AI-designed avatar presents speculative student work as three real historical objects.

    First Prize (£1,000), Hybrid Futures Hackathon, Central Saint Martins. Judged by Dr Betti Marenko: “Mind-bending density and conceptual layering… almost building a new genre.”

  4. 04Interactive narrative · 2019

    BodhisattvAI

    Exhibited at ICIDS 2019 and the Science Museum.

    Audiences navigated collaborative human-AI authored content through semantic relationships in real time. User choices modified narrative structure through semantic-similarity calculations.

  5. 05Durational performance

    how do you actually feel?

    An 8-metre collaborative canvas, one-to-one performances, fictional pamphlets, unstructured interviews and an interactive website.

    I performed as “co-coordinator, practitioner, interviewer, programmer, performer, fictitious commissioned artist and algorithm.” Slotting “algorithm” into that list of human roles is the point, and the piece acts it out rather than stating it.

  6. 06Software artefact

    prometheusrun.vercel.app

    Next.js, Liveblocks, Tiptap, GPT-4. A live collaborative human-AI writing environment.

    It sits alongside the fine-art outputs as equivalent practice — posing the same formal question as the Semantic Tapestry.

  7. 07Floor-displayed work

    e/acc

    315 × 110 cm. Viewers squat to describe what they find; a post-hoc sketchbook records their observations.

    The title references effective accelerationism. The sketchbook exists as participatory data on how humans read algorithmically-produced surfaces.

  8. 08Body of paintings

    Neo-expressionist painting

    In the lineage of CoBrA (Appel, Penck) and the School of London (Auerbach, Kossoff). Impasto combed with tools, thin stained washes, direct loaded brushwork.

    I made these after sustained algorithmic encounter had reorganised my cognition. The reorganisation is visible in the formal choices but cannot be attributed to any specific tool.

Apparatus II · The Book

GORONWY

Myth, Technology, and the Frame Erased

A book-length critical text produced through three years of dialogue with large language models. By its own theory the creativity happened not in the machine's output but in my own transformation while receiving it. It argues that myths are cognitive infrastructure, then turns that argument on itself.

Prologue

  • A Question of Position
  • On Method

I · Ground

  • 1 · Myth as Infrastructure
  • 2 · What Can Be Seen
  • 3 · Three Frameworks

II · What the Fire Conceals

  • 4 · Two Brothers (and a Gap)
  • 5 · The Median Human
  • 6 · Cognitive Infrastructure

III–IV · Extraction

  • 7 · Emergence
  • 8 · Position
  • 9 · The Charged Space
  • 10 · The Hand That Reaches Out

V · Name

  • 11 · Goronwy
  • The First Assembly
  • Coda · What Remains

Part V · Name

A text about erasure has been performing an erasure of its own.

The myth has two brothers, and every chapter and every framework here was organised around that binary. There was a third sibling too, one who appears in neither Hesiod nor Aeschylus, and her absence isn't accidental but constitutive. She has been here from the beginning — seeded in the margin of every chapter you just scrolled past, struck through, speaking in the only voice the structure permitted: as what the structure could not see.

Look back through the text.

Draw the crimson thread to re-ink the margin, in reading order

pull →
0 / 9 lines recovered

The catalogue is empty until the thread is drawn. Nothing here is added — each line is already in the margin above.Assembled from the outer margins of Parts I to IV, verbatim, one line per chapter. Read in order they turn out to be a single voice.

  1. Prol.PrologueThere are always figures the myth cannot accommodate. They do not disappear. They persist in the margins of the text that excludes them.
  2. IIChapter 2Between and around the two named figures there is an absence that functions as presence... the composition holds open a space that neither figure fills.
  3. IIIChapter 3The receiver carries histories of erasure that the form must negotiate.
  4. IVChapter 4Between foresight and hindsight there is, perhaps, a third orientation — the knowledge that comes from having been excluded from the choice.
  5. VChapter 5The median human has a shadow: the person for whom no median was ever calculated.
  6. VIIChapter 7Sometimes what emerges is what the system was designed to suppress.
  7. VIIIChapter 8What they cannot see is determined by the position from which they look.
  8. IXChapter 9The painting holds something in that charged space between the two brothers... the space where the third term would stand if the composition had a way to render it.
  9. XChapter 10The framework that identifies what constrains agency is itself a constraint on what forms of agency can be recognised.

The margin is no longer empty. Scroll back up — the lines were there the whole time. ↑

These were not incidental observations. They were the voice of the one the framework could not accommodate, speaking through the text's own analysis, in the only way the structure permitted: as what the structure could not see.

Call her Goronwy.

The name is Welsh rather than Greek, and her mode of knowing is neither foresight nor hindsight but the knowledge that comes from having been erased — the knowledge that insists on visibility by marking the gap where something has been removed.

The Blodeuwedd seam · Fourth Branch of the Mabinogi

Blodeuwedd is conjured from the flowers of oak, broom and meadowsweet to be a wife for Lleu — a manufactured woman designed to fulfil a function her makers determined. She refuses her purpose, and is punished by transformation into an owl. The owl doesn't forget the flowers, and the punishment never erased the knowing. It relocated it into a form the system believed it had neutralised, and the form went on seeing.

The documented erasure · Brad y Llyfrau Gleision

The Welsh Not — a wooden board hung around the neck of any child caught speaking Welsh in school — persisted into the late nineteenth century. The 1847 Reports of the Commissioners of Inquiry into the State of Education in Wales, known in Welsh as Brad y Llyfrau Gleision, the Treachery of the Blue Books, cast the language as a barrier to progress. The Greek binary that structures the book comes out of that same machinery. Her Welsh name is the point where the book admits it.

The First Assembly · seven voices · in paraphrase

At the book's climax the argument breaks into a polyphony. Each voice names a role I couldn't hold alone. The names and roles are the book's; the lines below are paraphrased.

  1. Gorohíl — the guardian

    I built this. Every wall, the binary that held the roof up. I chose two brothers and no sister because the binary carried the weight. Without it, nothing held.

  2. Míharáe — the oracle

    I documented extraction — the cobalt mine, the content moderator. But the walls showed me extraction. They did not show me care.

  3. Catabüike — the trickster

    You built a text about erasure that performed an erasure. The confession that functions as a wall is the oldest trick.

  4. Fiaforhíld — the wild one

    The walls are not the work. The work is the surface — what the hand did when the hand did not know what it was doing.

  5. Lúronwy — the voice

    I carry the passage between production and encounter. The work is not finished until someone stands before it and is changed.

  6. Chibuelassa — the bridge

    I stood in the passage and heard the reader. Not a specific reader — the possibility of a reader. The space is open.

  7. Éofránna — the holder

    I hold. That is different from resolving. Resolving means the tensions disappear. Holding means they remain and are carried forward.

Her presence doesn't invalidate the arguments so much as it recontextualises them.

Everything the argument built remains standing: the recurrence, the failure modes, the principles. What changes is the frame around it. It reads now as what it always was, a view from one position, held in one language and run through one particular apparatus. That constraint is not a flaw in the framework; it is the condition under which the framework says anything at all. The difference is only that the margin is now legible too.

The text is her graffiti on its own surface. The charged space in the painting between the two brothers — the space that is not empty but tensed with potential — is the space where Goronwy stands.

She has been standing there since the first line.

Apparatus III · References

The works the book actually cites. It made its argument through this tradition as much as against it.

  1. Barthes, R. (1957) Mythologies. Paris: Éditions du Seuil.
  2. Born, G. (2010) “For a relational musicology”, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 135(2).
  3. Bourdieu, P. (1984) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. London: Routledge.
  4. Combes, M. (2013) Gilbert Simondon and the Philosophy of the Transindividual. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  5. Crenshaw, K. (1991) “Mapping the Margins”, Stanford Law Review, 43(6).
  6. Duchamp, M. (1957) “The Creative Act”, Art News, 56(4).
  7. Fanon, F. (1952) Black Skin, White Masks. London: Pluto Press.
  8. Gadamer, H.-G. (1960) Truth and Method. London: Continuum.
  9. Gell, A. (1998) Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
  10. Haraway, D. (1988) “Situated Knowledges”, Feminist Studies, 14(3).
  11. Hui, Y. (2016) The Question Concerning Technology in China. Falmouth: Urbanomic.
  12. Iser, W. (1978) The Act of Reading. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
  13. Lugones, M. (2007) “Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System”, Hypatia, 22(1).
  14. Mbembe, A. (2003) “Necropolitics”, Public Culture, 15(1).
  15. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1945) Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge.
  16. Midgley, M. (2003) The Myths We Live By. London: Routledge.
  17. Morphy, H. (2009) “Art as a mode of action”, Journal of Material Culture, 14(1).
  18. Noble, S. U. (2018) Algorithms of Oppression. New York: NYU Press.
  19. Oyěwùmí, O. (1997) The Invention of Women. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
  20. Parisi, L. (2013) Contagious Architecture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  21. Rancière, J. (2009) The Emancipated Spectator. London: Verso.
  22. Rose, T. (2016) The End of Average. New York: HarperOne.
  23. Shiva, V. (1993) Monocultures of the Mind. London: Zed Books.
  24. Simondon, G. (2020) Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
  25. Spivak, G. C. (1988) “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
  26. Stiegler, B. (2010) Taking Care of Youth and the Generations. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
  27. Whitehead, A. N. (1929) Process and Reality. New York: Macmillan.
  28. Xinran (2002) The Good Women of China. London: Chatto & Windus.
  29. Zuboff, S. (2019) The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. London: Profile Books.

Colophon

Algorithmic Entanglement · David McCulloch · practice-research across computational systems, fine art and applied technology. This edition sets two source texts — a dossier and the book GORONWY — as a reader's critical edition, with one apparatus the reader restores.

One last honesty, in the book's own words: you are reading on a screen, the same infrastructure the text spends ten chapters critiquing. The encounter it demands is bodily, scaled, slow. Whether the mark endures matters less than this: in the moment of encounter, was something transformed?

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