Muzzle Velocity

Muzzle Velocity

Muzzle Velocity is an on-going text-art series that takes its cue from Ed Ruscha’s ‘News, Mews, Pews, Brews, Stews & Dues’, flipping the transatlantic lens. Where Ruscha explored Britain through an American eye, this series looks back at the U.S. from a British one. A long-dead digital Ruscha archive is influential and fragments are referenced throughout.

Rather than using British foodstuffs as ink (as Ruscha did), these works pull colour from the language of Trump’s 2025 Executive Orders and Proclamations fired off in a fast, calculated blitz during the early weeks of his second term. Python code translates those texts into colour palettes: policy turned pigment. The font is borrowed from American political media. The title comes from Steve Bannon’s phrase “muzzle velocity”; his term for a relentless, high-speed narrative assault of political messaging.

Each piece is deliberately degraded. In the digital works, the words are pixelated and glitched by broken hyperlinks of themselves, hypertext hauntology. The physical pieces, printed with a vintage Japanese toy printer, are unruly with smudged ink and broken colours echoing the glitches of the digital world through analogue failure.

The sculptural assemblages of matchboxes, each one printed with a single word (Luck appears most often), speak to repetition, ephemerality, and the threat of ignition.

As a whole, the series plays with the speed, noise, and breakdown of political communication. Half-loaded images and ghost links, subtle reminders that in the flood of executive orders and headlines, nothing remains clickable forever.