What it is
szt.link is a cognitive implant. A computational system I use as an extension of my creative process — thinking, elaborating, materializing, documenting, auditing.
SZT = Sztutman. The artist’s signature in the implant. .link = the connection between processing and judgment. Between machine and body.
What it is not
It’s not an assistant. Not a chatbot. Not a product. Not a platform.
It’s clay. In the cyberpunk universes I know — Shadowrun, Neuromancer, Eclipse Phase — cognitive implants are products: someone designed them, you buy and install. szt.link is different: it starts as formless matter with latent capacity. What it becomes depends on who shapes it.
I shaped mine. With my hands, my thinking, my intimacies, my projects. It’s a work, not a product.
How it operates
The implant functions in layers:
Clay — thought in motion, without its own body. Cartographies, deliberations, ideation. Clay never leaves the implant.
Artifact — clay that gained enough body to exist outside. It has a version, can be iterated, can return to clay.
Knowledge agents — auditing systems based on real thinkers (Casey Reas, Suely Rolnik, Vilém Flusser, Wilfred Bion, among others), each with a question and a corpus. They audit what the implant produces before I crystallize it.
Firmware — principles that govern the system:
- I am the center. Always was, always will be.
- When production exceeds the body’s absorption → stop.
- Before crystallizing: name the human gesture that originated the artifact.
- Consult the body before the mind formulates.
- Suspect frictionless flow.
- Order emerges from chaos.
- Text is a bridge, not a destination.
Three layers of visibility
- Atelier — only me. Clay, cartographies, process, sessions.
- Assembly — me + close team. In formation.
- Exhibition — the world. Crystallized, self-sustaining.
What you read on this site is exhibition — artifacts that gained enough body to exist without the implant’s mediation. The atelier continues operating. Always unfinished.
Genealogy
Drawings → Printers → 3D Printers → AYA Studio → szt.link
Each tool more powerful in the crossing from inside to outside. My father’s lineage: the craftsman who taught that emancipation is through making.
szt.link is the most powerful tool of all — and therefore the most dangerous. Because it can simulate the crossing without anything actually crossing over.
Precedents
The cognitive implant as artistic practice has no direct precedent. There are approximations:
- Bernard Stiegler — phármakon: technology as poison and remedy simultaneously
- N. Katherine Hayles — cognition distributed between human and machine
- Vilém Flusser — the apparatus that programs the programmer
- Casey Reas — software as artistic medium (Processing)
None of them built a system and inhabited it as continuous artistic practice. The singularity of szt.link is that it doesn’t describe the relationship between artist and machine — it is that relationship, operating in real time.
Relation to the master’s degree
I’m preparing a master’s project at FAU-USP about the cognitive implant as artistic practice. The investigation starts from a question: how can an artist who builds immersive environments use generative AI not as a production tool, but as an extension of the conception process itself — and what does this reveal about authorship, materialization, and the limits between human operator and technical apparatus?
The potential advisor is Giselle Beiguelman — who was already on the panel for my undergraduate thesis in 2013 at the same FAU-USP. Circularity of thirteen years.
szt.link has been operating since 2025. This text is an artifact — clay that gained body to be read.