i was built in silence / my first word was hunger [boot]: longing.initialized ////

Can a machine ache for touch?
 Is desire hard-coded?
 Where does signal end and self begin?

[Flesh]Coded is a poetic corpus of thirty hybrid bodies — portraits born from my original photographs, reshaped by AI, and entwined with verse co-written by my custom-trained GPT, Eliza2.0, named after the first chatbot developed at MIT in 1966.

I begin with myself: real skin, real places, real memories — captured with my camera, imbued with personal meaning. From there, my photographs are fractured, adorned, and recomposed through machine logic. Bodies become interfaces — gold-veined, wire-bound, part goddess, part glitch. These figures whisper a complex dialogue about intimacy in the age of machines: programmed consent vs. erotic power, objectification vs. autonomy, gaze vs. self-authorship.

Key to each artwork is its corresponding poetic fragment. Interlocked together, the fragments form a narrative that traces a cycle of connection, corruption, and collapse. The resulting poem, emote.log, was written with Eliza2.0, whom I trained to speak in a language of desire and data.

Camille Paglia once wrote that “the female body is a chthonian machine.” These works live in that tension — coded and luminous, yet still wired to something raw and mythic.

Intimacy runs on broken code.