iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Feileacan McCormick @feileacan.net · 27/09/2026

There's always been a disconnect between the now and the idea of now we embody (McLuhan posited a 50 year lag), arguing that our world has compressed that, there's still the claim to be made that we generally suffer from "tech-lag" on the whole (jetlag-like disorientation at perception vs. reality)

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Feileacan McCormick @feileacan.net · 26/09/2026

The more I sit with it, the more 'sensemaking' as both a practice (and as a means of describing why much of my work involves instrumentation) seems ever more resonant.

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Feileacan McCormick @feileacan.net · 26/09/2026

"There’s nothing in the world that isn’t already known, that can’t be made instantly legible by assimilating it to some stereotype. Post-literate culture is deeply incurious." samkriss.substack.com/p/reading-is...

samkriss.substack.com

Reading is magic

What will happen in our second peasanthood

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Feileacan McCormick @feileacan.net · 25/09/2026

awake, caffeinated, thinking about when exactly does information transition into memetic form. Is it upon its initial "publication", or upon dissemination? Must it be replicated by others (hosts) before it qualifies?

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Is practicing gardening* the only way through? * a prolonged process & practice of maintenance, preparation and nurture (i.e. slow, delayed rewards and anticipatory long-term thinking)

process snap from one of this summer's many explorations into artificial life.

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The downside of a new Peter Watts book right now is I'm frightfully busy, but also heck yes, and I shall carve time for 'Fold Catastrophes' asap.

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Feileacan McCormick @feileacan.net · 22/09/2026

It's easy to be negative in the face of what seems like a turbulent, uncertain future. That said I think we should fight to nurture wonder and a sense of openness about what our futures could embody, from there it might not be easier, but it sure is more motivating.d

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The last couple of years I've been obsessing over exploring (especially ML) algorithms at their most minimal, where compression bleeds into noise. nathan.rs/posts/gzip-lm/ underlines in a very tangible way just how fascinating the edge between compression and information can be.

nathan.rs

Can gzip be a language model?

A while back I wrote about language modeling without neural networks, where I generated Shakespeare with an unbounded n-gram model: no weights, no training, …

Feileacan McCormick @feileacan.net · 20/09/2026

Is it a truly a Sunday if you haven't made something so cursed god would weep?

Feileacan McCormick @feileacan.net · 17/09/2026

Impressed beyond measure, and a little slack-jawed over the most recent chapter.

Feileacan McCormick @feileacan.net · 17/09/2026

We need to bring friction back to our computational substrates.

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Feileacan McCormick @feileacan.net · 16/09/2026

Now, more than ever, nurturing community (especially physically) is more important than ever in order to have a foundation resistant to whatever fresh virtual shoggoth emerges with curious gifts and experiences.

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Feileacan McCormick @feileacan.net · 16/09/2026

Being in the countryside is a continuous reminder of just how eldritch reality used to be.

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Feileacan McCormick @feileacan.net · 15/09/2026

There’s a lovely kind of full circle moment today when I realised that for the first time in 15 years I’m collaborating with a dear, old friend … once again on video (me) and sound (him) in a former, converted grain silo

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Feileacan McCormick @feileacan.net · 15/09/2026

One of the (many) things I'm immensely grateful as an artist is those moments that offer the opportunity to imagine something slightly different, and then bring that into being. It's akin to adding a line of verse to an epic poem: the story of the space/site as a common weave we might add to.

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Feileacan McCormick @feileacan.net · 14/09/2026

bcantrill.dtrace.org/2026/09/13/t... by @bcantrill.bsky.social highlights the crisis we are in: "the claims (...) are the most extraordinary a technologist can make, and we must demand evidence commensurate with the claims". Tech almost always ends up problematic, this is a human issue.

bcantrill.dtrace.org

The contagion of fear | The Observation Deck

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Feileacan McCormick @feileacan.net · 14/09/2026

trying to make a (pet) shoggoth only nibble lightly, send grimoires

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Feileacan McCormick @feileacan.net · 14/09/2026

Finally understanding why I've been obsessing over certain themes/topics the last year, thank goodness it's actually making sense.

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Feileacan McCormick @feileacan.net · 12/09/2026

Struggling with how to better format (and present) research that springs from artistic processes. Not everything is "under" the resulting work itself, yet, nor can it entirely be disentangled from it. Does on capitulate and just do something akin to blogpost braindumps?

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Feileacan McCormick @feileacan.net · 11/09/2026

awake, caffeinated, and thinking about feedback loops in creative process: most of my work involves in some way building a process/system, this in turn needs to act as a an externalisation, as well as a feeedback loop that provides both a contact surface for intuition, as well as useful frictions.

Feileacan McCormick @feileacan.net · 11/09/2026

getting up early and enjoying a good cup of coffee, just to realise you brewed decaf.

Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 10/09/2026

This summer has left me reeling like a man mugged in a meadow, which if nothing else, is at least seasonally on brand.

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Reposted by Feileacan McCormick

Some folks will claim that this is hyperbolic, but what I wish people would understand is that tech initiatives like this serve as a means of eroding consent and lower the barrier for the persistent capture of people’s image, voice, data, or whatever else a gadget can glean.

pcmag.com

Apple's New Siri Recap Turns Every Apple Watch Into a Mass Surveillance Nightmare

Apple's always-listening AI feature promises neat summaries of your daily conversations, but it forces everyone around you into a nonconsensual recording experiment.

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shower thought: is democratisation (of tools/lowered bar to speciously "HQ" content production) a simultaneous expansion of the contact surface for memetic contagion? This whole fly business wouldn't nearly be the meme bit it is if it weren't so much easier as we can just point an LLM at the data.

Is there a coined "law" for the experience of when the more you write, the more flustered you become?

Feileacan McCormick @feileacan.net · 09/09/2026

The whole fly-brain scan business bothers me, even though it's not in any way an uploaded brain (more like a hardware map, at best, if I've understood correctly) people are immediately toying with it in the most casual, unthinkingly cruel ways.

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in this late summer heat it's a game of chicken between me and my desktop as to who'll melt first.

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Feileacan McCormick @feileacan.net · 09/09/2026

there's a common misconception that a focus on ecological problems ignores social and economic ones, I'd argue that any ecological focus takes for granted that social and economical problems need to be tackled throughly as part of any true attempt at improving the world.

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Feileacan McCormick @feileacan.net · 07/09/2026

I'm not sure if heartening/demoralizing that "growing" a DOOM clone with NCAs even on modern hardware is way less performant than my old 486. Many tasks, all failing successfully.

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Feileacan McCormick @feileacan.net · 07/09/2026

The things i've been obsessed with recently, and have no reason not to consider a long term obsession-worthy, are all small. This certainly is a curious, unexpected development.

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Feileacan McCormick @feileacan.net · 07/09/2026

today's steady progress towards tomorrow (fewer and fewer bugs).

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Feileacan McCormick @feileacan.net · 05/09/2026

my side quests are spawning their own side quests, this may, or may not be, a problem.

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Feileacan McCormick @feileacan.net · 04/09/2026

Considering the soft, fuzzy potential of computation.

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Feileacan McCormick @feileacan.net · 15/05/2026

finding a useful framing of a lot of the fanciful, mystical narratives around so-call «machine consciousness» and «AI-collaboration» to be (info) hygiene issues: a lack of suitable mental defences/rituals against viral stories projected onto the specious appearance of «real»

Feileacan McCormick @feileacan.net · 08/05/2026

gearing up for my haruspicy summer of sacrificing jpgs and reading their numeric entrails

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Feileacan McCormick @feileacan.net · 05/05/2026

every hot-take, viral notion, etc. as a continuous negotiated attention canvas where memetic contagion visualised reveals a tangible, organic free-for-all of competing info payloads within an ecosystem of networked minds

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Feileacan McCormick @feileacan.net · 03/05/2026

Having handwriting akin to the scratchings of a pigeon suffering a stroke isn’t the best combo when combined with a notebook-first kind of process

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Reposted by Feileacan McCormick

Entangled Others @entangledothers.bsky.social · 30/04/2026

Belatedly, a long 🧵 on our latest work, (di)atomic garden, an exploration of radiation’s mutative power, some of its history, and its afterlives in the present. The work began with our encounter with the “atomic garden,” or “gamma garden”:

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Feileacan McCormick @feileacan.net · 19/04/2026

origins of site-specific thought / grunnlag for stedskunst som språk

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Feileacan McCormick @feileacan.net · 11/04/2026

10:49AM, partially clear skies, tendency to haze, intermittent sun the messy negotiation of creek, marsh, and beavers: the detritus of last years growth at the cusp of spring, meltwater and decay (to jump/wade/slip on path to new geographical heights)

Feileacan McCormick @feileacan.net · 02/04/2026

10:04AM, overcast at edge of marsh-filled indentations on the hill-ridge: the complexity of growth (seemingly) inverted downwards (an anchor in the concept of home)