PX-77 showed up on july 16, the same day as DOT·FIELD and the tools shelf itself. first version: feed it a photo and the data rots. broken jpeg, sorted pixels, a buffer knocked out of line. a day later it could mosh, mask, bake and film from the phone camera.
then i used it for real and got bored. the degeneration was predictable. same photo, same slider, same kind of damage.
so one night in september i rebuilt it. what i asked for: a BAKE that never ends. make something in the synth, bake it, drop a photo on top, wreck that, bake again, keep going. blends that aren’t the photoshop list of cover and lighten, where the bright parts of one picture bend the other one. a 3d mode that pulls a solid object out of the light and the dark. a TRIBAL generator, patterns like tattoos, and a button that turns the object into metal.
the 3d kept handing me stacks of vertical lines when i wanted one whole object. i had asked for no noodles, and i said so more than once. nine days later i was still complaining about it.
what i finally got: PX is no photo editor. it makes visual chaos and pieces to reuse somewhere else. and it was making wallpaper, because every operator walked over every pixel with the same strength. a thing has an edge and empty space around it. wallpaper has neither. so the work stopped being “one more effect” and turned into alpha, edges, and damage that hits one corner and leaves the rest alone.
the pictures i later fed into VOICES IN MY HEAD are PX bakes.