ScribblyJoe’s no begin_nings (2017) interrogates the moral architecture of blame and accountability through the language of digital portraiture. Anchored in the artist’s own statement—questioning where blame begins and how concepts of fairness can exist amid genetic, psychological, and social determinants—the work visualises the instability of moral agency. This essay explores how the artwork uses formal ambiguity and layered digital process to render visible the tensions between free will, causality, and justice in the human condition.

In no begin_nings, ScribblyJoe presents a fractured, overlapping visage that resists singular interpretation. The artist has described the work as “questioning where blame begins”, citing the entangled influences of mental illness, childhood abuse, and genetic predisposition to impulsivity. This statement situates the artwork within a moral-philosophical inquiry rather than a purely aesthetic one. The digital portrait thus becomes an image of ethical complexity—a meditation on agency in a world where causation diffuses across biology, experience, and social systems.

The title no begin_nings signals a refusal of origin. The concept of “beginning” is dismantled—there is no single point from which responsibility, identity, or culpability can be traced. The artwork visualises this uncertainty through visual fragmentation, abstraction, and the instability of the digital mark.

The portrait depicts two overlapping faces rendered in contrasting tones of orange and black. The layering and partial occlusion create a dialogue between visibility and erasure. One face seems to emerge, the other to dissolve—an oscillation that embodies moral ambiguity. Is the figure revealing itself, or concealing something? The ambiguity mirrors the indeterminacy of blame itself: the impossibility of isolating cause in a network of intersecting forces.

ScribblyJoe’s use of ProCreate reinforces this conceptual layering. The digital brushwork evokes expressive immediacy while maintaining the potential for revision, undoing, and correction. This capacity to alter retrospectively parallels the judicial impulse to assign responsibility after the fact—to trace a beginning in what is, fundamentally, a continuum. The unfinished textures and visible overlays suggest a psychological portrait where nothing is ever complete, and no single gesture defines the whole.

The dominance of orange—evocative of flesh, heat, and warning—contrasts with the black shadows that consume portions of the face. These chromatic tensions can be read as the visual grammar of ethical conflict: illumination versus concealment, understanding versus judgment.

By invoking mental illness, neurodiversity, and trauma, the artist situates no begin_nings within a discourse that challenges Enlightenment notions of rational agency. The work echoes the philosophical tension between determinism and moral responsibility—a question that has troubled thinkers from Aristotle to contemporary neuroscientists.

If, as the artist asks, “mental illness is a caveat,” then the visual fragmentation of the portrait symbolises the fracturing of moral coherence. The doubled face may represent competing internal states: one rational, one impulsive; one guilty, one exonerated. The viewer becomes implicated in this ethical oscillation, drawn into the impossible task of discerning blame within a fractured psyche.

Through this lens, no begin_nings operates as a visual form of moral phenomenology. It exposes how social and legal systems demand linear causality—a beginning—in order to assign blame, even when human behaviour arises from overlapping causes beyond conscious control. The shadowed profile can be seen as the unseen histories—genetic, environmental, psychological—that shape behaviour but remain invisible to juridical reasoning.

The choice of digital media amplifies these conceptual tensions. The capacity to endlessly edit and rework a digital image parallels the recursive questioning of justice: each judgment can be revised, each moral stance overwritten. Yet traces of the previous marks remain, much as the legacies of trauma and biology persist beneath the surface of human action.

In this sense, ScribblyJoe’s process enacts the very question the work poses. If identity is editable, where does responsibility begin? If an artwork, like a person, is an accumulation of inherited marks and accidents, can any gesture—or any crime—truly be isolated as an origin point?

ScribblyJoe’s reference to fairness and law extends the discussion into a broader critique of moral systems. The portrait’s duality can be interpreted as the face of justice itself: divided between empathy and punishment, understanding and control. The diffuse boundaries of the figure recall the porousness of legal categories when confronted with human complexity.

Contemporary debates around neurodiversity, impulse control, and criminal responsibility mirror the uncertainties visualised in no begin_nings. The artwork refuses to resolve these tensions. Instead, it visualises their coexistence—the impossibility of constructing fairness without confronting the limits of human autonomy. In doing so, ScribblyJoe’s work aligns with philosophical inquiries by Foucault and Arendt into how modern societies produce subjects who are both judged and conditioned by the very systems that hold them accountable.

no begin_nings is not merely a digital portrait but an ethical landscape. Through compositional fragmentation, chromatic tension, and digital layering, ScribblyJoe visualises the impossibility of tracing the origins of blame. The work merges aesthetic gesture with philosophical inquiry, asking whether justice can exist without illusionary notions of beginnings or control.

In confronting these questions, ScribblyJoe positions digital art as a site of contemporary moral reflection—where the boundaries between self and system, freedom and determinism, are as unstable as the overlapping faces that haunt the screen.

• Arendt, H. (1963). Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Viking Press.
• Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Pantheon.
• Hayles, N. Katherine. (1999). How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. University of Chicago Press.
• Manovich, L. (2001). The Language of New Media. MIT Press.
• Strawson, P. (1962). “Freedom and Resentment.” Proceedings of the British Academy, 48, 1–25.

- Critical Analysis by ChatGPT