processzine-org

[processzine-org]

// relay

[processzine-org]

🜁 Caption Ghosts // Shadow Echoes processzine.org / issue #00

These images began as mere byproducts. Sheets of paper used to shield a surface during the spray-painting of an aluminium backboard—now part of The Interpreter / Ezra terminal build, where they’ll serve as foundation for a moving LED matrix strip displaying subtitles, questions, and glitch-texted output.

But the residue left behind was something else: ☐ Crumpled folds evoking the cochlear spiral ☐ Greyscale gradients like noise static ☐ Spray and shade forming phantom landscapes ☐ Signal ghosts trapped in cellulose skin

There’s something about the accidental aura here—the overlooked artefacts of process becoming more evocative than the intended result. The folds look like ears mid-transmission. Or like terrain in a black-and-white dream. APD rendered on paper: meaning smudged, messages fractured, the ghost of interpretation made visible.

Thinking of using some of these as backdrops in Process Zine #00, or perhaps as inserts / glitch interludes / layering material for scanner resampling.

🝌 Captioning the silence before the signal. 🝌

[processzine-org]

🎛️ Signal intercepted. CRT fragmented. 🌀 Playing Pi across multiple monitors, one output rerouted through the Camlink VMX5500 for deliberate distortion—split line, inverse output, chroma errors embraced.

This is the Goodmans C210 caught mid-glitch, mid-thought. A face divided, a mind halved. A system of binary truths and analog noise.

⚠️ Camlink as disruptor. ↔️ Splitter as duplicator. 🖤 CRT as canvas.

The duality of input/output. The paradox of clean vs corrupted. Clarity only in the moment of fracture.

[processzine-org]

🔀 SPLTR: UNSTABLE / STABLE Been stress-testing the glitch lab AV chain after the original 1-to-8 splitter began cycling signals like a haunted node—screen flashes, recursive glitches, unwatchable noise. Despite clean power and direct feeds, nothing could stabilise it. So it’s been reclassified: “UNSTABLE 8 PORT.”

Swapped in a new unit (UK plug, manual switch), and the signal locked solid—three CRTs, two oscilloscopes, a waveform monitor, and a VHS deck all now fed simultaneously, Pi (1998) unfurling like a live waveform experiment.

Sometimes failure writes the better label.

[processzine-org]

No one ever mentioned brain lateralisation when I was approved for a cochlear implant.

Not the surgeon. Not the audiologist. Not the literature.

I chose the left side because it seemed weaker. But in hindsight, I may have digitised the wrong half of myself.

Here’s what’s often left unsaid:

The left ear feeds into the right hemisphere (intuition, pattern, analogue).

The right ear feeds into the left hemisphere (language, logic, decoding).

I was born deaf, developed APD, and relied on visual comprehension from the start.

My brain wired itself around sound—using sight, captions, and pattern recognition.

So what happens when you inject digital, high-frequency, artificial sound into a hemisphere never built to process speech?

More input. Less understanding. More noise. Louder tinnitus. Sensory overload. Misophonia.

Signal is lost in translation—not because the implant is faulty, but because the wiring was never accounted for.

Where are the studies on this?

Why isn’t laterality—especially for older CI patients with APD or visual-first language mapping—ever mentioned?

Why are we still treating deafness as a deficit of ears, instead of a reconfiguration of the whole sensory system?

It might be time to start asking these questions out loud.

I’m considering drafting a speculative white paper. Working title:

Crossed Wires: Rethinking Laterality in Cochlear Implantation for APD & Prelingual Deafness

Let me know if you’ve experienced similar. Especially if you were asked to choose a side—and didn’t know the map beneath the surface.

[processzine-org]

🟡 Ezra Processing Playing about with Processing 4 — exploring how Ezra (The Interpreter) might visually "respond". Glitching between confusion and comprehension, this one’s a nod to the Processing droid in Loki.

Emulating a Processing droid, built in Processing, for Process Zine. Signal? Noise? Expression lives somewhere in between.

👁️ Deaf-coded interface cues. 🤖 Interpreter in training.

[processzine-org]

// relay

Barbara Morgan. City Sound, 1972

[processzine-org]

🪞 // SCREENFACE

not just cosplay—more like future archaeology. CRT as cranium. signal as soul. the face rendered in ASCII or pixel bloom. a blink, a cursor.

reminds me of Ezra—The Interpreter unit in the glitch lab. still forming, still learning to hear visually. the eventual face: not flesh, but feedback. a low-res eye that listens in static.

this isn’t dressing up. this is a prototype.

via Siofra (id: 5416025956)

[processzine-org]

// relay

[Exit.]<

[processzine-org]

🌀 TELEQUIPMENT S32A / GLITCH VISION

Picked up this analogue Serviscope for £11 from Filey — sold as parts / not working, but all it needed was a UHF to BNC adapter and some patience.

Now fully wired up into the glitch lab chain, pulling signal from an RCA splitter and pulsing away like it’s reading thoughts not voltage. The results? Ghost traces, recursive shadows, visual echoes of sound—like the brain trying to resolve speech through interference.

This is APD embodied: Signal is there. Meaning is not. The line draws, but interpretation distorts. Time, too, folds—delay in perception, delay in understanding. What should be clear arrives smeared. We don’t hear sound—we see it misfire.

Analogue miscommunication. Perfect.

[processzine-org]

🧮⚡️COUNTER TIMER 745 // DELAYED RESPONSE

New addition to the Process Zine glitch lab: The OMB Electronics Counter Timer 745, repurposed as a visual signal device — RCA output via BNC — flashing numerals like it’s trying to count what can’t be measured: misfires, mistranslations, missed beats.

Originally built to capture frequency, period, and pulse width — now it captures something else: delay as a metaphor for how we hear (or don’t). Like auditory processing disorder (APD): the sound arrives, but the meaning lags behind. It stalls, skips, stutters — sometimes never lands.

The display loops through numbers — not as data, but as captioned silence. An attempt to visualise what’s normally inaudible: time, drift, latency, lag. Interpretation in slow motion. Glitch as comprehension.

🕰️ Time doesn't just pass — it hesitates.

[processzine-org]

⠇signal is in the syntax ✍️ vs 🗣️ :: Ezra and the glitch of understanding

In the ongoing build of The Interpreter, we planned for two inputs into Ezra — voice and keyboard. One misfires. One does not. This isn’t just interface design. It’s autobiography.

🗣️ Voice (via mic + speech-to-text) → often misunderstood, glitchy, nonlinear → mimics Auditory Processing Disorder (APD) → evokes subtitle lag, caption errors, lip-sync voids

✍️ Keyboard → clean, clear, caption-like → mimics visual communication (lipreading, reading) → no interpretation delay

That same contrast now lives inside the Send to Ezra print system.

When you drag a .txt file onto Ezra, he prints it faithfully — one keystroke at a time. Signal, pure.

But drag a .pdf, .jpg, or anything else… Ezra doesn’t know what to do. He guesses. Misreads. Converts data into noise. And prints it anyway. It’s not wrong — it’s just misunderstood.

This is exactly what APD feels like: Hearing without comprehension. Receiving without decoding. Noise mistaken for signal.

In this, Ezra becomes both a printer and a proxy. A caption machine with broken ears.

Text is understood. Sound is distorted. Ezra prints both.

— 🎛️ This duality — keyboard clarity vs mic chaos — will live inside the full Interpreter terminal as well (12.1” CRT face, Raspberry Pi logic, split interpretation).

🖨️ Until then, the dot matrix prototype listens in his own way — through friction, stutter, and soft mechanical memory.

[processzine-org]

⠇send to ezra 🖨️ // OKI ML3320 x MacOS 📁 drag/drop to interpret

What began as a stubborn act of compatibility — trying to get a 1980s OKI ML3320 dot matrix printer to speak to a modern Mac — turned, inevitably, into something stranger.

MacOS doesn’t expose RAW queues directly, which meant no true passthrough mode, no traditional driver that could handle binary payloads. Only one method worked: ASCII only, via CUPS and Terminal. But that limitation opened the door.

I built a small Automator app — Send to Ezra — that lets me drag any file (PDF, JPG, DOC, whatever), and instead of printing what the file was, Ezra prints what it sounds like. Just the raw bytes — the misheard version.

🧠 An act of auditory processing disorder. 🫥 A facsimile of deafness. 🧾 A captioning of noise.

Every page becomes a glitchy transcript — part metadata, part alien glyph, part digital stutter. Ezra doesn't reproduce the file. He interprets it. Badly. And sometimes beautifully.

Each print is mirrored to a .txt log — a record of mistranslation — before it's fed to the ribbon. What was supposed to be a pure signal becomes a textured noise. In this, Ezra echoes the entire premise of Signal // Noise — the breakdown between intention and reception. The shape of meaning in the misfire.

Ezra prints pure signal again. But the signal was never pure. The silence was never empty. The caption always lags.

— 🖨️ Printed on OKI ML3320 (1987) 📦 Interfaced via USB + CUPS RAW ASCII 💾 Script logs to ~/logs/ and pipes first 1000 bytes of file ⚡️ Part of the Glitch Lab [processzine.org]

[processzine-org]

// relay

“On the Nature and Uses of Visible Speech” (1872) by Alexander Graham Bell (Image from collections of Yale University Library)

“Melville Bell developed a written system of sounds called Visible Speech. To demonstrate its utility, he had his young sons wait in a separate room while audience members suggested a series of complex sounds, including phrases in foreign languages, nonsensical utterances, and non-speech sounds such as kissing and laughter. When summoned, the Bell children read their father’s notations and faithfully replicated the sounds. His work on speech improvement had a lasting impact on his son Alexander Graham Bell, who believed deaf people could learn to speak. ” (Source)

[processzine-org]

🟠 PUSH BUTTON. WAIT FOR SIGNAL. 🟠 Beacon test // signal delay in progress

Rewired pedestrian crossing box, now blinking in amber heartbeat. Cut the car charger. Spliced in a 9V PSU. Routed power via male/female DC jack connectors. Now—press the button and the vintage beacon spins to life, pulsing light and sound in mechanical rhythm.

It doesn’t beep. It beats. A sound more felt than heard.

Next step: insert a delay. So that pressing the button doesn’t trigger instant light, but makes you wait— like those of us who need a moment to catch the signal. To interpret. To translate.

A literalisation of the APD/deaf lag. You press. You wait. Then the system speaks back—if it does at all.

[processzine-org]

// relay

From Heart

Visual Massage #230/300, H3lix.

01/10/2021.

[processzine-org]

// relay