“Pleasure […] is wonder.” - H. P. Lovecraft

Inspired by real world patents in Artificial Emotional Intelligence, this debut collection of surreal graphic vignettes unfolds in a future where feelings are optimized for satisfaction, leaving nothing to be desired.

Through a series of chance encounters, the lives of unlikely heroes begin to shift.

Rather than grieving a lost past or rebelling against the present, their journeys mark the awakening of the now suppressed human instinct of curiosity. As the characters explore new spaces of intimacy, they uncover a strange delight within the constraints of artificial emotion. From radical sadness to embodied interfaces and uncanny rituals, this work honors the pleasure of wonder - the enduring impulse to imagine otherness in a world that only validates what it can measure.

Think Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis’ and Cronenberg’s ‘Videodrome’ meeting Yuval Noah Harari in a dark alley. Or, in other words:

120 pages of speculative fiction, dreamy, UI-noir about uncanny worlds governed by Artificial Emotional Intelligence in softcover (perfect bound), 6.5 x 9 inches on natural uncoated quality paper.

Every chapter offers an intimate glimpse into someone's or something’s daily routine, where the legal and technical language of a written patent becomes a lived reality - a ‘real’ human story, an algorithmic problem, a visceral tension. It is not an attempt to translate professional vocabulary, or follow a traditional hero journey, but a curious speculation on the type of inner life, inventors and corporations believe is worth living (a hidden gaze that follows readers everywhere through the book). Which feelings matter in their eyes? Is there a spectrum? What is the value of feelings?

I’m a speculative designer. I spend most of my days provoking organizations and people to imagine different ways of living. I gather signals, thoughts, fragments of logic, events, and behaviours, to build plausible foundations of new worlds. I introduce something into it and observe… how it transforms, adapt, resist, or gives up. My background is illustration and design and this is my way of fusing it all together... joyfully.

To me, Joyless is about the power of creativity. Creativity as a resilient human instinct to find new ways of seeing what's around you, to make new meaning - a simple, peaceful act of existing with other things.