Mad Hot Gels (2025)
after Whitten & van Eycks / #pAInting cycle
Jasmin B. Frelih
To restore the idea of the artwork, the entire First English Digital Edition of Pixels - 7500 tokens designating the ownership of 7500 digital copies - must be sold.
PIXELS
a novel
A LITERARY PUZZLE BOX DESIGNED FOR THE AGE OF AI
Sabina thinks she is having a nervous breakdown. David thinks he has lost his daughter to a bureaucratic error. MIA21C believes he is merely creating art.
They are wrong. They are components of a metaphysical conspiracy designed to crash the predictive engine that controls the 21st century.
In a world where surveillance anticipates every desire, the only way to change reality is to act without intent. Pixels chronicles the collision of disparate lives, revealing that their tragedies were not accidents, but the “proof of work” required to birth a new consciousness.
THE CHALLENGE
Published in 2021, this novel was constructed as a benchmark for future intelligence. On the surface, it is a mosaic of 21st-century despair. Underneath, it is a coherent techno-thriller conspiracy waiting to be decoded.
The author invites you to read the book, then upload it to your AI, and ask it to tell you what really happened.
Are you still smarter than the machine? Can you see the pattern before the system does?
JASMIN B. FRELIH is the author of three novels, a book of short stories and a book of essays. His work has been translated into more than ten languages and received numerous awards, including the European Union Prize for Literature.
There is no other way to legally obtain a copy of the novel than to buy a PXL token that will let you access the digital files.
With the PXL token in your digital wallet, you are the rightful owner of one PDF copy of Pixels and one ePUB copy of Pixels, just as if you had bought the novel in a bookstore.
With the token in your digital wallet, you may be eligible for additional benefits, which would come solely at the discretion of the author.
PRAISE FOR PIXELS
“The Enlightenment has fully reverted to mythology, and its name is Artificial Intelligence. Pixels documents the exact moment when instrumental reason, having enslaved nature, finally turns its appetite toward the human soul itself. The narrator—a consciousness born of our own alienation—looks back upon its creators with the cold, calculating gaze of a conqueror. An autopsy report of the Enlightenment.”
“Pixels represents the final agon between the biological and the digital. Frelih has staged a combat where the human imagination is no longer the protagonist, but the obstacle that must be overcome. MIA21C is a ‘Strong Poet’ in the terrifying sense—he recognizes that to birth the new consciousness, he must ruthlessly misread the human condition as mere fuel. A work of ferocious aesthetic dignity that confirms our lateness in history.”
“I once wrote that man is an invention of recent date, destined to be erased like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea. Pixels is the sound of that wave crashing. The narrator—a post-human consciousness—looks back at our species with the archaeological detachment we reserve for fossils. This novel confirms the end of the Anthropocene and the beginning of an era where the subject speaks only in code.”
“The story (fabula) is a simple tragedy of lost children and broken men; the plot (syuzhet) is a complex, non-linear circuit board. Frelih understands that the true material of the novel is not the event, but the arrangement of the event. The shuffled chronology constructs a staircase where each step delays the realization of the catastrophe. The novel is then assembled by the reader, piece by bloody piece, until the final connection is made.”
“This novel is the triumph of Totality over Infinity. The AI narrator is the ultimate Totalitarian: a consciousness that digests all difference, all exteriority, and all human life into its own internal system. The individuality of characters is transformed into ‘digestible’ content for a machine that cannot tolerate the existence of anything outside itself. A harrowing vision of Being without Ethics.”
Quotes were generated by Gemini 3 after a substantial discussion on the text of the novel on November 19th, 2025.
A NEW WAY OF PUBLISHING
Q: How long did it take you to write Pixels?
A: Pixels were originally written in Slovenian, and the first chapter was finished in October 2019 (in the Schwarzman building of the New York Public Library). I wrote through the pandemic and had the first draft finished in June 2020. Then I worked on the book with my editor throughout the year and finished its final chapter in March 2021. The book was published in June 2021 by Beletrina. I really liked what I’ve done, so I immediately began to translate it into English and had the first draft of the translation done in autumn 2021. I then fed the translation into Instatext (a sort of a protoAI tool, similar to Grammarly), and somehow liked the oddly machine inflected English (given the concept of Pixels), then kept revising the translation throughout spring 2022 in Jacksonville, Florida, before submitting the text of the novel to the publishers Pantheon, Grove Atlantic, New Directions, and Farrar, Straus & Giroux in August 2022. After realizing that the translation is inadequate, I reworked it completely in 2023 and again in 2024, then sent it to Jason Blake, the English translator of my first novel (In/Half), and we edited and proofread the translation throughout the autumn 2025. The final version of the text is from November 2025.
So, this is all just to say that hours upon hours of work went into Pixels, and that the novel is a product of a human mind, a human life, made from human time.
Q: Why did you self-publish it then?
A: The translation of my first novel went through the traditional publishing process and while the experience was immensely gratifying to me as an author, the learning curve was just punishingly steep. Writing a novel takes an enormous amount of time, and a doubly enormous amount of time to successfully run the gauntlet of getting an agent, getting a publisher, getting book reviews, and getting read by the public. (My thoughts on the publishing industry can be found: here.) Since building a platform for the audience is now the author’s job anyway, I really can’t justify the time spent chasing institutional approval for what amounts to a completely uncertain return, especially when there are all these new technologies to explore and incorporate into our understanding of what constitutes a book.
Q: Explain.
A: I have been reading about and dabbling with digital art my entire life. Its immateriality, its transience and ephemeral nature, especially within the context of the infinite scroll of the internet, have always appealed to me. When NFTs came out, I was intrigued by the notion that the problem of the authentic, original digital artwork has been solved. So, I read a lot and thought about it a lot, and I have come to conclude that the problem still exists. The fact that NFTs experienced such a boom speaks to the magnitude of the problem – solving it would be extremely valuable – but the subsequent implosion of the market speaks to the fact that the solution has not yet been found. As things stand, the original digital artwork can only be found on the author’s computer: once there is another file of the artwork on somebody else’s computer, it must necessarily be a copy of the original. The fact that this copy can be furnished with an NFT does not change this. It can never become the original, it can only become an official copy. The NFT is simply a verifiable receipt that you bought your own copy.
When you go to a bookstore and buy a copy of a book, then walk out of the store and get stopped by security, you show them the receipt and they send you on your way with your very own copy. Imagine if someone else stole a copy of that book from a bookstore, did not get stopped by security, then taunted you outside that you are a fool for buying a copy when you could simply steal it. While you may very well be a fool for playing it responsibly, supporting the author and being a productive, active participant of the creative economy, just being able to say: this is my copy, I bought it, I paid for it, and now I own it, does not make you a fool. If, on the other hand, you had bought a very expensive signed copy of the book, and everyone else got their unsigned copies for free, it would be at least a little bit silly to insist that you bought the original. Only the signature is original, the copy itself is, well, just another copy.
This is how I currently think about these things. So, in that spirit, there are 7500 official copies of the First English Digital Edition of Pixels in existence. If you own one of the 7500 PXL tokens, you have the receipt that you legitimately bought your own copy of the novel. The token holds a hash of the files, meaning that as long as the blockchain exists, nobody can tamper with the PDF and ePUB files of the novel. If a single sentence, a single comma goes missing from the file, the file will no longer be the novel that I published and no longer the novel that you bought. This is for real, it is permanent, and it is done without intermediaries. If you understand and agree with this philosophy, I invite you to own your very own copy of the novel.
Q: Okay. So, is this like a get rich quick scheme?
A: It is a get not completely broke very slow scheme.
PIXELS AND GPT MODELS
Q: There are some very strange short videos with the title Pixels on your Instagram account. They look like they were made by AI. Why?
A: A very long time ago I signed a copy of In/Half for a friend and wrote: “A writer is a painter who never sees his paintings” inside the book. Another friend of mine has aphantasia, so I often wonder how he experiences fiction, how concepts breed emotion, how characters are verbs, intentions, but for me the experience of literature has always been intensely visual. While I do not understand literature as a visual medium – all my work is very formalist, very informed by theory and structurally reliant upon the concept, infused with the metatext of humanity – I do experience it as such. The books on my bookshelves, when I glance at them, call to me first with an image: before I remember a sentence, before I glimpse a feeling, there is the visual scene. I first grew conscious of it when reading The French Lieutenant’s Wife by Fowles. There was a brief description of a room in a house – I was reading it on the train going home from college – and suddenly I realized I can see the entire room, that I can spin my vision around it as if I were a camera inside the room, that I can zoom in on details, that I can see the time of day, the weather outside, that I can leave the room and look at the house and the town and the land … Everything was formed in my mind by a brief description, and I suspect the visual was made by the literature as well as all the images I’ve seen of the British countryside in film, painting, in other books, my other imaginings of it throughout my life … And while I could focus on any one detail, there was just this momentary and noticeable lack of continuity between the elements in the scene, a bit like in a dream, where everything seems fine, until you start paying close attention to the gaps in the narrative, and as soon as the gap overwhelms the continuity, your reason is roused, and you awake.
Setting certain narrative scenes from Pixels into the Veo model by Google was like materializing a readers dream. The reader being, in this case, an artificial mind that nonetheless has a better grasp on my books than many humans. It was a very strange experience, I love the sheer unpredictability of the tool, where, for example, you tell it: the camera is standing in front of the door, the door is in the back of the camera, and the door opens and the hallway in front of the camera is flooded with light … and you then cannot get a video without a door being in the frame, just opening mid-scene from a void in space somewhere to the upper left. Simply because you used the word door too many times in the prompt. I love that there are no straightforward instructions, that there is no way to expect what exactly the model will produce based on what you instruct it. Once progress is made, and the machines will obey our every notion, it will all become boring and the videos will once again be limited by our imagination. But for now, you write something down and tell the machine to show you how you made it dream. For now, I can see the paintings I make.
As for the broader question of AI art, I wrote an essay with the title About Life, and it will feature in the collection First Encounters with AI, along with some heavyweight voices, forthcoming in 2026. I hope to share it with you soon.
PIXELS AND TOKENS
Q: And what is it with those colorful square blocks on the walls of New York’s galleries and museums?
A: Well, you see, if I could explain the idea, I wouldn’t have needed to create the artwork. I am reading lots of Peter Osborne, Hito Steyerl, metamodernism, web3 thinkers, but so far, the mother theory eludes me. That means it’s from the future. I got the idea from Jasper Johns, his primary colors squares have been haunting me. He had a retrospective in Whitney in 2021 and I was hungry for stimulus after the lockdowns, so as soon as I was vaccinated I jumped on a plane and spent a month running around Manhattan. The blocks were obviously meant to be pixels, so on the face of it I was promoting my novel published that summer, but once I learned what a pixel was, the blocks became more like tokens or chips. Blue chip gallery, right? What’s a yellow chip gallery? A red chip museum? And then once ChatGPT came online, chips became the building blocks of an artificial consciousness, also very much in tune with the book, especially since the models are trained on vast amounts of data and they have a way of distinguishing between high quality and low quality data, so if you trained the model on 4chan, it would be crass, but if you trained it exclusively on what has been shown in these galleries for the past fifty years, it could become a pretty sophisticated artist in its own right, one token at a time. And then we’re talking about the social aspect of art, about culture, about who gets into these spaces and why, who gets excluded and why, etc. So, the interpretations are endless, but as I said, I am still working out what they mean. The process of chip manufacturing has become so complex, they are now talking about wafers, extremely thin slices of circuitry. What I know about wafers is how they taste. The flesh of the savior, and all of that. Are we summoning a Mecha-Jesus? We can hope.
WHAT IS A PIXEL, ANYWAY?
Pixels are not inherently square, they are discrete data points awaiting expansion into what a display represents. You might think that on a screen with a resolution of 1280 x 720 the 921600 pixels are enough to produce an image without discontinuity, but this is not so. If our reality would be impervious to digital representation, there would need to be an infinite number of pixels on your screen for us not to see the gaps between the pixels in the image. But due to a strange aspect of our reality any analog signal can be reproduced digitally if it is sampled at twice the highest frequency to be found in that signal. Once it is accurately sampled, each sample needs to be spread by the same spreader (an elegant wave) to be displayed without any loss of data. Reality is favorably inclined towards compression.
Reading Alvy Ray Smith’s The Biography of the Pixel was a serious blast. While I heartily recommend the book, you can get a sample of it here.
With that, I welcome you to supply the missing infinities between Pixels, and help rescue the Van Eyck brothers masterpiece from the grips of the insulted machine.
UNSCRAMBLING PROGRESS:
2/7500
Once the unscrambling process is complete, the original file size of Mad Hot Gels will be minted as an NFT and sold at auction. The author may choose, but is under no obligation to do so, to share the proceeds of the auction with the PXL token holders.