I've had an unorthodox background for a long time. In high school, I pursued a very STEM heavy track, co-founding a failed start-up, while also taking a lot of AP courses which allowed me to take 2 years off from traditional education thanks to accrued credits. When I returned and went to school, it was for a program at The New School which allowed me to self-design a degree focused around media theory, contemporary art, philosophy, and experimental film. At this point in time, I wasn't really thinking about building companies so much as heavily invested in scholarship, and had developed a very independent through a rigorous approach to reading, viewing, watching, and practicing, much of it developed through my time outside of academia. As such, once I graduated, I didn't stop and my interests in philosophy media theory (most significantly Vilem Flusser, Heidegger, and Derrida) lead me to getting into more contemporary work such as the Yuk Hui, CCRU writers, Alexander Galloway, and other contemporary academics. In this time following my graduation, I worked day jobs in the public relations industry, while also maintaining an arts practice. At first I screened my first work under my real name at two experimental film festivals which occupy important nodes in their circuits / systems, though I could tell that this was a system that was failing and not constructed for the changing times.

As such, I developed a pseudonymous practice "paul (from bible)" / "S. Paul", a name I chose in particular because of Paul's influence on the West and my relationship to Western (Art/Literature) Worlds and the way they inherently commodified anyone coming from a non-Western background, but also because of the invisibility cloak the name (along with its S. Paul and even Satya Paul variations) provides when it comes to search engine indexes. I focused most of my publishing / artistic activities (besides other names / pseudonyms / institutions) under this name and built a following of what is now 1,500+ people for my work on Substack through which I self-published collages of algorithmic images and theory texts, experimental essay films, and other texts, wrote in / was featured in Spike Art Magazine, and had my work discussed in Other Internet. This work formed the bulk of my portfolio when I applied to and was accepted to ToftH School, a now-shuttered Berggruen-affiliated para-academic institute, in 2022 as a Research Fellow, which placed me in an environment to utilize much of my strategic thinking skills with a focus on how to apply them to product development, somewhat returning full-circle to my start-up roots (various ToftH projects are linked in the Speculative Design section of my portfolio).

During one of my research presentations at ToftH, I broke down the systems of the art world to my cohort, systems which I have learned and intuited through exposure and a strong innate understanding of how social structures and social positioning functions. I have a lot of experience in the contemporary art world, I occasionally flirt with it in the form of writing and gallery shows, and have many friends who occupy various positions in its different levels. A text like "These Bitches Act Local And Think Global" is indicative of this and also demonstrates my understanding of this "Art World" operating in relation to other Art Worlds. As someone who's worked in PR for galleries, I also have a strong understanding of "how the sausage is made" and how press / media shapes the position of artists and galleries in their World.

As someone with an interest in writing and the evolution of writing, I have to deal with the systems at play for disseminiating writing. In the art world (as well as music world and general cultural sphere), I've witnessed the transformation of how the critic has become superceded by the algorithm. In the case of the art world, however, which operates at a much smaller level and has far fewer players, I believe that the system which previously relied on structures like Artforum and Texte Zur Kunst used to create value is ripe for disruption and that the proper introduction of a protocol like the one I propose as (Art)Forum 2.0 could definitively alter how meaning and value are made and how social and financial capital are exchanged.