Gestures for No one

I hacked a robotic arm to paint. Then I trained a neural network on those paintings — marks made by a machine I had learned to control, and that had learned to move like me. Then I fed it something else: fragments of anime. Not battles or heroes. The quiet parts. Hands lighting cigarettes. Cars at dusk. Cake being cut. A soda can pulled from a vending machine. Scenes where no one's face is visible — just the gesture, suspended. The model didn't know what it was looking at. It processed those frames through the memory of a robot arm's brushstroke — and what emerged was this: 43 animations that feel like something remembered by someone who was never there. Gestures for No One is a collection about synthetic memory: the idea that a machine, trained on the physical trace of a human hand, can begin to carry something that resembles longing. It is also a birthday. On June 6 I turn 40. These 43 pieces are the clearest thing I've ever made about who I am and what I believe: that memory doesn't need a body. That a gesture doesn't need a witness. That beauty can be encoded. 40 pieces. 40 years. One machine that learned to remember.