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Borges

Callie Rose Petal

Do Knot Site; Your Source: Is ██████.

II. IV. Give: The Characters • ERA_Æ

Callie Rose Petal (born 17 April 1994) is a Scottish avant-garde conceptual performance artist, composer, software developer, and language artist. Her work spans experimental literature, noise composition, and transmedia ritual. She is known for her work as a "noise alchemist", fusing experimental sound, ritual structure, and semiotics.

Early life and creative development

Petal demonstrated academic aptitude from an early age but experienced delayed diagnosis of ADHD and autism, a manifestation of twice-exceptionality. Her initial creative output was poetry, later expanding into music and visual art, particularly through her album cover designs. Her background in bioinformatics and scientific research into virology eventually integrated into her interdisciplinary transtextualnarrative framework, Lexicomythography, which leverages these diverse specialisms into a research methodology for characters within her multiverse.

Her creative practice initially served as a shield against the difficulties of growing up trans in the United Kingdom, later shifting from insular, contemplative solitary work to "performance-as-purge", and ultimately reaching a balance through integration of these opposites. This trajectory underpins the central arc of the short film What It Means to Be, filmed over three years, which documents her navigation of transition, chronic illness, and artistic growth.

Petal also hosts and curates the radio show “the medium is the wreckage” on EHFM, where she "explores the many forms that abrasion takes"; showcasing original noise works, abrasive soundscapes, spoken word poetry fragments and her writings and personal reflections, which merge fiction and nonfiction — a literary method reminiscent of Borges' work.

Career

Petal’s practice involves the design of fictional languages, hybrid systems blending constructed linguistic elements with esoteric programming language features, used and/or written by characters and entities within her narrative universe, along with the compilation of conceptual dictionaries. She interlaces programming logic with mythopoetic frameworks to create complex symbolic meanings. She was a Creative Informatics Resident Entrepreneur in Edinburgh, exploring transmedia narrative platforms "Digital platform (infrastructure)") integrating audio, computational statistics, and digital storytelling.

She holds a published academic background in virology and bioinformatics, contributing notably to research on avian influenza during her time as a Researcher at The Roslin Institute. While at Roslin, she received the Outstanding Student Experience Award for her extracurricular work, introducing inclusive bathrooms on all floors of the Institute and organising its first queer/ally social events. Petal has stated that this scientific foundation underpins her creative work, drawing influence from intersecting biological and computational methodologies.

She composed the score and starred in the short documentary What It Means to Be by Lea Luiz de Oliveira, which won Best Short Documentary at the KASHISH Pride Film Festival. It was screened in Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Brussels, with Petal participating in post-screening Q&As.

As a performance artist, she was commissioned by the international queer art showcase Homografía Festival in Brussels, presenting hybrid works of live performance, noise composition, and ritual. Her commissioned performance work at Homografía 2023, IF ONLY HANDS COULD SPEAK, was a multidisciplinary ritual, drawing from the myth of Philomela as catharsis for her own experience of sexual trauma. The piece involved "staged self-mutilation with theatrical blood, a prosthetic tongue, live painting, and ended with aggressive extended vocal technique "Screaming (music)") in an open, industrial venue, addressing themes of forced vulnerability and biological essentialism imposed on trans women". The performance piece was premiered in a gallery installation at LTD Ink Corporation in Edinburgh. Petal delivered a hybrid live art performance with electric double bass and keyboards, mixing field recordings, noise and queer industrial music at Edinburgh's Sneaky Pete's in 2022.

Her 2020 one-woman durational performance HOW MUCH DO I HAVE TO BLEED explored embodied exhaustion, censorship, and audience proximity, performed bound and gagged, drenched in blood, and marked with the names of trans people killed in acts of violence that year, an act of endurance art amplifying themes of silenced grief and bodily vulnerability during the COVID-19 pandemic. It was documented and accompanied by her 2020 orchestral release, GAUDIA, in What It Means to Be.

She is also a software developer, incorporating technical expertise into interactive, narrative-driven systems and digital artworks.

Petal releases music under her current alias ⁿᵒᵗBorges. Earlier releases appeared under the names lonely carp and CARPVS MORTVVM. As lonely carp, she released several works including the album _ KATABASIS: an underworld opera_, an experimental live opera of noise composition and ritual theatre which, according to a review in 2022, developed a significant following. She premiered KATABASIS at Summerhall's Anatomy Lecture Theatre, a converted veterinary school space featuring raised wooden horseshoe seating, over a series of two intimate performances in Edinburgh. The concerts involved gradually stripping naked to expose vulnerability, thematically exploring survival sex—a form of sex work prevalent amongst trans women, often rooted in socio-economic marginalisation. She also performed KATABASIS at the StagEHd festival in the Ross Bandstand, an open-air stadium in Princes Street Gardens.

She has appeared on the compilation cassette No Authority Without Corruption, No Power Without Abuse, released by the label Venalism, to which she is currently signed. A forthcoming double cassette release on Venalism, titled Xˡᶦᵇʳᶦˢ, extends her literary practice through a noise-based conceptual framework.

Petal’s first musical performance was at age 18, supporting Diane Cluck at the Tin Music and Arts in Coventry. She has supported the Melbourne duo Divide and Dissolve at The Hug and Pint in Glasgow, in 2022. She also supported Extra Life "Extra Life (band)") at a Venalism-organised show at The Banshee Labyrinth in Edinburgh. That same year, Petal performed in the full Edinburgh Fringe run of SHE/HER, produced by Brian Cox "Brian Cox (actor)") and Actor Rising Productions. Her musical performance—combining an original vocal and accordion composition with interpretive dance—earned standout reviews for its emotional intensity and storytelling.

Awards and nominations

2019: Outstanding Student Experience Award for her Disability Rights and Trans Rights Activism work, involving the introduction of inclusive bathrooms and the first ever queer/ally socials at the Roslin Institute.

2019: Supported artist with Help Musicians UK, Do It Differently Fund for vinyl pressing, cassette duplication, and distribution of KATABASIS: an underworld opera.

2019: Creative Bridge Scholarship, awarded by Creative Informatics, supporting emerging artists integrating technology and creative practice.

2019: Resident Entrepreneur Residency at Creative Informatics, Edinburgh.

2022: Nominated for Best Newcomer at the Scottish Alternative Music Awards (SAMAs), sponsored by the Academy of Music & Sound.

2023: Shortlisted for the Unlimited Fund UK Open Awards, supporting artists with disabilities and neurodivergence.

2023: Best Short Documentary for What It Means to Be, Jury Award, KASHISH Pride Film Festival.

Style and influences

Petal’s multidisciplinary practice integrates experimental literature, abrasive music production —often accompanying visceral ritual performance — and digitally innovative alternate reality game (ARG) creation. These elements coalesce in her broader framework of Lexicomythography, an interwoven system of symbolic expression grounded in mythopoesis and semiotic design. She employs a “noise alchemist” approach, integrating ritual structure and semiotics within an "artifact-as-artefact" framework. Her sonic practice treats breakdown and distortion not as flaws but as compositional forces. Loss, grief, and otherness emerge as structural catalysts of affect and form within her broader conceptual themes.

Her trans identity and lived experience inform much of her work’s thematic exploration.

Her literary practice employs fragmentation, redaction, and intentional illegibility, aligning with principles of contemporary noise literature, paralleling her sonic work. Her "page-as-performance" engages self-reflexive narrative techniques, exploring textual instability and reader positioning. This metafictional methodology employs intertextuality by embedding fictional publications as fractalised texts within a larger narrative architecture.

ⁿᵒᵗBorges is both her musical moniker and the pseudonym for her broader transmedia and literary work, the latter encompassing over one million words, structured as a layered, recursive universe, composed of cryptic fragments and multimedia forms. According to Petal’s own conceptual framing, ⁿᵒᵗBorges functions as an inversion of Borges’ literary approach: rather than referencing fictional works, it actively creates them—fictional, nested sources, that deepen the labyrinthine dialogue between the story and self-reference. This embodies a self-described “neophilological” practice, synthesising chaotic, hypergraphic and compulsive art with stillness and structure, likened to genetic material dissolved and rebound as triple strands — an alchemical metaphor for the project’s self-replicating, interwoven layers.

Immersive storytelling and metanarrative work

Petal’s durational narrative project incorporates fictional languages, mythopoeic systems, and interlinked documents distributed across textual, sonic, visual, performative, and digital forms. She has described her narrative work as “a durational literary project that will undoubtedly last the rest of [her] life”, stating that she aims “to frame the conditions of marginalisation [she], and so many others have been dealt, not as absences, but as generative states of meaning.”

Petal coined Lexicomythography, a pseudo-academic field that centres mythopoesis through etymology and dissection of The Word, as both a creative schema and a critical commentary on the exclusionary politics of traditional academia, particularly from the perspective of a queer, disabled woman in STEM. Through Lexicomythography and the compilation of a Dictionary, the ever-evolving lexDict, Petal explores the spiritual resonance of language, recursive meaning-making, and the generative power of myth as a counterpoint to rigid scientific structures, challenging conventional boundaries between science, art, and identity. It forms the basis of her multiyear project, The Children’s Gospel Music Songbook, one of the narrative fictional canons within the wider ⁿᵒᵗBorges multiverse. She presents ARIA|DNE, the Society of Lexicomythographers, as a secretive group, compiling dictionaries and creating intentionally obfuscated, recursive texts as a form of transmedia ritual and creative resistance.

She maintains multiple independently-produced, continuously updated digital platforms as part of the Lexicomythography project, along with a regularly updated GitHub profile of multiple in-universe repositories, featuring narrative threads encoded within pull requests and commit messages. These repositories serve not only as technical infrastructure, but as canonical extensions of the Lexicomythography multiverse, embedding recursive narrative logic and symbolic lexicons into the very architecture of their version control. Many serve as Trailheads (ARG entry points), the first introduced via post linking to the initiation video by the artist on the subreddit r/ARG. Examples include:

• An interactive command-line interface (CLI), itself an in-universe entity
• A 'Choose Your Own Adventure' applet tied to The Children’s Gospel Music Songbook, with a digitised manuscript portal
• A podcast integrating AI-generated narrative segments,
• The ‘Journals of ARIA|DNE pseudo-academic repository, framing the narrative universe through layers of ' institutional access'

These platforms operate both as standalone art objects and as active interfaces for her immersive ARG-like narrative—blending magick, software development, scientific method, and trans mysticism within the secret society framework that permeates her fictional multiverse.

Discography

as lonely carp
Title	Year	Format	Label	Notes
Your Shirt	2014	Single (Digital)	Self-released	Spoken word collaboration with Will Toledo (Car Seat Headrest)
GAUDIA	2020	Single (Digital)	Self-released	From the original score of What It Means to Be (2023 Documentary)
WAR SORE	2020	EP (Digital)	Self-released	Precursor to KATABASIS: an underworld opera. Withdrawn by the artist post-release
Behold this SACRED STAIN (O! BREATH OF THE ALMIGHTY!)	2021	Single (Digital)	Self-released	Lead single from the studio debut album KATABASIS: an underworld opera
KATABASIS: an underworld opera	2021	LP (Digital, Vinyl, Cassette)	Self-released	Studio debut album
No Authority Without Corruption, No Power Without Abuse	2023	Compilation Album (Digital, Cassette)	Venalism	A benefit compilation supporting humanitarian efforts in Gaza
we are ᴺever ( going on a bear hunt | ever a gain )	2024	EP (Digital)	Self-released	Early demos and fragments from the forthcoming double cassette, Xˡᶦᵇʳᶦˢ
as CARPVS MORTVVM
THE LABYRINTH CYCLE: iterations on a dream of icarus	2022	EP (Digital)	Self-released	Reimagined/extended orchestral noise compositions of KATABASIS: an underworld opera
ARCHITECT OF MY ABUSE: this chapel you built must surely collapse	2022	EP (Digital)	Self-released	Orchestral noise accompaniment to performance piece IF ONLY HANDS COULD SPEAK
FAGOCYTE: my plate is empty i ate everything let me go	2023	EP (Digital)	Self-released	Harsh noise EP
THE WOMAN IN THE WARD CHAPEL'S WALLPAPER ...	2024	EP (Digital)	Self-released	Earliest example of textual illegibility and formatting experimentation in a release title. Final lonely carp release before adopting ⁿᵒᵗBorges.
as {the(woman)wallpaper}
bairn | a folklorexic song circle neglected by the woman in the wallpaper	2024	EP (Digital)	Self-released	Part of The Children's Gospel Music Songbook, sonic components of the Lexicomythography narrative universe
as ⁿᵒᵗBorges
XVII ᵃᵈᵛᵉⁿᵗᵘʳᵉˢ ᶠᵒʳ ˢᵠᵘᵃⁿᵈᵉʳᵉᵈ ʸᵉᵃʳˢ	2025	EP (Digital)	Self-released
I ˢʰᵒʳᵗ ˢᵗᵒʳʸ ᶠᵒʳ ᵇᵒʳᵍᵉˢ ᵃⁿᵈ ᶦ	2025	Single (Digital)	Self-released	Part of The Children's Gospel Music Songbook
XVIII ᵘⁿˢᵉⁿᵗ ᵖᵃˡᶦᵐᵖˢᵉˢᵗˢ ᶠʳᵒᵐ ᴶᵒʳᵍᵉ ᴸᵘᶦˢ ᴮᵒʳᵍᵉˢ ⁽ᵃᵈᵈʳᵉˢˢᵉᵈ ᵗᵒ ᵖʰᶦˡ ᵉˡᵛᵉʳᵘᵐ⁾	2025	EP (Digital)	Self-released	Samples work by Phil Elverum ( The Microphones)
Vᵃʳᶦᵃ ᶠᵒʳ ᵇˡᵒᵒᵈ ᵃⁿᵈ ᵒᵗʰᵉʳ ᵃˢʰᵉˢ	2025	EP (Digital)	Self-released
Iᵃᵇᶦᵈᵉ ʷᶦᵗʰ ᵗʰᵉᵉ	2025	Single (Digital)	Self-released	Samples work by The Microphones, Trinity College Choir, and Thelonious Monk
VI ˢʰᵒʳᵗ ᵖʳᵒᵇˡᵉᵐˢ ᶠᵒʳ ᵇᵒʷᵉᵈ ˢᵃʷ ᵃⁿᵈ ˢᶦⁿᵍᶦⁿᵍ ᵇᵒʷˡ	2025	Album (Digital)	Self-released	Debut full-length under the ⁿᵒᵗBorges moniker
IXᵖʳᵃʸᵉʳˢ ᶠᵒʳ ᵈᶦᵛᶦⁿᵉ ᶠᶦˡᵗʰ ᵃⁿᵈ ᵒᵗʰᵉʳ ˢᵗᵒʳᶦᵉˢ	2025	EP (Digital)	Self-released	Samples FK Alexander and Cat Boyd's When Everything I Love Falls from the Sky, the World will be Covered in Darkness
XII ᶜᶦʳᶜᵘˡᵃʳ ᵇʳᵉᵃᵗʰˢ ᶠᵒʳ ᵇᵉˡˡᵒʷˢ	2025	Album (Digital)	Self-released	Sophomore full-length under the ⁿᵒᵗBorges moniker
Xˡᶦᵇʳᶦˢ	-	Album (Digital, Cassette)	Venalism	The first full-length to be released under the Venalism label (forthcoming)

Personal life

Petal lives and works in Scotland. She has publicly discussed her experiences living with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, a connective tissue disorder that impacts her mobility and energy levels, shaping many aspects of her daily life and creative practice. The condition posed challenges to her medical transition. She has written about undergoing gender-affirming surgeries in personal essays scattered across her website. She continues hormone replacement therapy, as documented in the short film ‘‘What It Means to Be’’.

Petal has openly described experiencing psychotic episodes, including symptoms such as hypergraphia and clanging, which she integrates into her creative methodology. These experiences are narrativised by the pseudonymous persona ‘The Woman in the Wallpaper’, credited as the author of The Children’s Gospel Music Songbook —a central text in the recursively layered universe of Lexicomythography.

The project originated during a psychiatric hospitalisation in late 2024, and its central text, RED_RING_PARALLEL, encodes this period within densely layered metatext, accessible only through oblique traversal of her site’s symbolic architecture.

Petal is also neurodivergent, and has spoken about being autistic and having ADHD, as well as experiencing traits associated with schizotypal perception and cognition. Her creative practice is informed by considerations of access, disability justice, the temporal rhythms imposed by chronic illness and neurodivergence.

She has also reflected on her own survivorhood, which informs the themes of grief, resilience, and recovery across her work. Her advocacy for trauma-informed creative spaces draws from this history, shaping both her artistic and community-facing practices. These layered perspectives influence her approach to pacing, ritual, and the thematic navigation of pain, embodiment, and altered states.