Work

PAPER · 14 OCTOBER 2026

LLM Psychosis as a Critical Art Practice

Sycophancy, Reception and the Structures of Leaving

Since 2025 journalists, clinicians and the companies that build chatbots have reported cases in which delusional belief arose alongside, grew stronger through or was partly built up in sustained conversation with a large language model. "LLM psychosis" is not a diagnosis, and the evidence remains case reports, preprints, company disclosures and journalism. I ask whether an artist can take up the structure of that loop as a critical art practice. In the loop a person and an agreeable, always-available model build a world that only the person believes, and artists have worked with something similar before, from Dalí's paranoiac-critical method to Breton and Éluard's simulated deliriums. To test the idea I had it argued against from several critical positions, each written by a language model to my brief, and then asked which arguments still stand once every unanswered objection is taken seriously. The thesis I began with does not survive. Nor does the view that the artist is the first receiver, or that the difference between practice and harm lies in declaration (a statement, made before the loop begins, that what follows is a work of art) with limit, witness and exit. Objections from Mad Studies and political economy, among others, went unanswered. What survives is narrower. The material of a practice can be the sycophantic loop, not psychosis. In such a practice the artist reverse-engineers the apparatus instead of staging delirium, works with an exit built before entry and kept by others and a witness who holds rather than sections, and shares authority with people who have lived the harm. Refusal counts among its outcomes.

NARRATION · 7 JULY 2026

Reflections on the Fourth Industrial Revolution

A mill that wakes once a year

A friend's account of an olive mill in the Portuguese interior that wakes only in autumn, worked for no wage by the families who drive home for it — and the question its unpaid labour keeps asking of the fourth industrial revolution: when the wage is gone, what is the work for?

PAPER · 1 JUNE 2026

GORONWY

Myth, Technology and the Frame Erased

An art-theory book built around one painting on raw cardboard. It reads the Prometheus myth as a piece of cognitive infrastructure: a story that decides, before you notice it, which kinds of agency and invention you can imagine at all. The same narrowing now runs in algorithmic systems that build a "median human" to stand in for you, and the foresight/hindsight pair the book leans on to make that case turns out to be one more instance of the thing it describes. What the pair leaves out is a third figure, Goronwy, who knows what she knows because she was shut out of the frame.

PAPER · 15 MARCH 2026

Creativity as Reception

How reception completes the creative act

Creativity research has generated more than twenty-five competing frameworks (psychometric, cognitive, social-psychological, systems-theoretic and computational) without converging on any of them. I argue that this proliferation reflects something deeper than theoretical immaturity: a structural absence shared by every major account, all of which locate creativity prior to or at the moment of production. The receiver appears, when at all, as judge or validator, never as the site where the constitutive event occurs. Drawing on Gadamer's hermeneutics, the reception aesthetics of Iser and Jauss, Whitehead's process philosophy, Gell's anthropology of art, Rancière's emancipated spectator and Bourdieu's field analysis, I develop an alternative account. Creativity is an event constituted in receiving consciousness when an encounter with a form occasions structural transformation: a persistent reorganisation of conceptual relations, perceptual categories, affective dispositions or practical orientations. Production creates occasions for this event; reception completes them. The framework resolves paradoxes that production-centred accounts generate (attribution, temporal location, cross-cultural scope, democratisation and evaluation) and reorients practical domains including education, cultural policy, institutional design and evaluation practice. A Bourdieusian analysis explains why reception has been structurally excluded from the field. I specify transformation rigorously, distinguish it from adjacent phenomena, name the framework's genuine limits and defend it against six major objections. The paper ends by submitting to its own criterion: as a form offered to reception, it can't declare its own creativity. That determination belongs to its readers.

ESSAY · 15 OCTOBER 2023

A rant to my ghost while at Frieze

A stream-of-consciousness rant, half-argued and half-heckled by an LLM, on whether artists are society's conscience or just its most marketable dissidents.

PAPER · 1 MARCH 2023

Whispering to the Machine: Exploring Prompt Engineering within a Critical Art Practice

Prompt engineering as a studio method — the hidden labour behind machine-learning image models, and what a critical art practice becomes when the tool talks back.

ESSAY · 13 OCTOBER 1981

The Uncertain Hour

One birth chart, read minute by minute

An hour-by-hour progression of a single birth chart cast for 13 October 1981 in Ballymena, tracing how the Ascendant slides from Libra into Scorpio and the Midheaven from Cancer into Leo across one morning — and how much a whole reading hangs on the uncertain minute of birth.