Light, made into product.
BUTENKO ART STUDIO is an independent media and digital studio. We treat attention, language and code as raw matter, and shape it into apps, books, media and film that feel inevitable.
We work small and ship like something far larger. A tiny crew directs a fleet of AI agents across research, design, writing and code, so an idea travels from first spark to released object without losing its edge.
We make our own products and imprints, and bring the same discipline to work made with clients. Every surface — a screen, a page, a frame — is held to the restraint a spectrum imposes on light.
Portfolio
8 Pages Burnaby
Web · 2026 · Editorial system · Design · Build
An independent hyperlocal magazine — eight hand-edited stories a month.
Local journalism is thinning out, and the stories closest to a place are usually the first to go. 8 Pages Burnaby answers with restraint: one issue a month, exactly eight stories, each researched, written and edited by hand. Behind the masthead a small set of Claude Code agents handle research, drafting, visual direction and SEO — and nothing publishes until an editor has read it.
The early issues went after the city's buried history: Robert Burnaby, Still Creek, Bridge Studios, Expo 86, the local punk scene. They proved a cadence one person can hold — an AI-assisted newsroom that amplifies editorial judgement rather than standing in for it.
Nuance
Web · 2026 · Concept · Product design · Build
Train the word before the word — name exactly what you see and feel.
Most language tools train delivery: pace, filler, confidence. Nuance trains the step before speech — turning an inner image or feeling into the exact word. A stimulus appears, the user says aloud what they see or feel, and the app weighs the answer for precision, then offers a sharper word drawn from the edge of their own passive vocabulary. They say it again with the better word, and spaced repetition brings it back until it is theirs.
Bilingual across Russian and English and built to work offline, Nuance grows active vocabulary and emotional granularity together. Naming a feeling more exactly turns out to be its own kind of regulation.
Resurface
Web · 2025 · Concept · Product design
A calm, offline-first companion for finding your way back from derealization.
Depersonalization-derealization leaves the world feeling distant and unreal, and the help for it is scattered across forums, videos and half-finished worksheets. Resurface gathers the recovery into one calm, offline-first place: grounding and somatic exercises, a set of small games that pull attention back into the body, an AI companion for the hours between sessions, and quiet tracking of triggers and progress.
Every screen is designed to be used on a bad day — low stimulation, large targets, nothing that asks for more than the person has. What remains is a single place to return to, day after day, until the fog thins.
English Coach
Web · 2026 · Product design · Build
English from zero, audio first — a patient tutor that learns from each mistake.
English Coach takes an adult from zero — someone who has never had room for the language and needs to hear a word before trusting it on the page. It writes its own curriculum, drills grammar in short daily sessions, synthesises audio for every sentence, and reads each mistake closely enough to teach from it. Spaced repetition decides what comes back and when.
Built on Next.js and Postgres with a generation pipeline behind it, English Coach behaves less like a course and more like a patient tutor who never loses the thread between lessons.
Wordhoard
Web · 2025 · Design system · Product design
A living dictionary — your own words, enriched and kept warm.
Wordhoard treats vocabulary as a living dictionary rather than a deck of flashcards. Words arrive with their senses, examples and connotations intact, enriched on the way in, and stay searchable and revisable as the collection grows. Spaced repetition keeps the active set warm; a weekly export turns the month's words into something to keep.
It began as a study in how a vocabulary tool should look and feel when it is designed for words specifically — down to a colour system where magenta marks meaning, not a button.
Korean Coach
Web · 2026 · Product design · Build
A personal Korean vocabulary, learned by ear and held by spaced repetition.
Korean Coach is a personal vocabulary trainer built around the ear. It starts from a curated library of around six hundred Korean words, grouped by the situations they belong to and filtered by where the learner stands with each — wanted, learning, known. Audio is generated for every entry, example sentences are written to fit, and spaced repetition carries the words forward.
The design favours one clean library over a pile of features: find the words that matter, hear them, keep them.
Publishing
Orbit of Us
BUTENKO ART STUDIO · 2026
Two astronauts fall in love on a dying station the agencies swore was safe.
A romance with a thriller's engine, told in two voices. On the ATLAS station in 2038, a structural engineer and an astrophysicist circle each other while Module C quietly degrades and the people on the ground keep moving the line for what counts as safe. Between the chapters, the station's AI logs everything it sees and understands none of it.
Twelve episodes, two men who have spent their lives carrying everything alone, and the slow discovery that an orbit needs two bodies to hold.
Pharaoh
BUTENKO ART STUDIO · 2026
A Belgian anthropologist talks his way into the Egyptian underworld and learns it was waiting for him.
Daniel Amon believes he can study the Duat the way he has studied every other belief system — from a safe, intellectual distance. The artifact in his hands disagrees. Over thirty-five days his body begins to change, and the nine-thousand-year-old presences trapped on the far side of attention start to negotiate, with his daughter's life as the stake.
A mystical thriller built on dense, coherent world mechanics, where curiosity hardens into obligation and the real question is whether a man who has become a beacon for ancient predators can protect the people he loves without becoming what they want him to be.
Science Fiction Boy
BUTENKO ART STUDIO · 2026
A boy with real powers spends his youth trying to save people, then sees that he is the harm.
Told from somewhere above the Earth, looking back. A young man in an immigrant family in East Vancouver can move objects with his mind, read thoughts, start fires — and is certain he is fighting evil. The world holds no evil, only situations, and every time he intervenes the situation gets worse. The morning after a plane he could not save goes down, his friends tell him the truth plainly.
He believes them. He puts on a spacesuit and leaves, choosing exile where he can do no more damage. A psychological science fiction novel about a savior complex that learns — too late, and exactly in time — to remove itself.
The Nervous System Reset
BUTENKO ART STUDIO · 2026
Nervous-system science turned into fifteen practices for a body stuck in survival mode.
A field manual for people whose nervous system is jammed in alarm — anxious, exhausted, dissociated or frozen. It opens with the physiological sigh, a thirty-second technique with the research behind it, then builds a fifteen-chapter toolkit: the polyvagal ladder, trauma responses, breathwork, vagal stimulation, somatic release, tapping, the gut-brain connection, and morning, evening and emergency protocols.
Every technique is named with a study or a researcher to stand behind it. The promise is modest and specific — small, repeatable ways to tell the body it is safe.
The Loneliness Cure
BUTENKO ART STUDIO · 2026
A neuroscience-based, twelve-week plan for the brain that loneliness has put on alert.
Loneliness is not answered by being told to go out more. It changes how the brain reads social information, turning ordinary conversations into something that feels unsafe. This book starts there — with the cognitive trap — then moves outward in weekly steps: micro-connections, deeper friendships, the third places and daily habits that hold a social life up, and giving as a way back in.
Twelve chapters, twelve weeks, with chapters for the people the standard advice forgets: men, parents, remote workers, expats, the old.
The Glitch
BUTENKO ART STUDIO · 2026
Nineteen documented anomalies reality can't quite explain, filed as a system error report.
Written as though reality is an old program with bugs nobody can patch. Each of nineteen cases opens with a one-page error log, then the investigation: the human story, the data, the explanations that hold and the parts that do not, and a verdict — patched, unresolved, or administratively closed. The Versailles time slip, the Wow! signal, Dyatlov Pass, the Antikythera mechanism, the Hessdalen lights.
The book stays honest about the discomfort of genuine not-knowing, and finds a dry humour in it.
Classified
BUTENKO ART STUDIO · 2026
Fifteen conspiracies the government finally admitted were real — every claim on the record.
An investigation of declassified operations — MKUltra, COINTELPRO, Operation Condor, the LIBOR rigging, the Nayirah testimony and more — built entirely from sworn testimony, court rulings and official admissions, with no speculation. The organizing idea is a seven-step pipeline that carries a story from allegation to public amnesia, twenty to thirty years on average.
The voice is an investigative journalist's over a drink: dry, factual, a little angry. It does not say what to believe. It shows what was admitted.
The Doomsday Equations
BUTENKO ART STUDIO · 2026
The math behind every end-of-the-world prediction, and where each one's logic breaks.
Ten models for the end — the Drake equation, the Fermi paradox, the Great Filter, the Doomsday Clock and argument, Limits to Growth, nuclear probability, AI alignment, demographic collapse — explained as puzzles rather than textbook entries. For each: what it actually predicts, and the point where the reasoning gives way.
Narrated like an intelligent friend who spent a year down every rabbit hole and came back to explain it over a beer. The goal is to understand — not to panic, and not to be reassured.
Age 30-40: To Live and to Think
BUTENKO ART STUDIO · 2026
Sixteen letters from your forty-year-old self to the decade where life stops being hypothetical.
A field guide for the decade after the twenties, written as letters from an older self to a younger one — parental in the best sense, neither coach nor memoir. It takes exhaustion as the starting condition rather than a failure to fix, and builds inward through four pillars: authenticity, courage, presence and connection.
Sixteen chapter-length investigations, each grounded in the literature of regret and each ending in one concrete move for the week. A book for readers who have outgrown self-help.
The Lighthouse
Eleanor Vance · 2026
Aging without children, partner or close family — a retreat where twelve solo agers work out how.
Narrative nonfiction with a workbook inside it. Morgan arrives at a twelve-day lighthouse retreat run by Helen, its keeper; over the days, eleven other people aging without a biological safety net trade hard-won answers — the legal documents, the money, the healthcare, the housing, the technology, the meaning. Each chapter follows one person through one pillar of solo aging.
The register is warm, unsentimental and occasionally funny: a story to read and a plan to keep, for a reader the rest of the genre leaves out.