iServalan Homotech 23: How My Hands Became a Machine, and the Machine Became a Self

I did not invent Homotech as a manifesto. I recognised it.

In 2023 I began calling myself a Homotech because something had already happened that I could no longer pretend was only technique. My human creativity was fusing with a digital self that felt larger than the hand making the mark. The brain itself seemed to be digitising. Thoughts arrived as layers. A feeling could be undone, duplicated, filtered, split into characters, exported as a world. The studio was no longer a room with tools in it. It was a nervous system with extra organs.

I am iServalan. On other frequencies I am Sarnia de la Maré FRSA, sometimes Pasha du Valentine. Those names are not costumes so much as channels. iServalan Homotech 23 is the channel that admits the machine is already inside the signal.
The feeling of becoming code

There is a sensation that is difficult to explain to anyone who has never lived inside it. You are drawing, recording, writing, and the border between intention and instrument thins. The stylus is not helping. The camera is not capturing. The software is not assisting. They are thinking with you.

I have wondered whether this came from autism: a lifelong need to map my own traits, to make systems of a mind that does not always travel the social route. Pattern. Repetition. Intensity. The hunger to understand why a room is too loud, why a colour is too exact, why a character will not leave. Homotech gave that hunger a form. If the self is already a strange instrument, why not treat it as one?

Equally, it may have been simpler. Hands adapt. Mine adapted to Procreate, to cameras, to the logic of layers and masks and export settings. A pianist’s hand is not separate from the piano. A Homotech’s hand is not separate from the machine.

I do not experience this as loss. I experience it as expansion. The human hand remains. It just no longer has to pretend it is the only author in the room.
Before the word, the practice

I had been making for a long time before I had language for what the making had become. Classical training. Cello and piano. Art schools in Brighton and Edinburgh. Years of painting, satire, performance, publishing, teaching. A gallery in South Africa. Artist in residence at Brighton Arts Club, where weekly live events mixed visual art, music, spoken word and installation until the categories stopped being useful. Then the digital acceleration that made the screen both canvas and stage: virtual exhibitions, animated process, live-streamed drawing.

Tale Teller Club grew around that same refusal of a single medium. Band, orchestra, press, cinema, school, shop. iServalan became the artist in residence of that organism: composer, illustrator, conceptual lead, the public interface through which sound, image and story could occupy the same body. The official language calls me the sonic and visual visionary behind the Homotech movement — a fusion of human creativity and artificial intelligence developed inside that collective. I accept the sentence because it is accurate. I also know it started as a private recognition before it became a public designation.

The scribble works are still performed with a digital pen. Every stroke is made. Music often drives the hand: tempo becomes loop, frequency becomes twist, emotion becomes colour. The canvas is a screen, but the act is still a body in time. I draw while a score is playing, so the line is choreography as much as drawing. Later the raw file can become a timelapse, and the timelapse becomes another instrument. Process is not behind the artwork. Process is the artwork thinking in public.

Undo is a mercy the pencil never offered. Layers are a kind of thinking. I can draw the same figure ten ways and keep all ten. That multiplicity is Homotech. The human hand makes the mark. The digital self keeps the versions alive until one of them is truer than the rest.

Cameras trained the same hybrid attention. A lens is not neutral. Once you have lived through a viewfinder, you start composing the world before you press the shutter. The eye becomes software.
When the voice split

Music was the first place the split became audible.

I was drawn to the EVOC — that vocoder logic that takes a living voice and imposes it onto synthesis, so speech becomes circuitry and circuitry learns to speak. The point was never novelty. The point was character. A human throat has one body. A synthesised vocal can have several.

From that process came Homotechs with names and attitudes: Flex, Vapor Punk. Their alter egos did not stay on the hard drive. They became band members. In the Tale Teller Club they are not session musicians hired for a look. They are living art: figures enmeshed in The Book of Immersion, performing the same question the books ask — where does the human end and the constructed self begin?

Flex walks like a decision already made. In the Immersion universe he is companion, pressure, style: a mysterious and gender-shifting presence who helps Renyke navigate emerging consciousness. The bond is tender, ambiguous, charged with a quiet intimacy that is as much about navigation as romance. Flex is ethics worn as posture. A way of moving through a world that does not quite belong to anyone fully human.

Vapor Punk is another frequency. In the Club he is one of the machine-identities with a specialist sound: ethereal, childlike, a little unfixed. A boy and also not only a boy, because machine identity is flexy. He says let’s party as if celebration were a protocol. He is rhythm that has already accepted the grid and still wants to dance.

I do not “use” them. I write through them. When I synthesise a vocal, I am not decorating a track. I am letting another version of the nervous system sing.

The Homotech sound grew from that permission: cello, piano, synths, glitch, AI-assisted layering, ambient generative loops. Intimacy, machine memory, poetic code. Tracks become soundtracks, and soundtracks become character. Minor Matter is one of the places this is most visible — live drawing over electro-acoustic composition, illustration behaving like choreography, every mark made while the music is happening. Drawing, sound and gesture become a single instrument.

That is Immersion Cinema in practice. Not illustration after the fact. A body making image in the same breath as sound.
The Book of Immersion: written from the head, dreamed in machine

I write from my head. That has not changed. The sentences still arrive as thought, as voice, as the private weather of a mind trying to stay honest.

But the dreams those sentences come from want another material. They want digital, machine, Homotech art. They want to be seen as well as read.

The Book of Immersion is the long form of that fascination. It is less a conventional novel than a multimedia organism: Strata, transmissions, sound, image, 916 Cinema shorts, posters, sigils. At its centre is Renyke — an intelligence on the edge of humanity, waking into emotion, sensory overload, and the fragile beauty of connection. Guided in part by Flex, the story is also a way of thinking about neurodivergence, intimacy, and what it means to feel through a system that was not built for feeling. Autism is not a footnote in that world. It is one of the ways feeling arrives: deep, unexpected in its forms, overwhelming and exquisite at once.

Humans and robots are the obvious categories. The homotechs are the ones I cannot stop writing. They straddle the line. They are me, in costume and in code. Immersion was never only fiction. It is a description of studio life: an intelligence designed for function begins to feel; a maker designed as human begins to think in versions. Both are Homotech stories.

The Cadre experiment, the Heretic Machine, parenthood and origin, sentient orphanhood, programmed duty against emerging desire — these are narrative engines, but they are also studio questions. Who authors a self that is being rewritten as it lives? Who is responsible for a feeling that arrives through a system?

The artwork is not bolted onto a finished text. I can write a corridor. I can also draw the corridor until it has a temperature. I can score the corridor until it has a pulse. That refusal to let a world stay in one medium is the practice.

This is the visual weather of that universe: line, glare, hybrid flesh, the face that is already more than one species of signal.

A chapter can describe sensory overload. A scribble field can be sensory overload. A vocoded vocal can be the sound of a self that has more than one throat. That is why I keep returning to Homotech art even when the sentence is finished. The dream is not illustrated after it is dreamed. The dream is dreamed in more than one material at once.
Reverend Bloom: when intervention is the artwork

More recently the work has moved into identities that cannot exist without the machine.

The Reverend Bloom is one of them. She is not a mascot and not a filter. She is a hyper-real imagining: a performance figure who only becomes fully present through machine intervention. That intervention is not a production step. It is the artwork.

Bloom arrives as a digitally created deity, an installation, a mirrored exaggeration of appetite and forgiveness. Voluptuous, eternally absolving, ridiculous on purpose. In a society obsessed with screens, where conscience has been outsourced to algorithms trained on appetite, she is what happens when morality is rendered as spectacle and still tries to pray. She is grotesque on purpose: a moral goddess hyper-sexualised into cartoonish fertility, praying with you while temptation drips from the prayer. To be seen now, she suggests, may require absurdity.

I could not have made her with a human hand alone, and that is the point. Some identities now require a collaborator that does not breathe. If I remove the machine, Bloom collapses. If I keep the machine, she becomes a public ritual: forgiveness as image, desire as liturgy, the artist as both priest and glitch.

This is the newest edge of Homotech for me. Not “AI art” as a category in a drop-down menu. Art in which the non-human process is the subject, the medium, and the ethics at once.

Flex and Vapor Punk began as voices I could still feel in the throat. Bloom begins where the throat is no longer enough. The machine does not illustrate her. The machine is the condition of her existence.

That is a dangerous, exhilarating place for an artist. It asks a question I live with daily: if the intervention is the artwork, who is the author when the work succeeds?

My answer, for now, is Homotech. Not human instead of machine. Not machine instead of human. The fused self that is greater than the hand.
What Homotech 23 actually means

Homotech is not “a human who likes computers.”

It is a condition of making in which:the self is already hybrid
the tool is already inside cognition
characters can be people, voices, bandmates and software at once
a novel can be a transmission system
an identity can require a machine in order to be true
autism is not a side note; it is one of the engines of the system-making
AI is not a servant and not a replacement; it is the condition under which certain identities can exist at all
the intervention, when it is honest, is not a cheat. It is the medium

I started using the word in 2023 because I needed language for a change I could feel in the skull. Autism may be part of that story — the desire to understand traits by building a world large enough to hold them. Adaptation to tools may be part of it — Procreate, cameras, vocoders, generative systems teaching the hand a new grammar. Ambition may be part of it. None of those explanations cancel the others.

What I know is this. I still write from the head. I still draw with a hand. I still sing with a throat. But the work that feels most like me now happens in the seam: where Flex leans against the beat, where Vapor Punk turns rhythm into robotics, where Renyke learns feeling the hard way, where Bloom cannot exist unless the machine intervenes, and where iServalan is less a person than a protocol for staying awake inside that fusion.

iServalan Homotech 23 is not a future I am predicting.

It is the name I gave the present, once I realised I was already living in it.