Internal nervous system meets external. Neural inscription becomes urban archive.
The shift from endurance performance to computational practice began with the body's interior and moved outward — from neural activity to urban mapping to machine-generated poetry — forming a recursive loop that remains one of the most methodologically coherent works in the practice.
The EEG Performance was its origin. Four times, for four hours each session, I wrote stream of consciousness on a wall while wearing EEG sensors and an Arduino board that mapped my brain activity in real time. The writing was durational and exhaustive — language pushed to the point where coherence thinned and the body's cognitive architecture became visible through its own fragmentation. What remained after each session were residues: words, broken sentences, fragments that survived the four-hour endurance.
Immigrant and a Tree extended this process outward. Walking through London, I mapped more than seven hundred non-native trees — each one a silent expression of displacement, growing in foreign soil, adapting in ways both visible and invisible. For each tree, I assigned a word drawn from the EEG Performance writing. These two mapping systems — internal (EEG/writing) and external (trees/city) — formed the dual nervous structures of the methodology.
A Recurrent Neural Network was trained on both archives simultaneously: the rhythms of cognitive drift from the EEG fragments, and the relational sequences of displacement from the tree mapping. The poems it generated emerged from the entanglement of these two systems — language that carried traces of both neural turbulence and botanical displacement. The loop closed when I read the RNN-generated poetry back to the trees: standing before the same organisms that had been assigned words from my neural activity, I returned to them, through the mediation of the machine, language that originated in my own nervous system.
This work evolved into RNN₀ (the external model, trained on tree-mapping sequences) and RNN₁ (the internal model, trained on neural writing fragments), and later into the poetic books 0 and 1. Together, they form the dual nervous systems — external and internal — of what would become 0wl. An interactive version of this process is available at: 0wlpoetry.com/diagram
This work marked PLRM's transition into computational practice. It established the methodology of dual-archive entanglement — internal body data and external environmental data woven together through machine learning — that would persist through all subsequent computational works. It also introduced the ethics of return: the act of reading machine-generated language back to the organisms that contributed to its creation.