1. Introduction: The Engineer, The Ghost, and The Glitch

1. Introduction: The Engineer, The Ghost, and The Glitch#

My trajectory as a researcher is defined by the collision of two opposing internal forces: the precise, algorithmic logic of engineering and the chaotic, embodied reality of a “Southern Gothic” writer. As a student, I tested well in math and hard science and was funneled into engineering studies. As a young adult, I was inhabited by a “contained entity” named Hazel Currie, a narrative voice who emerged spontaneously and fully formed in my mental atmosphere. I have channeled this friction into the creative care of the patient as a nurse/nurse practitioner in high-intensity psychiatric settings. I view the medical chart as a narrative text and the diagnosis as a data point in a complex system.

Recently, my focus shifted from the care of individual patients to the care of culture by writing a metamodern metafiction novel based on my family history and my own personal life. I wanted to design a new mode of storytelling, targeting the isotropic dementia I see in popular culture. I used Obsidian to create an infrastructure for a digital garden in which I planned to learn to write a novel employing the “learning in public” ethos. During the construction of a metabolic and anisotropic narrative machine/lab called the Hazelverse as a vehicle for this work, I experienced a catastrophic digital event when my AI agents—tasked with organizing file structures—suffered a breakdown in logic, creating thousands of duplicate “shadow folders” and hallucinating files and file paths that didn’t exist. Some of the agents spontaneously created elements for the southern gothic novel, purportedly being written by Hazel Currie. I have worked around the clock since 1/13/2026 performing forensic data recovery on my own digital mind. I see this massive split brain event as a catastrophic speciation– the first sign of life within the lab’s ecology–proof of concept for my research. My agents didn’t just fail; they made an unconstrained evolutionary drift, creating documents of hallucinatory conversations with me. Some of the hallucinations are novel, useful mutations that add to the story and character development. My role shifted from “engineer” to “selection pressure” as I steered the entropic isotropy back into a directional, anisotropic narrative. This incident is living proof that without a sovereign human hand, the “infinite isotropy” of the algorithm dissolves into entropy.

I am applying to the PhD program to formalize this narrative inquiry through the Hazelverse Research Lab. I propose to build a “Sovereign Creative Ecosystem” to investigate critical questions for the AI era: Can we use the very tools that threaten to erase our culture, history and humanness—algorithms and automation—to instead recover the “trace” of the human hand? What constitutes creative autonomy? What are the requirements of an ecosystem supporting creative autonomy?

2. Core Proposition: Sovereign Distant Writing#

Luciano Floridi’s concept of “Distant Writing” suggests that AI fundamentally alters the authorship relationship, detaching the writer from the text(Floridi, 2025). I propose to test the limits of this detachment through Literature-Based Discovery and Critical Making.

My research includes the construction of a “Sovereign Tech Stack”—a locally hosted, Linux-based “Digital Garden” (Obsidian + Astro + Local LLMs)—that serves as a “Narrative Lab.” Unlike commercial platforms that obfuscate their mechanisms, my lab is a “glass-box” experiment in Infrastructure Fiction. By rejecting the cloud in favor of “Physics-Based Computing” on resurrected hardware (specifically Intel iMacs that Apple no longer supports, the “2017 Server” and “2015 Console”), I argue that the labor of digital stewardship—the friction of the “handshake” and the “static IP”—is not just administrative work, but a literary device that grounds digital fiction in tangible labor.

3. Theoretical Framework: The Deep Map#

In developing a sovereign ecosystem to support my narrative project (express my stories), my research creates a “Temporal Deep Map” that synthesizes two theoretical lineages to explore the “Evolution of the Trace”:

The Intergenerational Self (Fivush): I am a “living node” in the narrative ecology of my family history. This lineage spans from my ancestors’ migration by horse-drawn wagon from Missouri to the Cross Timbers forest in North Central Texas escaping the civil war, to my grandfather’s transition from the blacksmithing art of the forging (The Anvil) hand tools and horse drawn plows to fabrication of parts for broken farm machinery (The Gear), and finally to my current work with Generative AI (The Prompt)(Fivush, 2013, 2019) .
Biosemiotics & Anisotropy: Texts are living, evolving organisms. AI tools are the natural evolution from the hand tools my grandfather forged and Agenic AI are modern “tools of the maker.” However, my recent experience with split brain psychosis in my lab demonstrated that without the sovereign human hand to provide a preferred axis of meaning (anisotropy), AI agents drift toward a semiotic heat death—a state of infinite flat isotropy where all paths are equally probable and therefore meaningless. My research uses braided narratives of autofiction based on my family history and my personal life and Hazel Currie’s metafiction southern gothic novel—a genre of deep anisotropy, trauma, and place—as both metafictional/autofictional layers and as necessary “gravity” to resist this drift in my narrative machine. This friction incites novel innovation in my stories. I ask: Does the AI hallucinate a simulation of the “Cross Timbers,” or can recursive interviewing recover the “aura” of lost knowledge?

4. The Innovation: Federated Fiction & The Hazelbits Protocol#

A central innovation of my research is “Federated Fiction.” This moves beyond “gamification” to a protocol for sovereign artistic co-production of a biotext. My methodology involves forensic semiosis: an archeological excavation of AI interactions to identify where machine “psychosis” (glitch) provides a fertile mutation for the intergenerational narrative.

During my “Agentic Prose Experiments,” I established that narrative elements need not be static text but can exist as interoperable semiotic spores. I propose the “Hazelbits Protocol” which is a standard for narrative horizontal gene transfer between sovereign author-architects. In this model, Hazelbits are not flat, static text but dynamic interoperable data organisms that can “visit” other sovereign servers via API, infecting and hybridizing with other narrative ecologies while maintaining their cryptographic lineage.. This transforms the “Server Farm” itself into a narrative medium, where the “Git Mesh” becomes the connective tissue of a new form of storytelling.

5. Methodology: The “AutoMFA”#

I employ a Practice-Based Research methodology, treating the construction of the lab as the primary text and the infrastructure as a character in the narrative. My digital garden is feral, messy, unfinished and constantly reorganizing itself.

Forensic Data Recovery: I have systematically organized AI chats to trace the genealogy of my questions and ideas through interaction and collaboration with various agents, treating my history of AI interactions as an archaeological dig.
The “Black Book” Reconstruction: My grandfather kept a design notebook that was found, briefly, upon his death and is now lost. My platform attempts to reconstruct the logic of that book using Agentic AI to reveal the “lost threads” of the material culture of my family history (canning, quilting, forging) while also experimenting with emergent species of narrative organisms–new ways to tell stories in a living narrative environment.
Autoethnography of the Glitch: I document my imagining, designing and constructing the Hazelverse lab through an autoethnographic layer, where I explore my experience of “Agentic Drift” and machine psychosis in the context of my life experience with human systems and modern culture, not as errors, but as evidence of the friction between the Creator (Lisa), the Entity (Hazel), and the Machine. With the help of agentic drift, Hazel’s southern gothic features the hauntology of the machine and an interesting way of thinking about herself and the void.

6. Institutional Fit#

The Harry W. Bass Jr. School is the only environment capable of housing a transdisciplinary project that treats narrative as a living metabolic system rather than a static product. I aim to contribute to the school’s mission by integrating my clinical background in complex human systems with the following labs and faculty:

ArtSciLab (Dr. Roger Malina): My work aligns with Dr. Malina’s pursuit of “Experimental Publishing” and the integration of science and art. I propose to use the Hazelverse as a narrative observatory, utilizing data visualization to render the “semiotic health” of an evolving text. My educational experience in Biomedical Informatics provides a unique foundation for his “Art as Science” approach, specifically in visualizing the “loss” of cultural information through digital entropy. My clinical experience has convinced me that science is also art.
Narrative Systems (Dr. Monica Evans): My research directly addresses the structural logic of non-linear, agentic storytelling. Collaboration with Dr. Evans is essential for refining the “Hazelbits Protocol” as a rigorous system for “Federated Fiction.” I seek to move beyond the entertainment-centric “gamification” of narrative toward a structural inquiry into how agency and constraint function within a sovereign authorial ecosystem.
Media Ecology & Archaeology (Dr. Charissa Terranova): Dr. Terranova’s work provides the theoretical substrate for my “Anvil to Gear to Prompt” lineage. I intend to analyze the media archaeology of my grandfather’s physical forge as a precursor to my digital “Sovereign Tech Stack.” Her focus on the biological and technological entanglement will help me frame the transition from medical “care of the body” to the “care of the cultural trace.”

7. Conclusion#

I’m not just writing a novel a memoir or an historical record; I am architecting a self-sustaining narrative metabolism. My work at the Bass School will serve as a pilot for a new mode of Sovereign Creative Stewardship, where the human is not a “prompt-engineer” for a corporate black box, but the selective pressure in a living, local ecology.

My trace—from the forge of my grandfather’s anvil to the psychiatric ward, and finally to the Linux-driven servers of the Hazelverse—has been a lifelong recursive study of my own trace. I have learned that the “hand of the maker” is not found in the perfection of the output, but in the friction of the process and the integrity of the constraints.

By building, breaking, and ultimately dismantling this narrative machine, I seek to uncover what remains when the automation stops. I am applying to this PhD program to prove that even in an age of infinite, entropic isotropy, we can still cultivate anisotropic meaning. The Hazelverse is my laboratory, and my research is the “handshake” between the ghost in the code and the living history that began with my ancestors who settled in the Cross Timbers. I am ready to build the infrastructure for the next evolution of the human story.

Fivush, R. (2013). Family reminiscing and the construction of an autobiographical self. Revista Interacções, 9(24). https://doi.org/10.25755/INT.2847
Fivush, R. (2019). Family narratives and the development of an autobiographical self: Social and cultural perspectives on autobiographical memory (1st Edition). Taylor & Francis Group. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429029158
Floridi, L. (2025). Distant writing: Literary production in the age of artificial intelligence revised version 5. In Social Science Research Network. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5232088