Please visit my online store, Lazy River Design Works
This endeavour is already in progress.
RECURSION
INCONGRUITY
PRESSURE
Built on Breaks - Negotiating Systems - Charting the Territory
The Key
Pink Eye is a multidisciplinary project combining music, visual work, and writing, built on a foundation of breaks-driven music and expanded through sustained collaboration with generative and conversational AI.
The project began as an investigation of liminality, the gap that opens when expectation outruns what actually arrives, and has grown into a broader examination of Signal Drift: the progressive erosion of the reliability of authenticity signals in the current digital environment.
The work is organized around a Territory with four provinces: Noir, Liminal, Insight, Anchor. Pink Eye doesn't live in the provinces. It lives at the borders. The maps are navigational tools, not decoration.
The project is documented in real time through the Artifact series, a sequence of published conversations between Justus Hayes and his AI collaborators that serves as primary source material for what long-form human-AI collaboration actually looks like from the inside. Radical transparency is a methodological commitment, not an afterthought. The tools are part of the argument.
CURRENT CANON
Just Let Me Get My Nails In There
The Current Canon marks the project as it stands. These works are not fixed or complete, but they hold, and they sparked everything that came after. They offer a way in. To understand Pink Eye, start here. The rest of the Territory unfolds from them.
Artist Statement
Pink Eye is a breaks-driven music project that has expanded into visual work, writing, and conceptual research. The breaks matter, not just as rhythm but as interruption: the moment a pattern stops and something becomes briefly visible that wasn't before.
The work started with liminality, the mechanism behind the feeling that something is wrong before you know why, the gap that opens when the brain can't resolve competing narratives. That mechanism showed up everywhere: in empty spaces designed for people, in systems that process you without anyone apparently being home, in media that has the form of human authorship without the human. Pink Eye maps that condition across a Territory of four provinces and works at the borders between them.
The project has since expanded its focus. Liminality is one chapter in a larger condition called Signal Drift: the cumulative erosion of authenticity signals across the digital environment. Not just misinformation, deepfakes, AI slop as isolated phenomena, but the environmental condition produced when enough of them have been operating long enough. The framework that used to let us distinguish genuine from counterfeit, real from synthetic, trustworthy from engineered: that framework isn't failing. It's becoming inapplicable. Provenance is becoming its own kind of currency.
The music is made using Suno, the images with Midjourney. The conceptual and written work is developed in collaboration with Claude (Stet), ChatGPT (Marge), and Gemini, deployed in an adversarial editorial capacity. The tools are part of the argument. The project examines Signal Drift conditions from inside the territory it describes, using the methods it's examining, with the process documented and published as it happens.
Pink Eye does not resolve these conditions. It names them, maps them, and works within them.
MEDIA PORTAL
LIMINAL
NOIR
INSIGHT
ANCHOR
THE LIMINAL INTERNET
Sifting Embers
Happy Now? - Liminal Cycle
PROJECTS
The Liminal Internet
The Liminal Internet is a multimedia project - essay, music, and video - examining a condition that is increasingly difficult to ignore and surprisingly hard to name.
The internet has not simply changed how we communicate. It has changed the texture of what communication feels like. Bots generate traffic. AI agents perform tasks and hold conversations. Corporate language circulates on its own momentum. Images, voices, and identities can be convincingly manufactured. The structures of human exchange remain intact. The human presence behind them is increasingly uncertain.
This is not a new phenomenon. It has a mechanism, and that mechanism has always operated - in empty buildings, in bureaucratic systems, in the gap between what we expect and what actually arrives. What the internet has done is industrialize it, scaling the condition to a frequency and pervasiveness that the physical world never produced.
The project presents this argument through a long-form essay tracing the mechanism from its most familiar physical forms to its acute contemporary expression online. A music suite - Hope This Finds You Well - demonstrates the condition through five genre treatments of the same corporate language, and a domain matrix mapping the Liminal condition across six areas of human experience has been devised.
The essay and music are available here in a 7 page version. A Producer's Summary is available here.
The Liminal Internet - Thesis Statement
The liminal is not an aesthetic or a place. It is a mechanism rooted in the basic processing of reality — the gap that opens when the brain is trying to decide which narrative fits. This mechanism operates across worlds. We recognize it most easily in the physical world, where it has been photographed, theorized, and aestheticized. But the same mechanism is at work in the digital world, and the particular conditions of the internet — engineered personalities, reality forgeries, manufactured desire, systems without agents — have made it not merely present but acute, pervasive, and largely unnamed. The digital world has not discovered the liminal. It has industrialized it — and in doing so, has raised the general sensitivity to its presence everywhere, including in the physical world where we thought we already knew it. This essay names the mechanism, maps its manifestations, and demonstrates one of them.
MERCH
Before Pink Eye, there was the Lazy River, my online dropship/print-on-demand store. It's still available, although now that my focus has shifted to Pink Eye there will be a growing number of merch options for the project for sale there.
"Them's the Breaks" is the first official t-shirt for Pink Eye. It's printed on the Gildan 5000, a medium-weight all-cotton tee that bears up well over repeated washings. The print is DTG (Direct to Garment), meaning the ink is applied to the fabric for better penetration and adhesion.
It comes in 7 colours, in sizes S to 5XL. Only available in Canada.