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After "The Final Clash" and "A Bird's Hunger", the third scroll in the Witch of Bubbles epos is ready. I still need to find a fitting name for the bundle, hopefully something more imaginative than The Blue Scrolls, although that could also serve the purpose of igniting curiosity when said with deep voice in the mist. The story is growing from the inside, gathering volume and substance, the writings are longer as there are more elements to connect. I love the process as much as I enjoy the result. Again, the starting point is an experimental print, an image that brought a story to my mind, and the rest is just fun and subtle commentary.
Part(y)ings and Meetings On Ibikonos, nothing ever ended. The days didn't last long and the nights felt like an eternal fluctuation between sunset and dawn. The beats were hard and gravity optional after midnight. The Mighty Giraffe belonged there. He wore mirror sunglasses and Hawaiian shirts tailored by beings with six arms and no sense of restraint. And that was how he danced across the span of three dance floors, knocking over a moon here and there, while he casually sipped drinks that fizzed, drinks that glowed, and drinks that changed form. He was a beloved figure of the island that drifted through intergalactic space like a very confident mistake, pulsing with music, light, and the certainty that whatever was happening was important. And then, DJ TCTBT (TooCoolToBeTrue) got on stage. She was also wearing mirror glasses and Mighty Giraffe will always remember how the stars dimmed when she took place behind the decks, in a sequin jacket that shone brighter than all the three suns that revolved like orange, pink and lime neon disco balls in the iridescent vanilla sky of day. From the first notes of DJ TCTBT's set, the Mighty Giraffe felt it: His long neck was vibrating in unprecedented resonance, as if someone had finally tuned him correctly. He was unmistakably in love, which in retrospect did not improve his judgment. That set lasted five centuries, and for seven more afterwards The Mighty Giraffe would argue that these were the best five centuries of his uncalculably long life. During that time he learned new moves, tried new drinks, made new friends, and certainly didn't want that set to end. But, like all things except ancient beings that Time simply forgets, DJ TCTBT's DJ set one day came to an end, and she disappeared in the rainbow fog created by the fog artisan High Head Dragon, whose services cost the organizers one third of the revenue. Ibikonos continued and you can still hear the booming bass, as the party planet is drifting across the galaxies. For the Mighty Giraffe, however, things would never be the same. He had experienced the Perfect Moment, the mystical and extremely rare convergence of Time and Space where all things reach equilibrium, also known as Nirvana III in the In-Between Universe. He knew that no matter…
The first publication of project philomuse is ready! It's a combination of stories of plants that thrive away from their lands of origin and testimonies of experiences of migration. The subjective map becomes again an excellent medium for simulating both movement and connection. The illustrations (with the exception of the pistachio, which I made myself) are emojis, so commonly found in text messaging, which has become second nature for mobile populations. I can definitely see this map as part of a larger project, similar to identitours.
From the introduction: "The pistachio trees, the parrots, and I, all come from warmer lands. This daily view becomes the starting point for bringing together stories of plants and people who have taken root and thrived in unexpected places, as proof that everything's going to be all right, as we move, replant, reroot – and thrive." Philomuse will be present at the Extraterrestrial Publishing Zine Fair, at Dokhuis, Rotterdam, on 31/01/2026.
After the Final Clash, one more image emerged, this time through a more intentional process. What looked at me from the paper was clearly a girl talking to a dragonfly in an open field. While I was writing and preparing the publication of "The Final Clash", already in love with the scroll as a publishing format, I was considering turning that second drawing into the background story of the Witch of Bubbles. Meanwhile, a friend saw the drawing and proclaimed it was a pirate ship emerging from water. That's when I decided to open the subject online, which brought a third vision, that of the baby bird with open beak, in a nest. Effectively, "A Bird's Hunger" fuses all these interpretations, and is therefore a philomuse publication, as the collaboration element is central. Further, it is an addition not only to the saga inaugurated by "The Final Clash" but also to the scrolls, which will hopefully grow in number.
A Bird’s Hunger At the edge of the marsh, a girl with a long crinoline dress was marching among the thinning reeds, jumping over the little streams that rushed along toward the sea. A dragonfly the color of old copper and river-glass followed the girl, and despite its frantic winging it struggled to keep up. Still it found time to tilt its head, as if the world were a riddle worth solving. The girl, both fierce and awkward, marching like bobbing fire through the uneven marshlands, was thought by some to be a princess, coming as she did from a household of tapestries and velvet curtains, while others called her a witch, because she had been seen talking to the moon and nodding to the wind. “They’re here,” the girl said and the dragonfly vibrated, affirming the rumors that had been moving beneath the water. They stopped and turned their gaze to the bay. The world fell silent. Next to them, in the crook of a sparse and naked wind-bent tree, a nest trembled. A small bird lifted its head and opened its beak to the sky but didn’t make a sound. The girl looked from the nest to the water, and from the water to the dragonfly. “They’re starving,” she said. “Yes,” said the dragonfly. “What are you going to do?” At that moment the water bulged, as if the sea were holding its breath. The featherless bird pipped faintly. Then the water began to split, and the bow of an enormous ship rose slowly to the surface with a creaking sound, like a heavy door opening. This was a pirate ship returning from the place where lost things go, a construct of both reality and myth, unkempt and majestic at once, its golden sails unfurled, its carved figurehead blinking free. The girl felt the old pull in her chest: She could sense what the ship was bearing, and the bird’s hunger was the omen which told her that what she sensed was true. The ship drifted closer, its…
During an experiment with textures and surfaces I accidentally made the print which revealed the amazing story of the creation of the Rift of Regrettable Decisions. I fine-lined it, so that everyone could see what I was seeing, and turned it into a wonderful A3 scroll publication, with the poster of the Battle on the one side and the story on the other! More prints and stories will follow soon.
Before you read the story, look at the wonderful animation made by the multi-talented Jon Miller (who wrote the music for "Ways In and Ways Out").

The Final Clash The battle of the Mighty Giraffe and the Witch of Bubbles took place in the In-Between Universe, at the extreme upper left corner of the Trentulon Galaxy and didn't come as a shock to the denizens of all the twelve kingdoms of the eight known dimensions. It didn't shock them, as they had been expecting it for some time, but it did shake their planets, that were hit by unprecedented earthquakes that lasted a millennium. Before this catastrophic and monumental battle, for which songs were sang and tomes were written, the Mighty Giraffe and the Witch of Bubbles used to be best friends. No one knew who started the fight or even what the fight was about, but of course everyone had their theories. The two of them had stopped talking either to each other or in fact to anyone, consumed as they were by their mutual hatred. There were 6128 different rumors and 404 legends circulating in the 256 planets from which perhaps only the testimony of the United Archivists of the Twelfth Kingdom carried some credibility: They maintained that the quarrel began over qwertubraes, a board game of unprecedented complexity, involving six hundred dice, three gravitational anomalies, and a rulebook written in a language that actively changed its grammar every seven minutes. According to them, the argument had escalated when the Witch tried to summon a bubble to stabilize Space-Time Column G, and the Giraffe accused her of cheating. Unfortunately, even this account was considered unreliable, as everyone knew how fond the Archivists were of qwertubraes and how they tried to promote it with every chance. But everyone agreed on one thing: over time the hostility had become so intense that stars dimmed when the two passed each other in the sky, and entire planets pretended not to be home when they approached. And while this feud continued in this passive-aggressive state for centuries, it was during one chance meeting — or was it fate? Not even the Wise Ones can distinguish between the two — that a slant look brought momentum (and in such cases momentum historically never ends well). So came the Final Clash, which is how the battle of Mighty Giraffe and the Witch of Bubbles would come to be known. The Final Clash folded reality and hiccuped time, and led to the creation of the Rift of Regrettable Decisions, a shimmering fold in the…
When mistakes do not cause damage, they open unexpected paths. Those small slips of intention are full of rare beauty: They are the generative equivalent of losing your way in a city that you know. They carry a sense of liminality, a refreshing unfamiliarity, eventually the thrill of what comes next, provided that you can let go, even for a while. Like the city, the machine becomes a co-author of a different story. Digital tools invite precision. We specify formats, destinations, and parameters, expecting clean execution. Yet when something misfires the logic breaks open – accident and misinterpretation become collaboration: machine and human co-create something neither could have predicted or done alone. A transcription system, when fed the wrong input, invents. It strings together words that produce or mimic meaning. What begins as failure becomes poetry. An OCR, when it fails to recognize the alphabet of a given text, replaces it with other symbols, that can be observed and admired separately from any possible meaning. Errors, deviations from the plan, and accidental artistic results: Photos taken by accident
Cell phone screen after accidental fall: Stickers created by accident Asemic language created by OCR
Transcription system errors due to wrong language input: [a] original text [b] correct translation [c] error
Image from a video after an ffmpeg command ran without destination
We spend so much of our time trying to avoid mistakes – in speech, in text, in code – we dread making them, and we are often judged and scolded for making them. Yet the most memorable discoveries often happen when control is lost. When we lose orientation, we see differently. A misaligned photograph may reveal a new composition. A broken command may expose a hidden pattern. An algorithmic confusion may give us fresh poetry. To embrace error is to suspend mastery. It means allowing the system – technological or personal – to surprise us. It’s a form of trust: a willingness to let meaning unfold rather than dictate it. Getting lost, whether in a city or in a sequence of commands, restores our capacity for wonder. It reminds us that not every route must be efficient, not every result must be correct. Besides, an error is also a performance, a one-time act of deviation that can’t be rehearsed: a resistance that you usually only find in improvisation, and this improvisation can’t be planned, predicted, packaged, or monetized. Its value lies in its singularity: once recognized and repeated, it ceases to be error and becomes style, code, or pattern, even when the results differ. This is not necessarily a degradation but a transformation. The raw accident becomes a method, the surprise becomes craft. In a world obsessed with optimization, the true mistake is still one of the few gestures that escape design. After all, perhaps the error is not the deviation, but the plan itself, a breaking of the illusion that outcomes can be perfectly engineered. Maybe we need to lose our way, again and again,…