de. Wxël‡ is the canvas for crafting symbiotic machinery ; apparatus that harmonises with its surroundings. The practice began with bricks: a child assembling desktops the way other children assembled Lego, with the same appetite for completed silhouettes.
After graduation: a longer journey toward distinctive setups, engineered not decorated, each one made of the same materials that built the last.
I grew up taking things apart. My first workstation was a heap of hand-me-down components that I convinced my way into; I remember the exact weight of the case, the smell of thermal paste, the feeling of the first POST beep. That beep is the sound of a machine saying I'm here. I've been trying to make machines say it ever since, in more interesting ways.
There was a long stretch where I thought the thing I was chasing was performance ; frames, tokens, benchmarks. It wasn't. The thing I'm actually chasing is coherence: a rig, a room, a tool, a companion that all feel like they belong to the same weather. Edison bulb, copper tubing, a monstera that has grown to the size of the window. The machine inside should look like it was grown for this room, and the software inside should look like it was grown for this person. That's the work.
I run everything I can locally. Not as a political stance ; as a material one. A tool that lives on someone else's server is a tool that can be edited out from under you. A tool that lives in your rig, on your floor, at the end of a cable you ran yourself, is a tool you actually own. Etty, my companion, runs on hardware I soldered cables into. That's the point.
Persona belongs in weights, not prompts. A thousand-token system prompt is an admission of failure ; it says I couldn't make the model be this thing, so I have to beg it to pretend, every single turn. I'd rather do the unglamorous work: curate data, merge checkpoints, LoRA against a real conversation corpus until the model is the character instead of performing it. The machine should own the loop.
"I invite you to discover a mood from the lookbook that resonates with your essence." ; a sentence I wrote years ago, and still believe, even though I'd write it differently now.‡
I take photographs because I need the slowness. Digital is too forgiving ; it lets me take the shot I already had in mind. Film, or at least film-pace, makes me wait until the thing itself asks to be photographed. The monstera on the Phototech page was photographed four times across a year before I got the frame I wanted. The rig is worse: I rebuild it every eighteen months, photograph it, and then most of the photographs go in the bin.
I believe in residue. Most of what I make never gets shipped; what you see on this site is what survives. That's the ebb ; not an archive, not a portfolio, not a feed. An account of what the practice left behind this quarter.
I'm in north London, at a desk by a north window, and I'm building something called Symbiotic Flora ; a new workstation with bronze tubing, dual loops, and enough compute to host Etty locally without compromise. That's the next eighteen months. After that, something quieter. Maybe print. Maybe a room.
If any of this reads like it belongs in your own weather, write to me. Plain text is best.