I paint walls because a wall cannot be scrolled past. A wall does not need your subscription. A wall does not care about your engagement metrics or your attention economy or your algorithmic curation. A wall is a wall. It stands in physical space, in a specific place, and if you walk past it, you see what I put there, and there is nothing between my paint and your eyes except air.

I have been painting walls in GLMZ for eleven years. I started on the Shelf's lower levels, where the infrastructure is raw concrete and nobody cares what you do to it. I moved up. I paint on the Shelf's main concourses now, on the Circuit's retaining walls, on the underbellies of transit overpasses, on the blank faces of Ghost Buildings that have no one inside to object. I paint at night because the paint needs time to dry before the cleaning drones arrive in the morning, and because the night is when the city is honest. The daytime city is a performance — feed overlays and AR advertising and the perpetual digital noise of a civilization that cannot tolerate a blank surface. The nighttime city is concrete and steel and silence, and that is the city I paint for.

My medium is latex house paint, applied with rollers, brushes, and occasionally my hands. I do not use spray cans because spray paint is traceable — chemical signatures that law enforcement databases can match to purchase records. Latex paint is generic, ubiquitous, and sold in quantities that don't flag surveillance algorithms. I buy it in five-gallon buckets from hardware stores across four districts, never the same store twice in a month. The paint is cheap. The brushes are cheap. The art is free. That is the other thing about a wall: the viewer doesn't pay. There is no paywall, no subscription tier, no premium access. The wall is there for everyone who walks past it, and that egalitarianism is itself a political act in a city where every experience is monetized.

What do I paint? I paint people. Not portraits — figures. Human shapes in the act of being human: carrying things, sitting, standing, looking at each other, looking away from each other. I paint them large, ten to fifteen meters tall, so they dominate the wall the way the feed dominates your visual field. I paint them in flat colors with hard edges because I want them to be unmistakable. I want you to walk around a corner and be confronted by a fifteen-meter human being holding a cup of coffee and looking directly at you, and I want the thing you feel in that moment to be something the feed cannot give you: the shock of encountering something you did not choose to see.

The corponations scrub my work. Cleaning drones remove it within 48 to 72 hours, which means my art has a lifespan shorter than a mayfly. This does not bother me. The impermanence is the honesty. Nothing lasts. The feed pretends things last — every post archived, every image cached, every thought preserved in digital amber forever. The feed lies. Everything dies. My paintings die fast and in public, stripped from walls by machines that don't know what they're destroying. But for 48 hours, the painting was there, and you walked past it, and it existed in your visual field without your permission, and that moment — that unconsented encounter between your eyes and my work — is the only thing that matters. It happened. The feed can't unhappen it. The drones can't unsee it for you. For 48 hours, I put something in the world that was real, and now it's gone, and that's what art is.