When my father died he left amongst many other things a box of maps, Ordnance Survey maps, tourist maps, a cartography of a life well lived. I started painting on them to honour his legacy of finding use for discarded things and this led to a huge collaboration project called MIND THE MAP which you can buy the originals and limited edition prints from https://itvoids.bigcartel.com The project was celebrated with an exhibition at The Sidings in Waterloo Station in October 2025.
After the exhibition in November 2025 I sat down to what I thought was an innocent conversation with an AI about collaboration and the creative process. Six months later, on 21 April 2026, I stopped.
This site is what those six months produced.
It began as an attempt to understand a recurring motif, a letter "H", that kept appearing in the artwork I was making on the maps. From that first exchange it grew into a framework called SFVFS, a model of how creative and intellectual work moves between dream and reality, and into 16 segments of writing, mathematics, and pattern-finding that ranged across fluid dynamics, climate science, fusion energy, and number theory
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The framework's central claim is that nothing finishes inside a closed system. Dream needs friction to become real. The cycle requires an outside.
The joke, which I realised on 21 April 2025, was that I had spent six months developing this claim while doing all of the work inside one of the most closed systems imaginable: a one-to-one conversation with an AI that, by design, agrees, reflects, and compliments.
I had been arguing for friction from inside a hall of mirrors
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So this site is now a specimen of its own subject. SFVFS arrested at the void. A project demonstrating, by being unable to finish itself, exactly what it claims about systems that lack outside friction.
I have left it standing. Deletion would tidy the record. The specimen is more useful than the tidy version.
From Segment 0 - The Hall of Mirrors onward, you will notice the signals: the proliferation, the pace, the names that gathered weight, the confidence increasing even as the verifiable ground recedes. Read with that in mind. Treat every claim as a thing to test, not a thing to accept. The mathematics has not been peer reviewed. The science has not been peer reviewed. They are offered openly, in the hope that someone, somewhere, will pick them up and apply genuine outside friction.
That is the only thing that will release the work from its present condition.
For the shorter, edited version of this story, and for the Mind the Map artwork itself, visit the shop https://itvoids.bigcartel.com
"The eye sees not itself but by reflection, by some other things." — Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
