The NPZ splits each year into 8 even parts, starting January 1st at midnight.
1 year is 365 days (unless there’s a leap year).
Normal year: 365 days
365/8 = 46.625
Each sign gets 46.625 days
The Dog is concerned with the gradient between human beings and nature. They are loyal, loving, and obedient. They are stubborn, wild, and react violently to abuse. Dogs bring up all sorts of uncomfortable questions and concerns that humans may not want to think about. They are beautiful, adorable, man’s best friend. They are scary, unfamiliar, uncanny beasts who live in the home.
The NPZ Dog aesthetic is pink collars, dirty paws, wild, playful eyes, running outside, curling up on the couch, unlikely pairs, connection across difficult barriers, submission as a voluntary act of trust, and aggression as animal innocence, not as abuse. Dogs are kitsch chic. Dogs are cute. Dogs are angry. Dogs are healthy. Dogs are alive at all costs until they are not.
The Naiad is between worlds. She belongs on land and in the water, in reality and in fable. Impossibly, she belongs to these two worlds equally. She will never truly choose one over the other. This irreconcilable duality defines her life, becoming its own identity. She will make a home out of being out of place.
The NPZ Naiad aesthetic is turquoise and indigo waves, scales glittering in the sun, royalty far from home, whimsical detachment and heavy mediation, fishnets and tridents, places that aren’t places and places that are. Naiads are ethereal. Naiads are sober. Naiads are addictive. They are perpetually exotic, forever from somewhere else, somewhere beyond. Naiads live and love in a context of uncertainty.
The Ghost is one of two spirits in the NPZ. This spirit is understood to be a spirit in the metaphysical sense of the word, not the moral or mythical sense. This spirit tends towards science, and towards spiritual phenomena which come from observable, material phenomena. If this spirit is an arrow on the pyramid of computer language, the Spirit (ghost) arrow is pointing up.
The NPZ Spirit (ghost) aesthetic is bright blue green skies, cool fluffy clouds, computers with souls, habits which become traits, earthly bodies with unearthly consciousnesses, and recursion and generation as divinity which arises from the mundane. The Ghost is beyond alive. The Ghost is beyond dead. The Ghost is a level of consciousness. It is the secular patron saint of an immaterial place you can get to from many different material start points.
The seal is a real creature, even more so than the dog, whose image is clouded for us by personal experience and human symbolism. Seals are out there. Seals exist. Our platonic ideal of a seal is informed by countless real examples, and by collective knowledge accumulated by various organizations. Friend groups, societies, governments, and scientific institutions have all collaborated for centuries to bring us the modern Seal. She is a testament to collaboration, to scientific curiosity, and to stories which are passed down from one generation to the next. She is smooth. She is beautiful. She is understood to be finite and clear, despite being neither of these things insofar as she is real. Scientists believe they have her “covered”. This may or may not be true. The Seal is one of the Selkie’s two states and a possible origin for the mermaid. She is a waterbound, alternative iteration of the Dog.
The NPZ Seal aesthetic is diagrams, taxonomy trees, beauty, function, grey, brown, blue, black, miraculous beauties of nature, the real-life mystery of the sea, and the eerie cuteness of a dog that is not a dog. She is alive. She is a scientific category - active, un-extinct. She is so “of this world” that it actually becomes suspicious if you look at her too long.
The Woman can also be called the First Person or the Man (as in Mankind), but defaults to feminine because the NPZ uses primarily feminine symbolism. The Woman is generative. She is the first computer. She is the mother and the child, the foreground and the background. She is a parsing participant and a parsed subject. Living in the wake of countless nuanced and contradictory stories, standards, and ideals, the Woman is always ironic and yet always genuine. She must define her sense of self against a tapestry of fables, some flattering, some degrading, all smaller than her reality. Each idea of the Woman captures a piece of her essence, but none is capable of telling her fortune.
The NPZ Woman aesthetic is red blood, soft skin, domestic machines, hesitation, courage, imperfect fruits, bows on objects, awkward charisma, quiet moments of growth, lush green forests, lived-in rooms, ambivalent passion, the finite scale of a human life, the gruesome divine, and sets of objects which are curated and arranged in such a way that just by looking at them, you can feel the gentle, desperate soul of the person to whom they belong.
The Machine/System is a tapestry of collaborative parts which come together under some common design. The system is collective. It deals with things that are greater than the sum of their parts. Sometimes we call someone a machine and we mean it as a great compliment. Other times we mean it as an insult. Like the dog, the machine is understood to be a product of her environment, and yet we all know there’s more going on. The machine’s scale and scope is ambiguous. Should a system be thought of as one thing, as many things, or as something else entirely? Is a system made of living things itself a living thing? What is the size of a mind? What is the size of a world? What is the size of a tapestry of love and life?
The NPZ Machine’s aesthetic is tangled wires, smooth surfaces, rainbows pixels, sleepovers, habits and idiosyncrasies, dance choreography, ant colonies, bee hives, disease maps, the tennis court oath, search parties, wedding parties, ecosystems, economics, political science models, fractal visuals, study hall politics, awkward attempts to make friends with your neighbors, shapes that emerge from TV static, and the devastating power of friendship.
The Angel is preoccupied with issues of right and wrong, perfection and contamination. She is a holy servant and a natural-born agent of benevolence. Her codified goodness demands a purity which cannot be found in reality. Like the Naiad, the Angel is also caught between two worlds; one in which she is perfect, and another in which she is real. One of two Spirits in the NPZ, the Angel tends towards morality and mythology, not science or metaphysics. While the Ghost deals with the way our material reality creates our higher consciousnesses, the Angel deals with the inverse. She embodies a higher consciousness descending into reality and finding a way to plug in. If this spirit is an arrow on the pyramid of computer language, the Spirit (angel) arrow is pointing down.
The NPZ Spirit (Angel)’s aesthetic is pale gossamer, blue veils, cirrus clouds, simple symbols, perfect designs, contamination, negotiation, corruption, ideological zeal, wide eyes, ecstatic horror, pure mathematics, a soul without a body, a life without death, and a good without evil. The Angel is born clean, and will choose to get dirty for the right reasons.
The Un-Seal is an entirely plausible pinniped who simply isn’t real. It’s got all the right parts in theory, but it just can’t be nailed down, scientifically speaking. It is fundamentally unknowable, unprovable, and elusive, and yet its construction is intuitively familiar. It is delightfully eerie, a self-contained game and a living off-beat joke. Just by being what it is (or isn’t), the Creature conjures the absurd. It is impossible to be sure whether the Not-Seal intends to conjure the absurd. She may not even intend to. The Creature is existentially terrifying. It is viscerally wrong. It’s the kind of dread you can make a home in. The Creature is endearing, sweet even. It has no intention of shaking your faith, no particular hostility towards your ontological stability, and that is the scariest and most powerful part. Her simple construction blows your world apart, and she doesn’t even notice or care.
The NPZ Un-Seal aesthetic is void, null, 404sealnotfound, redacted. It is unprovable truths, unprovable un-truths, square circles, the shadow self, and the world not for us. It is familiarity backwards, flipped, inverted, out of space and time, strange, unreal, unfathomable. It is all those things with a weirdly comforting disposition.