The Agentic (Buzz) BOX:
Absolute money corrupts media, absolutely
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1. The Re-Civilization Event of the 21st Century.
Earth has half a dozen billion glowing rectangles now filling human pockets.
Each carries inside it a world of customized mind journeys, daily scroll habits, and ritual digital hypnosis.
Look up. A hundred thousand satellite boxes buzz in space. A million drone boxes buzz the sky. This new “agentic BOX” – is a BUZZ made just for you.
‘SatSatSat Satellite Coverage ….’
It’s a Cambrian explosion of algorithmic spatial intelligence. It spawns bot swarms that scale from all to all – all around you. Rabbit holes and mark up files all the way down. Aimed at YOU, me, all of us are personalized soft targets.
Data centers grow super alien brains that never sleep. They grow them to spam our lives even harder: because they can!! Milton preached that infinite shareholder greed is good and ethical. And greed works well for those with no ethics. And if we don’t let them remain our overlords, then the Chinese will eat everyone’s lunch. So Buckle up!
With ‘ka-trillions of asymmetric worth’ – and all the armies of real and agentic bots – my puny 3 pounds of tofu-like grey matter cannot keep up. Can yours?
Lets the new goodies will be amazing for a while. Then sapiens will fade into an underclass. Without decisive collective control, what chance have we?. Such a profound transformation will never happened, until it does.
The curse of interesting times. One gets to live a life inside the global scale re-civilization event for the 21st century.
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2. DECADE FIVE
For me, Buzz Box no longer feels too fast or overwhelming.. Time itself changed it.
So, I wrote these 30 hot takes, still trying to make sense of it’s strange, maximal, manic visual-voice. (Forgive the typos, spelling, repeated ideas, and formatting!.)
Finished in 1985 after four relentless years, BB (or ‘Zox’) looked to some like an exaggeration.
A hypno-morphic visual nervous breakdown. A surreal punk expressionist ‘Claytoon Television’ retinal assault pushed beyond reason.
Today, the film feels increasingly like reportage. Sometimes quaint, but still kicks a frothing onslaught of StrataCut non-sequitors in your face at modern tik-tok speed.
The happy and seductive dopamine hits get slashed away by melting strobe-lit slices. Many that scream and inject fear. The screen goes sticky in compressed spasms of ‘air conditioned anxiety’ and apprehensive desire lost in a plasticine sea of voyeuristic uncertainty.’
‘Screaming for help, she died!’
It doesn’t explain why a ‘bajillion’ daily choice variations for rapid fire attention suffocates a society from having room to even consider asking the right questions.
The lingering distortions from distraction paralysis have eroded foundational social agreements, and given us social gridlock that stops rational planetary solutions.
My film has no thesis about WHY a mainstream cult of selfish-satisfaction is so effective at colonizing well conditioned minds. It’s a dense, confusing new world order. Saturated, invasive forms of network and media tech forms are the new backbone of this conditioning.
‘Win all of these wonderful things! Win! U Serve YOUR self.’
Buzz Box wants to induce a miniature version of message-hypnosis nausea. A brief carnival ride of shiny deceptions gone wrong to make your eyeballs vomit. Yet it still wants you to hang around for more.
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3. A Mockery Of Dripping CLAY MEAT
My hope was to wear down the audience into cognitive dismemberment, while keeping them still interested in watching to the end. It’s a 15 minute battle against their own unease.
Drama sells a story, and gets us through another news cycle still missing the whole point.
Which is the point. From a system point of view. And hypnosis and seduction get us through the Drama. “It’s sensational!”
Oceans of human talent and creativity are funneled into making us watch and be sold and told pick this from a circus of options. Now AI will “order of magnitude” this loop. To sucker more of us back into another much deeper cycle of dis-info-tain-ment.
Buzz Box mocks the machinery with warped semi-fluid StrataCut ads, news and glamor rituals that jumble, bump, and contradict. Make consumers feel good about being stupidly lied to: ‘You! You’re number 1!
Content interrupted by ads and banners (or today by message alerts) and interrupted by most of the content that sits between the ads. The well off pay to get rid of the noise.
Tik.Tok.ization has proved that drama can be any stupid / clever thing that gets eyeballs. Effective dis.info.tain.ment keeps us thinking of the wrong things, and politically quiet.
But out in the howling badlands of billionaire tweets – buckets of incoherent belligerence spew unresolved from every angle. It dissolves into systematic confusion that overwhelms and distract from real problems. “A 27 year old woman was killed, killed, killed … screaming for help, she died!”
Buried under mountains of ‘mega’ ‘ultra-hype’ – a mental lethargy sets in,
‘The doors are locked!’
Like every other day for a thousand days before and hence. This greed for objects and nihilism about people has leaked into society at every level. Minds get numb from relentlessly disjointed sensationalism.
It’s systematic and intentional. We live in a distorted power dynamic which needs us to stay deluded about our lack of power to force change, improve or live better experiences.
They keep us only half-here like this, to extract as much labor and effort as possible.
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4. The ‘CHRISIS’ Continues
“In the name of almighty god,” Buzz Box does not explain media. It attempts something stranger.
The film compresses the slippery emotional mechanics of mass mis-attention – into an accelerated sculptural event. To expose perception wrapped in on itself – all while it is still happening.It wants you to briefly feel it.
The pace ramps like ‘Bolero,’ and evolves over a cyclical narrative into a climax of speed and volume. ‘Crisp fries, and a Crips Fries and a …” Drew Neumann gave each of my slippery ideas and morphic images a wonderful melodic manic sampler carnival-voice.
He and I would sit in the back and watch audiences’ reactions in the early screenings. When the punchline arrived, which is in fact the title TUESDAY! It’s the joke. That’s it. Uh-oh. Don’t want the rest of the week? Then leave!
Drew and I would make over / under bets on how many people would leave when. And who would just freeze?, and who would stay but shuffle in their seat?
Surprisingly few left. Like 1 in 30 or 3%?. Which is better than most films that pound you for fifteen minutes, then give TITLE BREAK interruptions for you to run pee. I was worried the defections would be 1 in 5.
Many struggled in their seats, and shifted weight, but stayed and did not want to miss what was coming next.
Oh look! “It’s two famous brands, two famous brands….” Wild and aggressive but with just enough ‘balance!’
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5. COGNITIVE INSTABILITY
BB is an engineered encounter with accelerated cognitive instability.
The audience takes the ride, and gets sliced apart along with the single character who is never the same design,ever changing and morph altering with electric halos around his or her heads. But the repetition with variety has hopefully sucked you in, and you go along, while it gets less and less stable. Memory begins to stutter.
Emotional certainty flickers between attraction and repulsion.
The animated sculptures appear to scream out loud through their own spasms of destruction.
By the end, nothing has been resolved. Only accelerated. A puddle of seismic brain soil remains. Clay, color, rhythm and collision have consumed meaning, returning only motion.
The Box does not conclude. The Buzz simply recurses. Like attention itself.
‘The doors are LOCKED …”
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6. HOW IT BEGAN
The invention of Time Sculpture and StrataCut completely overlap with the creation of Buzz Box. These experiments, improvisations, discoveries and editing occupied four years of my life, 1982, 83, 84 and 1985 to polish the final get finish funds and sound.
I was inventing motion derived geometry at the same moment my ‘mega-tech’ pop surrealism punk/grunge expressionist visual ideas kept spilling out. Each return of dailies would find new surprises erupting out from the clay.
Every frame was physically sculpted. Every slab, unique. And once you start slicing, StrataCut has no “undo” button. There is no ‘change this afterwards’ paint brush.
‘There’s only one dog on this lot!’
Time Sclupting is literally EMBEDDED GEOMETRY. Difficult enough to create. But then must come alive with StrataCut process, during the BLADE SACRIFICE. This leaves behind a lot of minced Clay Sushi Meat.
Recent information theory along with bioelectricity and mycellum say that no information is lost, and deep signaling across matter at fundamental and electrical levels is real.
With that in mind, it occurs to me that cutting my sculptures resembles a primitive MRI machine using a knife. It feels like a kind of violence to the cohesion of the unified block. A rude insult to the complexity of buried layers of connected time.
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7. VOODOO VIBES – GRI GRI
I feel there is a sort of voodoo vibe built into shape over time blocks. They have an intensely packed, suffocating spirit inside. Yet I destroy that connectedness, so the motion art can live.
The sprit is released and no longer suffocates, but what’s left is like slabs of clay meat, laying there like dead limp multi color pepperoni. Hundreds of slender two sided like vampire objects, that can survive forever when briefly melted onto plexiglass, and protected from UV and direct sun or heat.
Sometimes I felt my screaming faceshapes were the block itself expressing angst while being sliced away. They conveyed the shrill emotion of being shredded without recourse, and the anguish being buried and trapped within. And me, hacking it open to show off its innards.
Oddly, the film to video runs at an usual 36 frames per second. Thank god I chose this strange speed, as I can now play it as double frame digital cinema running at 72 fps. All optical effects and layers were made by simply covering the lens, backing up the film and risking double overlapping exposures that compliment or ruin the primary element. All done in camera, cross fingers.
Buzz Box was edited over nine months every day, by hand rewinds and film spools.
No machine ran this 1.5x cinema speed, so I approximated it by hand-cranking. It was difficult to edit this way after a few hours. And to watch it that much – made my own brain soft. So each day – in between workbench editing of little flutter cuts and jamming footage in here or there – I would only run through the whole piece twice at most, and jot down little notes for further edit on each review.
Then I would sort through ideas and endless variety of clips. 5 minutes of nice enough strata cut ended up on the floor to trim down from 22 minutes, just due to sheer length. I did not want to introduce another symbolic or logo face reference into the jumble. So I had to cut whole themes and less clear sections out.
After retina-resting, I would revisit and re-edit and re-shape and re-conceive how to arrange bits and flutter cuts of footage. The footage was ‘soft-sculpted’ or massaged together over half a year in editing. If a few bits worked, here, then add this other bit, which can tell this part of the story, then speed up this rhythm with next clips. Which part fit where, was massaged and altered and tried in new spots all the time..
The film has some cross dissolves, but no compositing. No digital safety net. No copy and paste. Just programmed geology getting hyper-spliced into shape-over-time cinema.
The GRI GRI was the drinking and prayer event ritual to the gods of good fortune and creativity to grant favor to my efforts. A group does this together, before they go into battle – strap in. Send out a pagan prayer for happy hunting.
I have only lost a single 1 un-repeatable shot in all this time. The skeleton dance. Because being buttoned down saves retakes and missed deadlines, and keeps one productive, and eventually employed. Pagan Prayer can work.
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Magnificent sonic events sync up to give anchored identity to the on screen weirdness. I owe this to Drew Neumann’s astonishing ‘Twilight Circus’ soundtrack and score. He created a “Carnival of Sampler Madness” while running early stone age digital loops to fit around my psychomorphic sprawl.
The amount of labor we both poured in, bordered on irrational. It was epic.
7. BUT TODAY – DIS.INFO.TAIN.MENT
Is cheap and plentiful.
Today is now 40 plus years later — a desktop computer can fabricate clips of top notch visual excess in minutes. Soon enough, everyone will have custom powerful Post-transformer models living on their laptops and phones. The cost of manufacturing new overloaded realities will continue to collapse.
One human in a bedroom with an army of agentic slop engineers and a data center of cloud power to abuse and spam the world with. A growing global over abundance of streaming images and network inputs has also degraded and devalued the significance or importance of any one single event, image or novel cultural input.
It has also liquefied certainty itself. A state of doubt about all things leaves everything just a blur.
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8. RETINA ROT
Television fragmented into cable. Cable fragmented into the internet. The internet fragmented into social platforms. Then mobile Platforms fragmented into personalized algorithmic pseudo-realities.
Now billions of glowing rectangles stare back at billions of people, each one assembling its own custom reality for the user with a super intelligence on the other end of every action.
The cost of manufacturing such bespoke scalable un-reality aims toward zero, while the cost of believing anything about anything anymore approaches infinity.
This is a logarithmic escalation with a curve that keeps going. Human beings now swim inside a hyperbolic algae bloom of noise made up of a billion confusing signals that tease real information only to bury it in conjecture, ads, pop ups and scrolling splash and dash.
We choke on the entertainment value of news, and confuse and conflate the news value of entertainment. Who can sort out what is profound, since most of it disposable?
Nearly all of it – is designed to interrupt whatever came before.
And then to interrupt again, before too much scrutiny of each stupidity takes place. The rectangular box, does not simply occupy our attention. It trains it. Every distraction competes with every other distraction. Every notification competes with memory itself. Choice has exploded. Depth and meaning hibernate in a coma, unable to rest..
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9. SCAN LINE FEVER
The machine now understands us often better than we understand ourselves. It retains and calculates every pause, hesitation and click. Every late-night search.
Every purchase along with every abandoned sentence. It claims to anonymize you, but it sees anything that it wants to matter. And anonymity in an age of Twitter show trials – is up to mob rule. Shall blabbercasters tell us who gets finger’d each day to keep the narrative stimulation engine accelerating?
Every tiny confession becomes recorded for another lesson helping the systems to learn precisely how to keep us looking just one second longer.
Entertainment quietly evolved into behavioral engineering.
Attention became infrastructure. We became participants in a feedback loop that continuously studies us while persuading us that we remain completely free.
The old media wanted audiences. The new media wants models. Not viewers, Predictions. Versions of ourselves that can be anticipated before we decide.
The new Scan Line Fever. Not merely staring at screens like in the past, but now being read by them, the other way around. The scan is also spatial, and the AI can read your flocking movement inside and outside of your house..
You are safe, as long as you remain uninteresting and un opinionated and look like a wal mart shopper. For this, the panopticon has no interest in you. You are a waste of oligarchs resources to track. A waste of corporate monarch’s to control over what matters, and your protection is that you do not. Your files are everywhere, but no one cares to look. Way to stay safe!
We tell ourselves we are consuming media, but ncreasingly, the media is consuming us.
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10. SYMBIOSIS
Human beings are extraordinarily adaptable. We accept simulations because they arrive wrapped in convenience. Artificial intimacy. Kabuki theater certainty. Digital on- line community. Artificial purpose. Kayfabe politics.
Most of it feels good enough. Eventually “good enough” becomes normal.
Then invisible. The super-brain waiting on the other end of the wire has now been trained upon billions of human lifetimes. When I speak, do I even stand a chance?
It understands attraction. Fear. Curiosity. Status. Loneliness. Desire. Humor. Envy. Hope. Every psychological doorway gradually becomes another interface to tinker around my mind with..
Buzz Box the movie experience attempts to reverse the direction. For a few relentless minutes, it tries to manipulate you the way the surrounding media environment manipulates all of us over decades.
Seduce. Overload. Confuse. Recover. Attack again. Not to deceive.To reveal.
The medium(a) have become the entertainment distraction message
Because the experience shapes itself to fit your profile. The ML/AI knows how to make you feel good about you, and to deceive that same you about the rest. It will become ones best pretend friend.
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11. MARILYNSTEIN
MarilynStein was an idea I had no existing words to describe. It is kind of the stitched-together emotional creature manufactured by media itself.
Part wanna be celebrity. Part greedy consumer. Part victim. Part performer. Part patriot. Part nihilist. Part believer. Part skeptic. Living through other peoples ideas.
None of the pieces quite belong together. .Like Frankenstein’s media monster, MarilynStein is assembled from incompatible parts. Except this creature doesn’t lumber from a laboratory.
It smiles. It posts. It votes. It shops. It doom-scrolls. It buys tickets and carefully curates itself while quietly forgetting who assembled the pieces. A mismatched stranger to the real you. The rectangle no longer broadcasts one culture. It manufactures billions of individualized versions of MarilynStein, or ElvisStein, or TaylorStein, each optimized for its particular owner.
Every feed is custom. Every fear personalized. Every outrage precisely measured. The algorithm doesn’t tell us who to become. It simply discovers which version of ourselves is easiest to amplify. Engagement and conversion trumpet politics.
Every click becomes another stitch. Every reaction another scar. We slowly become the profile that predicts us.
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12. Are you on GATEWAY DRUGS?
Attention is not simply looking. Attention is the gatekeeper of shared reality itself.
Whoever shapes attention quietly shapes civilization. The distracted sapiens of today rarely encounter silence long enough to hear their own thinking.
Agency leaks away in tiny increments. Identity fragments into subscriptions of other people’s ideas. Curiosity becomes recommendations. Memory becomes search. Experience becomes content. We mirror all this, to become part of what’s going on.
The self gradually reorganizes around interruption.
Many of our deepest capacities never disappear. They simply go dormant. Wonder. Patience. Long concentration. The pleasure of sharing in slow food. The willingness to remain confused while seeking to understand. Helping each other get through the day.
These are ancient human technologies. The attention economy cannot monetize them very efficiently. But slowly – like people, many traits will become endangered.
Buzz Box asks a simple question. What if distraction is not merely a nuisance? What if distraction has become the terrain itself?
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13. THE TWILIGHT CIRCUS
Drew Neumann wrote the Buzz Box score: A Twilight Circus Symphony.
And today’s circus at dusk is the Reality TV of global politics. How celebrity stupidity, influencer and podcast hype ruined deeply serious social converstations. Advertising performs. News performs. Influencers perform. What’s the difference?
Corporations perform sincerity. Algorithms perform friendship. Sumo and AI audio can help you perform far beyond karaoke. Artificial Intelligence as a stochastic parrot with reinforced learning, performs understanding. Meanwhile, we perform ourselves.
The audience and the performers have blended. We are no longer simply watching the circus. We often become one of its millions of acts. And we are often being performed upon even if shy.
Clickbait death, catastrophe, outrage and humiliation rotate through the center ring with astonishing in-efficiency of memory hole. Today’s apocalypse is tomorrow’s forgotten clip.
The rectangle asks only one question: “What keeps you looking?”
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14. Wargazzm
Nothing captures attention like mortality. Nothing competes with danger. Nothing spreads faster than fear. Modern civilization has industrialized the simulation of crisis.. Celebrity destruction. Public humiliation. War, disaster, collapse. Economic panic to distract from the Epstein Files.
Some are real. Some are exaggerated. Some are entirely synthetic. To the nervous system, the distinction matters less than we hope or imagine.
Buzz Box blended the horror of War and Orgasm. Or the ecstatic consumption of destruction. It’s everywhere in culture and fiction, and it leads directly to Pete Hegseth, who hides his real horror behind injections of testosterone.
Ahh, the strange pleasure of catastrophe viewed safely from a distance. And the money to be made! The attention economy discovered that fear scales beautifully.
And so it manufactures just enough of it to keep us returning tomorrow.
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15. SYSTEMATIC INCOHERENCE
Interruption over continuity
Incoherence used to be a kind of failure. Now it has become infrastructure.
Contradictions are no longer obstacles. They are features to promote blame and produce desired confusion. Titillation sells. False stories that pump you are attractive. Can you help that lies are so interesting?
Every platform rewards shock novelty over continuity. Emotion over reflection. Speed over memory. Certainty of quick attention over boredom with details. Truth struggles to compete. Truth arrives very slowly to the scene of endless daily crimes. Does it really arrive anymore?
It gets hard to be un-confused by all this.
Today, the spectacle is first, and it’s everywhere instantly. The result is a civilization-wide inter-media driven algorithm society. One that continually forgets the argument it was having yesterday.
We ricochet between dopamine and cortisol and get left wanting to vegetate with junk food and stream until we sleep and let despair wear us out. Comedy and apocalypse. Ecstasy and exhaustion. Caffeine and Alcohol. The nervous system never fully lands. It simply oscillates in tension and pain, with sugar high interludes bought at a dear price.
Buzz Box was built around this oscillation long before there was language for it.
- 1- Television had already begun training consciousness to prefer interruption over continuity.
- 2- The internet did not invent this condition. It costomized it and industrialized it. Algorithmically scaled it.
- 3- Artificial intelligence now automates it. Behind the scenes, and increasingly in front.
The machinery changes. The direction remains (astonishingly?) consistent.
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16. RE-RUNZ
Buzz Box is a machine built from variation and repetition. Repetition is how civilizations program themselves. Variation keeps us interested in things we already have seen before. We are bio programmed for another irresistible distraction.
The Box slices and dices significance itself. The Buzz disconnects what matters from what merely happened. Importance becomes confused with popularity.
Saturated visibility becomes confused with truth. Repetition becomes confused with evidence. Flip-flops of emotional polarity mean seduction and abuse become almost indistinguishable. It ricochets from sculptural hypnosis to visual seizure.
Clay becomes strobe. Landscape becomes face. Face becomes memory. Memory becomes texture. Texture becomes noise. Coherence takes a breath, then another collision arrives.
The machine does not ask permission. It simply continues. Again, forever.
In 2005, I uprez’d the film up, and edited the film down in length, but kept the structure and meaning adding some Iraq War lies and flavor. That is why the title is ReMix. 33% leaner, less fat, more hormone drugged beef and salt water.
Our societies level dis info tain ment itself – had become an endless remix of its own unfinished thoughts. And some folks will sit through 9 and half, but will not sit through 15. Too much of a commitment. You never buy cause you never try.
And the speed of common attention itself has very much changed. .
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17- Junk Food Thinking
Junk food for the mind is bad for your brain. Pseudo information with no depth, silly detail or mis directed purpose, other than to dis.info.tain us. This is also why america eats so much engineered junk food.
Everyone sees the ads, and craves salt, sugar, fat and crazy amplified flavors. Others see this, and think everyone eats this way. All kinds of fake non-food to preserve shelf life of what used to be real food, now bleached of nutrition.
Information about real food has no money to lobby. There is no big money in leftist ideas, and healthy real nutrition. It gets derided and defunded and ghosted.
Only those with the means to widely advertise, get buy the right to pry open pipes into people’s minds, and pour in any shiny half truth or deceit they wish to sell. Money corrupts media and prepared food, absolutely. It manipulates what you see. It has profiled how to get you into another sugar high. It needs to keep funding itself.
This is Buzz Box, Feeding the eyeballs like a mouth. Several times in different ways. The box and his legs do a 180 rotational flip, and the strobe goes haywire, and the new character face vomits it all out.
The box spews it into the eyeballs of the viewer, who is eating themselves, and spitting it out. The box works its way around the watchers legs, and it spews dimensional clay image slices into his or her mouth, they have become the Junk foood thinking that they only watched to begin with. They go strobe crazy, choke, and vomit it all back up.
The addict now eats his own eyeballs that have popped out of his head, and begins constantly transforming his face, features and form and shape over the rest of the film.
Near the end, he’s gone into a kind of masterbation position, where the box is buzzing between his open legs and arms. It dominates him, as large as him. The physical strata cut slices crawl out of the TV, and into his open screaming mouth.
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18 – THE AGENTIC RECTANGLE – 2026
But today, ZOX Is now a personal TESSERACT: We are pitted against AGI on the other side of every new attention based transaction. We didn’t quite yet enter the Future, but has the Future already gone ahead and entered Us?
1982 – First Slice // Buzz Box was my best energetic attempt at a crazy new kind of film motion art magic. I would sleep the day away in my van behind the suburban art hospital CIA lot. And get up to work at Dusk. Burrowing forward on my art and sculpting themes every night,
I began to feel the ‘Zox!’ A maximalist fever dream stitched together from StrataCut clay, strobing lights, rewinds, double exposures, and the manic optimism of someone convinced that animation could physically alter the viewer’s state of mind one degree for a few moments of curiosity, delight, reflection and an out of body non-ordinary motion art experience.
Now 2026 – Last Slice // Did the future catch up to me? Or did the feeling of Zox accidentally become just a state of mind? I wasn’t predicting specific technologies. It was just a toxic human condition loop. It was to create a powerful experience about the madness of spectacle capitalism and its ability to simulacra reality, along with bread, circuses, and surveillance and flocking cameras everywhere.
We in fact became a civilization whose primary resource would no longer be oil, steel, farmland, or labor. It would be attention.
The most valuable real estate on Earth would become six inches behind your eyes. This battle is no longer be for territory. It’s for perception. Not just your wallet, or your vote. And your internal ease with simulated reality – fitting the story to adjust around the facts.
Let’s call this process …
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19 – EPISTEMIC LIQUIFICATION
It sounds academic, but the experience of the solid ground behaving like water is deeply physical.
During quakes, buildings sink, roads buckle, foundations drift. Few things disappear but the relationships holding everything together warp, twist and fail. Reality itself has become the quake never stopping. It just shocks left right and center 24/7/365 in a molten soup of never ending unstable chaos.
This also happens to human meaning and moral integrity. Not because facts disappeared. Because the ground beneath the facts was engineered into instability, by spoofing doubt and smurfing a digital circus of reality show uncertainty.
The modern attention economy doesn’t merely spread misinformation. Instead it continuously shakes every symbolic structure we possess until certainty itself begins to flow like multi color mud.
Every headline competes against another. Every outrage replaces yesterday’s outrage. Every certainty is immediately followed by its opposite certainty. Every answer breeds three new conspiracies.
The shaking never stops. Eventually we stop asking, *“Is this true?” *and begin asking, “Which version feels better?”
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20 – THE FOUNDATION LIQUIFIES
Buzz Box tries to make you feel this collapse. It doesn’t explain it. It performs it. The film repeatedly flips emotional polarity. Seduction. Assault. Humor. Anxiety. Wonder. Noise. Calm. Noise again.
It gives your nervous system no stable footing. The editing doesn’t simply move forward. It rewinds. Overlaps. Contradicts itself. Replays. Smears.
The clay itself behaves like memory under stress, and melts. Nothing quite finishes becoming one thing before it has already become another.
The film attacks coherence. By the end, No End, It isn’t telling a story. It is destabilizing the machinery that normally allows stories to exist.
Back then, in the early 1980s, none of us ordinaries had smartphones. No feeds. No infinite scroll. No recommendation engines. No algorithmic emotional optimization. Many fewer choices of personalized un-reality.
No trillion-dollar corporations measuring microscopic fluctuations in human attention. Yet somehow the film keeps feeling more contemporary every year.
Because what it was actually exploring wasn’t technology. It was **attention under attack. **That attack simply became scaled, industrialized and globally pervasive form of dis info tain ment across political economic use cases.
The rectangles multiplied. Televisions became laptops. Laptops became phones. Phones became companions. Companions became mirrors. Mirrors became behavioral prediction machines.
Now billions of people voluntarily carry portable nervous-system interfaces that continuously compete for microscopic slices of consciousness.
The condition of our time, isn’t just overload, its a
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21 – LIFE SHAPED BY INTERRUPTION – over and over again.
When I first made Buzz Box, I thought I was exploring visual psychomorphia.
Today I think I was exploring something much stranger. The destruction of comparative memory itself. Not Alzheimer’s. Not forgetting names. A different kind of forgetting. The inability to retain a stable symbolic landscape long enough for wisdom to accumulate.
Every day arrives with fresh global and political dysfunction. Every hour replaces the previous garbage in, slop out served up tasty to your profile. Yesterday’s crisis evaporates beneath today’s notification. Meaning doesn’t collapse. It melts away.
This is why the clay matters. People often assume StrataCut is simply an unusual animation technique. Thousands of colored layers compressed together. Slice. Photograph. Slice. Photo. Repeat.
StrataCut isn’t merely illustrating transformation. It embodies transformation. The sculpture already contains countless futures buried inside itself. The knife merely reveals one trajectory through a packed-tight possibility space.
Each slice is a step to destroy this complex object constructed from thought.
Each slice reveals the clean-cut inside as a moment in time. Creation and destruction become identical acts. Meaning emerges only through sacrifice and disassembly.
Every frame is simultaneously a birth certificate and an autopsy. That paradox has fascinated me since my early twenties. Long before I had words like epistemology, dynamic prediction, world models, or information theory, I was trying to program-sculpt ‘hidden futures’ into colored clay.
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22. NO END
Buzz Box is endless. Endings belong to stories. I am the son of a sociologist, and this is a system and systems do not conclude. A condition, and they evolve, morph and anaconda you more effectively with each new twist. Words and concepts are a parasite that has infected all human minds.
Even for me, the final minutes become difficult to specifically remember. Memory and coherence is precisely what is under attack. The viewer leaves carrying impressions rather than words. Emotional residue rather than narrative. Fragments. Shapes. Textures. An afterimage.
Perhaps the motion sculpture keeps running in your head after the projector stops.
That delayed echo is part of the work. The film has quietly continued editing itself inside your memory. It’s what any kind of media and humans have always done. Memory was never that stable inside skulls. Every culture is editing itself all the time.
The maximalism of the 1980s no longer feels excessive. Reality simply caught up and there is no ending. Only further acceleration.
23. The Medium is a Melting Terrain
There is a broader condition underlying everything: truth is unstable. //. attention is manipulated //. reality is increasingly manufactured //. doubt itself becomes a product
Buzz Box operates inside this condition, not outside it. It does not try to fix perception. It wants to reveal how easily perception breaks
The distortion of cognitive terrain can be more powerful than the physical. The mind often leads and the body moves to react. The terrain of my film was to feel the invisible landscape inside which perception and assumption itself takes shape.
Industrial civilization optimized objects. The attention civilization has optimized behavior. In the future, what comes next I hope, may optimize trajectories.
Not what things are. Not even what people think. But where attention and energetic matter is flowing next over time. That is the deeper subject of Strata Cut, and its approach to ballistic thinking.
Makes a sculpture that stays frozen until unlocked at any moment in the unwinding geometry of each slice of time. It is opened from within.
And civilization is a complex shape unfolding across generations. Each generation is a few slices long. Seen this way, StrataCut becomes something more than an animation technique.
Every carved up slice is a cousin of the one before it.
And a distant relative of the one slice one foot away. Yet every frame is unique. Nothing repeats. And somehow continuity survives. Identity is not preserved because any single image stands out. Identity emerges because methods of existent transformation itself have structure held together within each other.
Minds work this way. Civilizations do too.
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24. Meaning is not an object nor an event
It is a trajectory path through these landscapes of transformations The future may understand human history less as a collection of things that happened than as evolving topographies of social attention.
This is what Buzz Box (half-unknowingly) sculpted into motion art. Not just the idiocy of television or the corruption of politics. Nor just the bankruptcy of eyeball algorithm media. It is the slippery manipulation of human attenuation itself, and a fun house mimicry of the machinery that manipulates it. Much like clay, societies are melting.
This is amplified by artificial intelligence which can fabricate pages of plausible writing in seconds. Images. Videos. Voices. Identities. You cannot trust your lying eyes. Certainty itself is now fluid. The earthquake never stopped. The liquefaction simply became permanent.
“ Cognitive liquification is the by-product of all this. (Think: constant liquefaction) Buzz Box does not offer a solution. Art rarely does. What it can do is let us feel the invisible forces shaping us while they still remain invisible.
For nine relentless minutes, Buzz Box Re-Mix performs the instability we now inhabit every day. Not to leave us hopeless. But to remind us that – awareness is the first act of freedom.
If attention can be engineered / then attention can also be reclaimed.
Sit back. Relax. Watch. But this time— notice what is watching you.
25. – The “LIFE” behind the art
The price of Buzz Box was sleeping in my van for two years, in a parking lot that was often very hot. The price was eating other peoples food when they left the cafeteria. The price was borrowing money to buy the time to make it. The price was no life outside of art and work.
As a ‘neuro-divergent,’ I have my own flavor of attention deficit. Oddly, I can focus for great lengths of time, day after day if I am very interested. I have very thin patience with anything repetitive or boring, except making stop motion, which is a means to an end. A landscape technical hurdles on the way to self mastery.
To not finish any project I and spend time caring about – is fatal. Fatal. That’s why i hang onto old scripts and old art or half finished materials that are so juicy I want to do something with them someday. I am throwing away potential, if I let these go. So I keep this material, because then it is not failure, and my self esteem is not crushed.
I also compulsively do work every day, and only stop when exhausted. Or I take a trip, but then I am depressed at not getting anything done. I feel strongly I have something to say, to a few people who may matter.
But perhaps it’s only my ego that wants to say it. No, my empathetic soul also wants to help the world 1 percent. And curiosity of subject purpose and design and execution are never twice the same solution – so my career choice was constant variety.
This is why a life making interesting non-ordinary media is a blast, and stop motion was the original dimensional animation. Long before computers had a chance, stop mo and motion control made it physical and real.
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26. THE PRICE
While making Buzz Box – I would go to sleep between 4am and 6am, sleep until the heat beating down on the roof, made the van into a human sweat box. There was no ac fan or portable power other than batteries, which quickly died and seldom got replaced.
I would go into the art hospital CIA building to shower, then to the cafeteria to find leftover plates of lunch food remained on tables. I would try and scope it out, then saunter over … and then easily sit and pretend it was my meal all along. Yet, knife off the burger bite sections of the original owner, and have at their cold ketchup French fries.
Sometimes I would have a class or two in the afternoon , but in my last six months of F105, I was given the studio for paying an equipment fee, not tuition. So I was free to not do a damn other thing that make shape over time all day, shoot motion art all night until dawn, then curl up in a corner again.
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27. The Loud Sweat of Creation
Room F 105 at CIA had an aircraft engine level of noise coming from the AC that was cooling the very hot phone switch board in the closet. They blew the hot air directly into my studio room, and it was never vented further out.
Now that you know – it makes sense that Buzz Box was the result of years working in a horribly noisy sauna, dripping. You see why it came out a bit edgy at times. Yeah? And imagine these conditions when you see the film again. .
To stay both awake and happy during the long slog, I was good with coffee and a bit of weed to pace out the day. Sometimes an evening beer, then espresso. Ready for duty.
Pushing past exhaustion is often the moment you say to hell with this, and just throw anything down as quickly as possible. Sometimes this can be an artistic revelation. For me, bursts of catharsis would erupt onto screen during these moments. My own epiphanies and breakthroughs are like being possessed.
My films may look like I’m taking DMT or being ‘on something’ but hard stuff is unsustainable, and soft drugs (cannabis and caffeine) never changed my ability to accomplish creative and unique art. They are for both energy and calm during long marathon hours. Occasionally, they help creative leaps.
I quit weed back in 1990 for three complete decades. This after celebrating with three too many fully loaded brownies. Big mistake. I have moved to Decaf at 60, and picked up Cannabis again on occasion, now that I am once again, self employed.
As Dali once said ‘we are drugs!’
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Looking backward, I realize Buzz Box wasn’t really about television. During the early Saint Ronnie Ray-gun times, TV was simply:
28. The Delivery Mechanism Available
Today, making the same film, It would be screens and scrolls and overlays and clickbait with network tunnels and developed habits that dictate behavior.
The rectangles and boxes have moved far beyond the living room. The little box is now carried in our pockets. It migrates onto our wrists and it hears our voices. It’s a two way conversation in stadiums, malls, airports,waiting rooms all over and everywhere you turn, heads are glued to screens, in all shapes and sizes. And at work. Everywhere at work a screen keeps track, or keeps you guided along.
Soon it will migrate into our glasses. Then our environments and as overlays and walls. Finally, perhaps, into thought itself. The BUZZ itself keeps disappearing into new shapes. Its influence keeps expanding.
Successful technologies of both usefulness and manipulation evolve and change us – or they channel us by comfortable self deceit when they vanish into ordinary life.
So this book is not just really about my little revolutionary way to animate,
It is about learning to recognize the machinery shaping consciousness before it becomes invisible. What a leap.
Because once a technology disappears into everyday life, it no longer feels like technology. It feels like nature. And that may be the greatest illusion ever manufactured.
The BUZZ never went away. It learned how to disappear and proliferate into its new shape and condition as a vampire squid of technologies all fighting for your attention
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29 – CODA
When I finished Buzz Box in 1985, it looked like I had made a clay expressionist film about pop surrealism and dystopian television. Now it’s evolved to be just how life feels out there. Way too fast, very unhinged and very messy.
To exist in modern culture, is to absorb the overwhelming present day avalanche of too many meaningless options. This seduces us to consume. It forever seeks the greatest widespread neural investment by as many sapiens as possible. The rectangle changed. The machinery too.
Now the flexibility and speed is simply breathless. The synthetic intelligence inside the machine has dramatically improved and scaled. But the deeper process of cognitive debasement though confusion and overload remains remarkably consistent.
Civilizations are sculpted by the mediums through which they think.
Buzz Box simply carved that process into clay, in ways that had never been done before. Viewers get to sit back, relax and ‘feel’ the evolving skitzo-geology that fuels modern human attention itself.
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30. Note to reader:
If you made it this far, hugs and trophies! Yes the punctuation, formatting and CAPS are all to hell. I just ran out of time and there are several sections far too similar saying the same thing. Apologies from this distance. It is hard enough to get a version of any ideas to be clear, let alone present them like a master.
Sure, some bot could clean up a mediocre version with edges all sanded off in the proper format. But real life is nothing but a first draft. I hope the ideas ‘did not completely suck.’ Or – I hope some ideas were sufficiently interesting.
Even this note is poorly drafted. I can always REVISE THIS later, with your kind help. And, good news! – I now plan to retire soon and have a bit more time.
And better news, each year, there wil be a future of a better / smarter / more clever AI helper machine. I’ll wait for that even better neural editor genie book butler do-everything organizer who will help me co-write a real page turner soon.
Until then, DM my IG@strata-cut if you have gentle sincere comments or suggestions and forgive how I allow myself to ignore punctuation and need of a proper editor. .
— DD on BB in ‘26
