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.