Observation
A conversation
It started with a woman describing, almost in passing, how obliged she felt to fake her CV: hiding the gaps, choosing the right words, cutting out what she was actually passionate about.
A Perfect CV
A CV of illegible labourFor years I was very good at building a CV. The passion I performed and never felt. The five-year plan I invented while dreaming of never coding again. Every time the mask got me the job, I was proud of it, and felt a relief that was a little sick.
A Perfect CV starts from what I left out. Next to my real CV, a second one made of everything that was real in those years but had no exchange rate. Both are glued onto canvas, worked instinctively, then read symbolically, without resolving anything.
It is not about a true self hiding under a mask. I do not believe in one. The question is which forms of a life convert into belonging, which stay illegible, and why I keep pursuing the illegible ones anyway.
I start with my own CV. Then I ask other people to write theirs.
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Journal18 September 2026
The safe version
Straight after that conversation I wrote the whole project around “fake CV versus authentic CV”. It was the safe path. Everyone would relate to it. I thought of a web app: people write the CV the market expects, answer a few questions about what they really want, and an AI turns the two into an artwork.
Once the excitement faded, I felt almost no pull to build it. There was nothing left to research, because I had made the project about something already resolved.
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Journal18 September 2026
Two objections
Talking the idea through with an AI model used as a critical interlocutor, two objections landed hard. My method needs the instinctive, bodily gesture, the part that cannot be delegated to a generative tool. And “fake versus honest” is a binary: I do not believe in a true self hiding under a mask.
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Process18 September 2026
Back to my own CV
So instead of designing an app, I went back to the years I spent perfecting my CV as a programmer. The passion I performed. The five-year plan I invented. The gaps I covered. The three books I wrote and never once mentioned. The bots I built at night and told no one about.
And the fact that I was proud of all of it, every time the mask got me the job.
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Reading18 September 2026
Two premises
Reading that material back, two premises surfaced, both sharper than “mask versus authentic self”.
One: which forms of a life convert into belonging, and which are real but have no exchange rate.
Two: building a convincing self is not an unconscious drift. It is a conscious, rational, learnable skill. The only unconscious part was not knowing it was a skill.
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Journal18 September 2026
The project splits in two
The two premises do not belong to the same piece. This one, A CV of Illegible Labour, follows the first. The second became a separate project, Self-Made: not about the lie, but about the engineering it takes to sustain one. Still open: whether to develop them in parallel, or commit to one first.
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Journal18 September 2026
Why I keep the instinctive phase
I have been tempted for a while to cut the instinctive phase out of my method. It felt slow, and at odds with “conceptual art”. This project made it obvious why I cannot. Without it, any project is only half mine. And it is the only way to learn something from the work that I did not already know.
The excitement of the first version has gone. I do not yet know where the creative process will take me. I feel curious and a little scared, which tells me I am in the right place.
Rationally, I would only arrive where I already know. Instinctively, it takes me where it needs to.
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Next
My own CV, then other people’s
First my own CV of illegible labour, glued onto canvas next to my real one. Then other people’s.