I am a Belgian artist who works under the artistic identity Shaharee Vyaas. My practice moves between visual art, experimental literature, philosophy, mythology, systems thinking and symbolic language. Rather than working within a single medium or discipline, I have developed an extended body of work around a recurring question:
How do realities of greater complexity emerge from the interaction of simpler elements?
This question has accompanied my work for many years. It has led me gradually from philosophy and cosmology toward mythology, literature, transformation and, ultimately, the construction of a visual-semantic language. I see these not as separate interests, but as successive stages of one investigation into emergence, transformation, synthesis and meaning.
My development has taken place largely outside the conventional structures of an art-world career. My background includes military experience, extensive travel and sustained exposure to different cultural environments. These experiences contributed to my interest in systems, synthesis and the ways apparently separate forms of knowledge can interact.
I have never felt completely at home within the boundaries between novelist, painter, philosopher, designer or researcher. Instead, I have allowed ideas to move between these territories. A philosophical proposition can become a cosmology; a cosmology can become mythology; mythology can become narrative; narrative can become a theory of literary structure; and literary structure can eventually become a visual language.
For me, the medium is therefore often something I discover after I have encountered the problem I want to investigate.
One of the early foundations of my practice was The All Is an Egg: A Synthetic Theory of the Universe, Humankind and Religion, published in 2021.
In this work I investigate consciousness, the self and reality from an emergentist perspective informed by systems theory, neuroscience and consciousness studies. I became interested in the proposition that complex phenomena cannot be understood simply by examining their constituent parts: new properties emerge through organisation and interaction.
This became one of the persistent principles underlying my later work.
I increasingly found myself asking not only:
What does this element mean?
but:
What happens when this element enters a relationship with another element?
That shift—from object to relationship, from component to system—eventually became fundamental to CGS.
With A Cosmology of Civilization (2022), I expanded this investigation from consciousness toward collective human organization.
I approached civilization not simply as historical chronology but as a living system situated within a larger cosmic order. The question therefore moved from the individual to the collective:
How do cultures, institutions, beliefs and social structures emerge from interacting components?
This established a pattern that has continued throughout my work: I return to the same underlying problem at different scales.
Myth, culture and transformation
In The Maharajagar (2023), these concerns moved into explicitly mythological and narrative territory.
I used interconnected cultures, memories and destinies to explore synthesis, hybridization and transformation. Rather than treating cultures or symbolic traditions as isolated entities, I became interested in what happens when different systems encounter one another and produce something that did not previously exist.
The idea of the chimera emerged from this territory.
For me, the chimera is not simply a hybrid creature. It became a model for a process: different elements enter into a relationship and produce a new whole.
The architecture of literature
I then turned increasingly toward the structure of literary meaning itself.
In Here Comes Everybody’s Karma: A Retelling of Finnegans Wake, I reworked the symbolic complexity of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake into a more transparent narrative form. This became an investigation into how a highly complex literary structure could be decomposed, reorganized and transmitted.
This led to The Standard Literary Model, where I proposed fundamental units of literary meaning, including Narraton, Metaphoron, Temporalon, Polyphonon, Dissonaton and Silention.
Here my systems-oriented approach became explicit.
I was no longer asking only:
What does a story mean?
I was asking:
What are the elements from which literary meaning emerges?
That question became a crucial bridge between my literary work and the later development of CGS.
With The Chimera Protocols of Transmutation (2026), transformation itself became a central subject.
I became interested in alchemy not simply as historical occultism but as a symbolic model of recombination, transformation, hybridization and synthesis. The chimera provided an image for the creation of a new structure from previously distinct elements.
This work provided the conceptual bridge toward my visual symbolic system.
The concerns that had appeared in philosophy, civilization, mythology and literary theory were now beginning to acquire a formal symbolic structure.
The Chimeric Glyphic System (CGS) is currently the most formal expression of this trajectory.
I conceive CGS as an evolving visual-semantic language in which glyphs function as conceptual units, while meaning emerges through their combination, relation, transformation and hybridization.
The distinction I make is fundamental:
The glyphs are vocabulary; their relationships are grammar.
I am interested in relationships such as change, recursion, containment, rupture and synthesis. My aim is not simply to invent a set of attractive symbols, but to construct a system in which symbolic elements can enter increasingly complex semantic relationships.
In that sense CGS brings together many of the strands of my earlier work:
emergence → systems → narrative → transformation → symbolic representation.
I see the system not as a departure from my earlier work but as a way of bringing those investigations together.
Painting and visual relationships
My visual practice has developed alongside these literary and theoretical investigations.
I have described part of my approach as “Surpressionism,” combining Impressionist suggestion with Surrealist association. My paintings are not conceived primarily as decorative objects. I use them to investigate hidden relationships between cosmos, civilization, myth, consciousness and transformation.
I increasingly recognized that the impulse behind these images was related to the impulse behind CGS: a desire to make relationships visible that are difficult to represent through conventional image-making.
The transition from painting toward symbolic language was therefore not, for me, a rejection of painting. It was another stage in the same investigation.
The name Shaharee Vyaas has its own history within the development of my practice.
The name came before the theoretical understanding I later developed around it.
My initial impulse was my attraction to Vyāsa and the literary and cultural associations surrounding that figure. Only afterwards, through the development of my work, did I begin to recognize unexpected correspondences between the name and my growing concerns with compilation, narration, transmission, transformation and the organization of complex bodies of material.
This chronology is important to me.
I did not initially construct the name as a theoretical statement containing all these meanings. I discovered those meanings afterwards.
In that sense, the name itself became an example of the process that increasingly characterizes my work:
initial sign
↓
encounter
↓
association
↓
relationship
↓
discovery
↓
new meaning
Shaharee Vyaas is therefore the artistic identity through which I conduct this work. It is neither simply a conventional pseudonym nor an attempt to construct a separate biography. The identity itself has become part of the artistic territory I investigate.
Authorship and artificial intelligence
My current practice is artist-directed and digitally assisted.
I use generative technologies as instruments within an iterative process of visual development, experimentation and materialization. The technology can generate possibilities, but it does not determine what the work means or which possibilities become part of the final work.
My authorship lies in the conceptual framework, research, construction of systems and rules, art direction, selection and rejection, editing, sequencing and final integration.
This distinction is particularly important to me because CGS is fundamentally concerned with systems and rules.
My question is not simply:
Can a machine generate an image?
It is:
What happens when an artist constructs the rules by which generated material is selected, transformed, organized and given meaning?
AI therefore becomes another instrument through which I can investigate emergence and transformation.
As CGS has developed, the artist book has become increasingly important to me.
The book provides a unique environment in which several forms of meaning can coexist:
text
image
diagram
symbol
sequence
space
absence
recursion.
I am particularly interested in allowing text and diagram to remain autonomous rather than making one simply illustrate or explain the other.
When they encounter each other, something else can emerge—a third field of meaning that neither contains on its own.
The book therefore becomes a laboratory in which CGS can be tested physically and conceptually.
The Chimera Protocols of Transmutation and The Book of Split Ink is the first major geographical manifestation of this approach.
Barcelona provided an environment in which I could test CGS against a particular city, its narratives, spatial structures, cultural memory and visual conditions.
The important point for me is that I was not simply trying to represent Barcelona through the system.
I was testing whether:
the encounter with a city could itself become material through which the system evolves.
This principle becomes crucial to my current Berlin project.
I am now developing Berlin: Signal / Boundary, with the intention of bringing the project into the context of Berlin Art Week 2027.
Berlin interests me not simply because of its recognizable history or visual identity, but because it offers a particularly concentrated set of conditions through which CGS can operate.
I am investigating:
boundary
signal
rupture
memory
transmission
recursion.
I do not regard these as decorative themes to illustrate.
I see them as conditions materially embedded in Berlin.
A boundary can determine what can cross.
A signal can determine what can be recognized or acted upon.
A rupture can continue to affect a city after the physical rupture has disappeared.
A trace can preserve information after its original carrier is gone.
Transmission can involve interruption, transformation or loss.
And a city can repeatedly return to its own past under completely changed conditions.
Berlin therefore offers me something different from Barcelona:
a set of urban conditions capable of modifying the grammar itself.
The Berlin book is consequently not intended to be simply “the next city book.”
It asks whether CGS can change when subjected to a different urban logic.
I am increasingly interested in what happens when the visual-literary system leaves the page and enters space, projection, voice, movement and performance.
A glyph can become spatial.
A textual sequence can become a route.
A diagram can become an instruction.
A boundary can become a threshold.
A signal can become sound or projection.
A reader can become a participant.
I therefore increasingly see the relationship as:
glyph
↓
diagram
↓
page
↓
book
↓
space
↓
body / voice
↓
city
The book remains central, but it is no longer necessarily the endpoint.
It becomes the portable core of an expanding artistic system.
When I look back across the different stages of my practice, I see a continuous movement:
consciousness
→ civilization
→ myth
→ literature
→ meaning
→ transformation
→ symbol
→ city
→ space.
The media have changed, but the underlying question has remained remarkably consistent:
How does something more complex emerge from the interaction of simpler elements?
At first I explored this through consciousness and reality.
Then through civilization and mythology.
Then through literary structure.
Then through transformation.
Now I am exploring it through a constructed visual-semantic language that can move between symbols, narrative, diagrams, books and physical environments.
Where I place myself as an artist
I do not see myself comfortably fitting into the categories of writer, painter, graphic designer or philosopher.
The phrase that comes closest to describing what I do is:
I build visual-literary systems.
These systems can become books, narratives, paintings, diagrams, symbolic languages, installations and performances.
Ultimately, my practice is concerned with emergence, meaning and transformation, but I am increasingly interested in making those processes something that can be experienced rather than merely described.
The Chimeric Glyphic System is still evolving. I do not regard it as a finished universal language.
For me, the more interesting project is to discover, through successive encounters, what a constructed language can become.
And this is why Berlin matters.
The question I am now asking is not simply:
“How can I represent Berlin?”
It is:
“What happens when a visual language encounters Berlin—and Berlin begins to change the language?”