Tuesday 29 August 2023

The Square and the rectangle

The QR (Quick Response) Code

The square and the rectangle are probably the most powerful shapers of contemporary visual thought, but they were never seen on cave walls, never seen as accompaniments to lives embedded into nature. Squares and rectangles signify a non-organic world, one where humans have devised grids that they place over nature and use to own it. Rectangles form doors that allow us to think that we can step outside of the interconnectivity that we live within. These Platonic forms rely on straight lines for their construction and the earliest straight edge drawing devices would have probably been lines made by tautening strings of some sort, drawings would then be made in a similar way to how we now use chalk snap lines. We need a straight edge of some sort to construct a square or rectangle. We also need a way of ensuring that the edges of rectangular forms are at right angles to each other. This now usually means using a ruler and compass construction, a method that would have been preceded I'm sure by a taut string process. These complex constructional issues meant that the square and the rectangle were relative late comers to the arsenal of forms that human beings developed as ways to think about concepts using things that formed extended minds, objects that existed outside of their own bodies, such as drawings and other constructions.

How to draw a right angle

The stringing of areas of land allows you to divide the land up. The land along the edges of the Nile was very fertile and the extent of the annual flood of the river was measured by stringing, the results of which were recorded in some of the earliest records of land registry. Thousands of years later, when archeologists begin an Egyptian dig they too string the area to be dug beforehand, so that it and everything found within it, can be located and fixed into position. Once you get used to the techniques of measuring areas by using pegs and taut string it is a very simple step to begin string geometry. A taut line between two pegs is a straight edge and a taut line attached by a loop, stretched between a fixed peg and a rotating drawing tool (in the case below a lump of chalk) held firmly in a hand, becomes a compass.

Drawing a circle with chalk, string and a fixed point

String defining the edges of an archeologist's dig

From these basic processes was derived Euclidean geometry, 'geometry' being itself a word that is derived from the Greek words 'geo' = earth and 'metrein' = 'to measure'. Geometry developed at the same time that cities evolved, and they came into being alongside the development of agriculture; all three concepts associated with measuring out the land. Early cities were often laid out on grid systems and architecture which had previously been very organic, became concerned with structural principles based on right angled forms. The plumb line being another taut string device, this time using the action of gravity to find a vertical. By 2600 BC, Mohenjo-daro and Harappa, major cities of the Indus Valley civilization, were organised using blocks of buildings divided by a grid of straight streets.

By the time of the writing down of the Epic of Gilgamesh (2,100 BC), the square was understood as being central to the formal idea of a city.

"Go up on to the wall of Uruk and walk around. Inspect the foundation platform and scrutinise the brickwork. Testify that its bricks are baked bricks, And that the Seven Counsellors must have laid its foundations. One square mile is city, one square mile is orchards, one square mile is claypits, as well as the open ground of Ishtar's temple.Three square miles and the open ground comprise Uruk. Look for the copper tablet-box, Undo its bronze lock, Open the door to its secret, Lift out the lapis lazuli tablet and read."

From: Dalley Stephanie ed. (1989). Myths from Mesopotamia: Creation, the Flood, Gilgamesh, and Others. Oxford University Press p.120

The right angled square is a key formal device in the development of the modern world, and we still live in architecture dominated by it and now embed our lives into screen based technology that is also shaped by the rectangular form.

I was reminded to put up a post about the square by recently seeing a film, which in many ways carried ideas within it that were not very square like. 'The Square' was released in 2017 and without going into detail it is basically a dark comedy and satire on the hypocrisy of the art world. The film is about the publicity surrounding an art installation, and was partly inspired by an installation the writer and directer Ruben Östlund and the producer Kalle Boman had made a few years earlier for the Vandalorum Museum in Värnamo. In their artists' statement for the exhibition they wrote. "The Square is a sanctuary of trust and caring. Within it we all share equal rights and obligations." They had at that time obviously looked at the myths surrounding the square and used what they had found to determine their artists' statement, and then as they reflected upon their exhibition experience decided that the reality of the situation was nothing like what they had written. Out of such reflections ideas emerge and in this case a film was engendered.

My first contact with the mythology of the square, was via Bruno Munari's small book 'The Discovery of the Square', which was written in 1960. It came in a neat square format and by the time I began teaching on the foundation course in art and design at Leeds, was a standard text recommended to all students.

Bruno Munari: The Discovery of the Square

The Square Munari stated, symbolises stability, the fixed nature of matter, strong foundations and order. In the physical world the Square is meant to represent the static configuration of matter, and is responsible for solidity, reliability and sturdiness.
The Discovery of the Square is a delightful book and was accompanied on the library shelves by his other books which came in the same format, 'The Discovery of the Circle' and 'The Discovery of the Triangle'.

The square is associated with the number four and therefore is often linked to other things that come in fours. Such as the four ancient elements of the physical world, (earth, air, water, and fire), the four states of matter, (hot, dry, wet, cold) or the four seasons (winter, spring, summer, and autumn), the four Directions (north, south, east, west) and other more debatable fours such as the four stages of life (birth, childhood, maturity, and death).

It is in the construction of a square that you can effectively watch symbolism arise, because the process of a square's construction is a physical thing, you have to make it and in making it somehow you are much more deeply embedded into its life than simply 'understanding' it, or intellectually referencing it.

When constructing the square you can begin with a circle drawn using your compass or taut string centred with a peg in the ground. Fig 1.

Draw a straight line through the centre point of the circle and you have a diameter and at the same time a fixed length determined as that diameter. Fig 2.

Create another diameter length that goes through the centre of your circle at right angles to the first. (using the how to construct a right angle method already referenced) Fig 3.

The circle is now divided by four equal points that form a cross. By connecting the points of the cross in contact with the circumference, we obtain a type of square that is symbolically 'active', i.e. balanced on one corner. Fig 4.

By rotating the active square by 45°, we get a passive or more grounded square that sits solidly on its base. Fig 5.

This process is the method on which is then built further divisions of the geometry of a square, most importantly beginning with the square in its active position.

Polygons of space and matter

The polygons that can be built out of the square correspond to emerging ideas of space and matter. Which is for myself an important issue, as it begins the process of linking space and matter together, and eventually what flows from this enfolding of space into matter is the concept of energy fields lying beneath both. For instance, the tetragon represents the four cardinal points of Space, the four directions that we normally think of as north, south, east and west and in cartesian geometry the four quadrants.

The four quadrants of Cartesian Geometry

The octagon represents the four Elements and the four States of Matter as a combined idea.

In the octagon, direction (space) is embedded into the elements (matter), the diagram helping us to think about how the two could be combined. The only problem being that there is a contradiction between this need for order and the fact that everything is in reality in a state of entropy. Rudolf Arnheim wrote a classic essay on these issues; 'Entropy and Art: An essay on Disorder and Order', which was an attempt to reconcile this contradiction and as I extend my thoughts on squares and rectangles I shall attempt to keep Arnheim's observations in mind.

Going from a circle to a square is not quite as easy as deriving a square from a circle. It demands more esoteric knowledge. The squaring of the circle was seen as much as a geometric problem as a spiritual exercise, that symbolised the passage from the earthly (the square) to the celestial (the circle), from the imperfect to the perfect, it is a metaphysical problem. Going from square to circle could also diagrammatically locate a move towards the invisible from the visible, and make transcendent the passage from the sensible to the divine.

The symbol π is obtained on my computer by pressing the option key while I type 'p'. The value of Pi (π) is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter and is approximately equal to 3.14159. In a circle, if you divide the circumference by the diameter, you will get exactly the same number. But π is a mathematical idea, and although mathematical ideas can seem like universal truths, life isn't like that.

It was Plato who thought there were universal forms that underpinned all reality and similar ideas have continued to pop up whenever human beings have sat around and reflected on what it might be all about. An idea such as an omniscience God is similar, as it depends on a sort of fixed entity, an unchanging something against which all transient life can be measured. But the reality I live with is that everything changes, everything is in flux and you cant really find a point outside of existence to look at it. We are entwined into existence with everything else and myself and everything else will become what becomes as moments unfold out of the nowness of now, there being no pre-known future, only possibilities.

I have looked before at the Necker Cube, a shape that visually oscillates between viewpoints, therefore it is a more flexible diagrammatic form. The Bronshtein hypercube uses this format and can help to visualise the idea that even emotions are quantum processes and that they are as tied into the physical world just as securely as mountains.

The Bronshtein cube

The Bronshtein cube attempts to show that the energy field motions we find within the depths of matter, link chemistry, colour perception, the working of nerves, volcano eruptions, the structure of DNA, everyday life and basically everything that there is, together. It also suggests that there is a sort of sliding scale between different ways of thinking about this, from a sort of Newtonian or Galilean perspective, via an Einsteinian one, to quantum field theory. However it too, like all the diagrams in this post, seems to me to be problematic, as it also strays into Plato's territory of belief in a universal idea that can be fixed. If we are embedded into a web of interconnected processes, everything I do and am, is connected in such as way that these things cause consequences. A diagram therefore needs lines radiating out from it to represent these consequences. A vibrating spider web being perhaps a better analogy. A spider web is a extension of its body out into the world. It both lives within it, and uses it as a sensor. Each strand of the web emits a different frequency when disturbed and can as well as send signals back to the spider about the state of external reality, be used to communicate with other spiders. When the spider taps on the strands, its web works as a form of percussion instrument, one that operates like a cross between a message drum and a piano.

From: Studio Tomás Saraceno: A Hybrid web

So my squares and rectangles have dissolved into a network of connections. Which is perhaps all for the best, the various histories of squares and their symbolic function are just that, 'histories', thoughts about past ideas and if I am to maintain my belief in process and relational forms as being what life is all about, tightly composed structural forms such as squares or circles, are far too static to be useful. I need visualisation tools that help with entanglements and interconnections, with flux and hybridity; unfortunately the grid of measurement brings with it ideas of territorial boundaries just as much as ideas of scientific exactitude, both of which have been used by capitalists to facilitate ownership rather than partnership.

The symbol for the Jacob Kramer College Leeds 1968 to 1993

Hybrid forms such as the old Jacob Kramer red spot are perhaps more useful. It could also well be that the QR (Quick Response) Code squares will become a symbol of interconnectedness rather than ownership, as we use them to link site specific experiences with associated information, they operate as a type of invisible link back to whatever context the QR code instigator wants to direct you to. This could be to direct you to buy more, but it doesn't have to be. However I would like to think that it's the spiders that have it right, and that they might be able to devise a new organic geometry for us, one that consists of a fine web of connections that radiates out and takes energy in, that rhythmically responds to the patterns developing around it and that is flexible enough to be constantly re-shaped in the ever happening moment of the present.

A visual conversation with a spider about hypercubes. (Homage to Tomás Saraceno)

A hyper-topology of energy fields

Tuesday 22 August 2023

Maps made by our nervous systems

The autonomic nervous system

I have become very interested in how our body's nervous systems are used to create maps of awareness, which enable us to respond to what is going on in both our outer and inner worlds. I'm trying to use my understanding of these 'maps of awareness' as a sort of platform or underlying support for the images I am trying to make as an artist that emerge from a fusion of inner and outer perceptual awareness. My understanding is that animals have for millions of years been attempting to use various nervous systems to map or diagram what seems to be going on, both without and within the various bodies that have evolved over time, so that the complexity of reality can be understood and acted upon. These maps have been made in several ways and it is in the interconnections between them that we make sense of what information is out there and in particular the role of the peripheral nervous system as a controller of 'feeling tone' interests me. My attempts to visualise the more peripheral aspects of perceptual experience by working with interoceptive information, (see) could perhaps be supported by more thinking about this aspect of neurobiology, especially as mapping is such an important aspect of how I think about drawing as a way to visualise experience.

So first of all a couple of my own 'maps' drawn to get me to think about how internal and external awareness interconnects.

The body inhabits various energy fields that we think of as an outside the body world

Energy fields within the body pass through its outer membrane, just as those from outside pass through and into the body

It is the movement between inner and outer awareness that fascinates me and this interpenetration has become a focus for both my intellectual and perceptual engagement with art making. For instance at the moment I'm very aware of various dimensions of pain and the fact that they are located in different parts of my own body map. I have plantar fasciitis in my left foot, this means that as I put my foot down to the floor I have a sharp pain in the heel, a pain that radiates down the tendon that goes underneath the foot. This pain is very intense first thing in the morning but wears off gradually during the day until it is a dull throb. My lower back went into spasm yesterday when I went to pick up the grass cuttings whilst mowing the lawn. By bedtime I was in agony but this morning it is much better, but still delicate and sensitive and I know exactly where the pain lies, in that arch of the lower spine, which in my case is too arched. I have slight toothache in the upper left side of my mouth and this has been there since visiting the dentist last week to have a broken tooth sorted out, this is not a problem, more an awareness and the back of my hand is itching and the red circle marks of insect bites are still there; another gardening memento. I could go on, but you get the idea. At this very moment I would say I'm more aware of these internal body issues than external ones, but all it needs is a ring of the doorbell and the perceptual balance could be changed dramatically. This flow is what makes life as it is experienced so fascinating and it offers a complex, rich subject to an artist.

But now some more technical detail.

The peripheral nervous system consists of nerves that branch out from your central nervous system into the body's main mass. (Waxenbaum et al. 2019) It relays information from your brain and spinal cord to your organs, arms, legs, fingers and toes and it consists of two distinct and separate evolutionary systems; the more recent somatic nervous system, which guides your voluntary movements and an evolutionary much older system, the autonomic nervous system, which controls many of the activities we do without us having to think consciously about them. The autonomic nervous system regulates certain body processes, such as blood pressure and the rate of breathing and it helps regulate the internal organs, including the blood vessels, stomach, intestine, liver, kidneys, bladder, genitals, lungs, pupils, heart, as well as sweat, salivary, and digestive glands, in response to both internal and external messages about the changing state of the environment. It has two response divisions; the sympathetic and the parasympathetic. When the autonomic nervous system receives new information about the body and/or the external environment, it responds by stimulating body processes, usually through the sympathetic division, or inhibiting them, usually through the parasympathetic division. The communication system involves a nerve pathway whereby one cell is located in a main processing section of the nervous system, the brain stem or spinal cord and another is located in a cluster of nerve cells (called an autonomic ganglion), which are connected with the various internal organs that need controlling. So by either stimulating or inhibiting these organs in doing what they do, the system controls internal body processes such as blood pressure, heart and breathing rates, body temperature, digestion, metabolism, chemical balances, production of body fluids, urination, defecation and sexual responses. I.e. most of what is going on to sustain our daily lives. For example, when the sympathetic division acts on the heart and blood vessels it increases blood pressure, whilst messages from the parasympathetic division decreases it. The two divisions work together to ensure that the body responds appropriately to different situations. Because we don't see how this works, we have to imagine what it might be like. Just as the changing echo sounds of a submarine sonar system might be listened to in order to visualise the shape of a nearby whale, imaginative images based on stories told in order to illicit representations of the feeling tones of someone's body might be used to develop images of what unseen things might look like.

In 'The Strange Order of Things' by Antonio Domasio, the idea of neural mapping is introduced.

'At some point, long after nervous systems were able to respond to many features of the objects and movements that they sensed, both inside and outside their own organism, there began the ability to map the objects and events being sensed. This meant that rather than merely helping detect stimuli and respond suitably, nervous systems literally began drawing maps of the configurations of objects and events in space, using the activity of nerve cells in a layout of neural circuits. .........imagine the neurons wired in circuits and laid out on a flat board, where every point of the surface corresponds to a neuron. Then imagine that when a neuron in the circuitry becomes active, it lights up, something akin to making a dot on a board using a marker. The ordered, gradual addition of many such dots generates lines that can link up or intersect and create a map'. (2019, p. 76)

Because we are so good at creating these imaginative maps of what we cant see, we have externalised the skills, so that we can build all sorts of cognitive maps in our minds that relate to external perceived experiences. A cognitive map is a type of mental representation that helps us to acquire, store, recall and decode information about the relative locations and attributes of experiences found in both real and/or metaphorical or invented spatial environments. Cognitive mapping then gives us a parallel process whereby we know where we are in space and how that location is related to other locations. Mapping can also add value to these places, such as where the best places to eat are or what areas to avoid because they are dangerous. What the implications of this mean are that before we made that very basic first drawn map, perhaps one that was scratched out using a stick in soft earth, we had developed the capacity to map out those relationships inside our body/minds. Not only that, but we had also developed representations of pain location as well as feeling tone. For instance a tightness in the chest might be due to stress or a lightheadedness due to sexual excitement, but we in some way knew where that tightness was located. These feelings are with us from the moment our nervous systems begin to operate. Therefore not only is the body's map known and used as a model before we begin to map out the environment it inhabits, but as the body grows an awareness of its environment, the map it builds is one based on its initial cognitive mapping of itself, which includes emotional awareness.

There has been some evidence for the idea that cognitive maps are represented in more than one way. (Jacobs et al 2003) One is the bearing map, which represents the environment through self-movement cues. These are vector-based cues that create a rough, 2D map of the environment. Another is a sort of sketch map that works using positional cues. The second map integrates specific objects, or landmarks and their relative locations to also create a 2D map of the environment. The integration of these two separate maps with other sources of information, such as memories of touch or awareness of the body, gradually shapes a growing awareness of the environments that people inhabit. Our bodies are very simple in many ways, they are bilaterally symmetrical and we have our main sense organs located at one end, therefore body maps can have a left / right, top / bottom structure and we apply this to the external world as well. What particularly interests myself is that scientists believe that individual place cells within the hippocampus correspond to separate locations in the environment, with the sum of all cells contributing to a single map of an entire environment. The strength of the connections built up between the cells represents the distances between them in the actual environment. In effect our physical structure is amended and reshaped in response to experiences, just as a map on paper you make or draw from personal experience, is composed of a constant re-drawing and editing in order to get a closer and closer account of the information you gather.

Cognitive mapping allows us to make complex maps of data

Related, but in many ways very different, are the Body Maps that are often used by medical practitioners to visually pinpoint where on the body a medical condition is affecting a patient. This helps them accurately track the physical progression of an illness so that care can be applied accordingly. A wide selection of conditions can be recorded whereby changes to the surface area of the map over time are important, such as bruises, scalds, infections, skin conditions or swellings as well as being a way to give precision to letting others know where a broken bone or pain may be, or the site of a previous injection. These maps tend to be outlines of the front and back of a male or female human. You can get them in adult and child size, but all the parts of the figure are related in a 'normalised' position and no accounts are made of the different psychological or or internal maps made by individuals, in these cases 'one shape fits all'.

Body map. Head (area 1, 2, 23, or 24); neck (area 3 or 25), shoulders (area 4, 5, 26, 27); arms (area 6, 7, 8, 9, 28, 29, 30 or 31); hand (area 10, 11, 32, 33); ribs or chest (area 12 or 13); abdomen (area 14 or 15), back (area 34, 35, 36, 37), buttocks or hips (area 38 or 39); genitalia (area 16), legs (area 17, 18, 19, 20, 40, 41, 42 or 43); feet (area 21, 22, 44 or 45). Adapted from Margolis, Tait, & Krause (1986).

However if we look at diagrams of how we actually sense the world, we find that the body is sensed very differently to the two front and back figure drawings above.

The body modelled by amount of sensitivity to touch

You will know yourself that when you have toothache for instance, your internal model of the body will be focused directly around the tooth that is causing you the pain. Just as London drags our attention to the south east of the map of the UK, because it is so important, a bad tooth drags the awareness of your internal body map to the mouth.

This sort of thinking is very common, we are all focused on different things because of self interest. These maps of the USA are hopefully self explanatory.

From: Jacobs, F. (2022)

Just as the map of the USA morphs according to interest and from where the viewer is coming from, everyone's internal cognitive map of their own body differs.

Another aspect that overlaps this area of visual thinking is psychological 'Body mapping', a technique used to identify and position important and relevant emotions such as anger, sadness and love, on a pre-drawn body outline. I was particularly interested in the fact that a study was made using a large sample of people across many cultures and it was found that bodily maps of emotions are culturally universal, (Volynets et al. 2020) especially because I had also read that emotions are not universally pre-programmed, but are culturally conditioned. (Barrett, 2017). This helped me as an artist to feel that it was possible for me to operate in this territory because there was enough scientific doubt to offer spaces in which to be inventive, especially in relation to what Barrett calls 'constructed emotions'.

Emotional body maps

The standard human shape in the diagram above is for many people acceptable but the colour range feels far too predictable, but I suppose if you are trying to communicate across several cultural barriers, then a certain crudity of emotion / colour correspondence is to be expected. It does though seem to me to be all too neat, it looks like a carefully designed answer, rather than the confused mess of colour, shape and emotion that I have had to deal with when I have spoken to people about visualising their emotional worlds. I'm reminded of Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid's work whereby they statistically researched what each country's population thought would be a most loved and most hated painting, and then making visible the results. The final body of work was very carefully designed and illustrated the points they wanted to make very well, but once you 'got it', you 'got it' and that seemed a long long way away from the actual experience of encountering either a painting or a landscape.

America's most wanted painting

Russia's most wanted painting

Both Komar and Melamid's work and the psychological body maps of emotions in relation to colour are based on surveys and according to quantitative research standards they have to be large enough to justify the resulting statistics, a too small number can easily be biased and the readings too subjective. However statistics don't help much in pin pointing those intrinsic qualities of our individual experiences. Science begins by looking at external studies and samples as types of explanations, but subjective experiences are part of what it is to be and this is where I feel art comes into its own. Seeing for example involves various sorts of probing; you are trying to make sense of the spatial chaos that confronts you. As you do you process both what things are and where things are and these recognitions are mixed together to make some sort of awareness. Action and feedback is slightly different in response to these different experiences, but we know our sense of 'where' is being constantly modified by our body movements; eyes change focus and as our body moves into new spaces it encounters constantly changing information that it senses by recording changes in touch, sight, smell etc. But what things are is something that emerges from previous experiences that are mapped against information coming through. You are one thing, constantly changing location amongst other things that are also moving. You are constantly updating the 'whatness' by adding in previous knowledge, such as friend or foe? Perception is therefore not like a passive screen whereby we simply receive qualia, it is more like a form of two way traffic whereby sensing and acting operate in tandem. The whatness of things being in flux, just as much as the 'whereness' of experience; is that stripy thing a tiger or a flickering shadow cast by tall grasses? As I run away I see that it was really a shadow and I slow down, but it was best to run first just in case it was a tiger. The fear was real however and that is an integral part of my feeling tone and as the actual moment fades into my past, the emotional memory embeds itself into my being. As Peter Godfrey-Smith puts it, 'systems... modulate the interpretation of sensory information by the animal's registration of what it is presently doing'; (2021, p. 86) there is a coordination between sensing and acting. When I make a drawing or a ceramic object, as I sense what I'm doing I act in response to what I'm sensing. As I make my images, I would like to think that the process of their making is no different to the process of simply being alive. As animals evolved and were able to coordinate multicellular sensing, parts of their bodies became 'maps or reflections of fragments of their surroundings'. (Ibid, p. 84) Inner and outer worlds therefore were contiguous.

If we go back to those very first cells and their ability to communicate, we return to the basics of electrical flow. A cell has to manage the chaos of atomic vibrations that become much more real when you are such a tiny thing. One way to bring order is to regulate electrical energy flow, or charge and it uses the control of ions to do this. A cell's membrane keeps some things outside and others inside it, but it needs to communicate through this membrane and let selective things go through. It often uses ion channels for this, which enables cells to adjust their overall charge in relation to the outside world, a sort of tuning, as well as to develop controlled flows of ions, which can function as a basic form of sensing. Godfrey-Smith uses an example of a cell coming into contact with a particular external chemical change, which opens a channel and lets in ions which then as charged particles set new events in the cell into motion. (Ibid, p. 31)

Perhaps the most important issue arriving for myself as an artist is some sort of confirmation that meaning is tightly bound up in materiality. This means that the old scientific critique of the artist as being too subjective fades away because we are not able to be 'outside' of the world in order to be able to observe it. We are aspects of the physical world, totally integrated into its activities, rhythmically enmeshed into all the other rhythms of vibrating energy fields. Our neurons are not just excitable cells, but are oscillatory devices and rhythmic things have as Huygens put it, 'an odd kind of sympathy between them', (In Godfrey-Smith, p. 191) and as an artist seeking a metaphoric understanding I am perhaps just looking for 'that odd kind of sympathy that exists between things'.

For instance I have just found out that the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research, have been given an award to support the creation of a detailed map of the anatomy of the human vagus nerve; one of the largest and most critical nerves controlling organ functions like heart rate, breathing, digestion, metabolism and immunological responses.

One bundle of the human vagus nerve (A), computer enhanced (B) and further analysed at a single fibre level (C).

The map will show the anatomical connectivity of vagus nerve fibres from the brainstem, where the vagus nerve starts, all the way down to organs in the neck, chest and abdomen. At the moment how sensory and motor fibres are arranged inside the vagus nerve and pathways to different organs are essentially unknown. The vagus nerve, which means “wandering” in Latin, runs from the brainstem to most of the body’s major organs. The nerve is not one solid structure but is instead made up of more than 100,000 sensory and motor fibres, grouped together in several bundles, or fascicles, inside the nerve, eventually forming branches that connect to the organs like the heart, lungs, oesophagus, liver and intestines. When functioning properly, the vagus nerve contributes to the maintenance of our body’s homeostasis. However, diseases like Crohn’s disease and rheumatoid arthritis, chronic heart diseases, diabetes and even some cancers are associated with inflammation and abnormal vagus nerve function. This research has already provided images that I could imagine at some point feeding into my own thinking about how the body has developed its own maps. The process of mapping being nested, going from initial maps made in the mind to these new ones that will rely on computer enhancement and the techniques of electron microscopy. The thinking behind this project emerging from minds structured in particular ways that allow them to think of ideas in certain ways, ways that are always responses to information being processed internally and externally; this two way process reflecting the fact that the vagus nerve itself is transmitting information in both directions between the brain and body.

After all this reflection of what it might be like inside I'm still left with an unknown continent, one that I can only really explore in my imagination, an imagination that is though fed by what I'm thinking and what I'm reading.

References:

Barrett, L.F., 2017. How emotions are made: The secret life of the brain. London: Pan Macmillan.

Damasio, A., 2019. The strange order of things: Life, feeling, and the making of cultures. London: Vintage.

Downs, R. M. and Stea, D. 1977 Maps in Minds: Reflections on cognitive mapping London: Harper and Row

Godfrey-Smith, P. 2021 Metazoa London: William Collins

Volynets, S., Glerean, E., Hietanen, J. K., Hari, R., & Nummenmaa, L. 2020 Bodily maps of emotions are culturally universal. Emotion, 20(7), 1127–1136. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0000624

Jacobs, F. 2022 Satirical cartography: a century of American humor in twisted maps Big Think Available at: https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/satirical-cartography-9th-avenue-steinberg/

Jacobs, Lucia F.; Schenk, Françoise (April 2003). Unpacking the cognitive map: the parallel map theory of hippocampal function. Psychological Review. 110 (2): 285–315.

Libassi, M. (2022) Feinstein awarded $6.7M NIH grant to create first human vagus nerve anatomical map Northwell Health: Newsroom, October 25th, Available at: https://www.northwell.edu/news/the-latest/6-7m-nih-grant-creates-first-human-vagus-nerve-anatomical-map

Waxenbaum, J.A., Reddy, V. and Varacallo, M., 2019. Anatomy, autonomic nervous system. National Library of Medicine Available at: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK539845/#:~:text=The%20autonomic%20nervous%20system%20is,sympathetic%2C%20parasympathetic%2C%20and%20enteric.

Monday 14 August 2023

Trench Art

Detail: Shellcase vase

One of my earliest memories of being interested in an art form is of my gran polishing the two brass shell cases that had been engraved and embossed with designs that stood in the fireplace of my grandparents' home in Pensnett. These things are now formally classified under the term 'Trench Art' but to my family they were 'tranculments', a Black Country word meaning 'ornaments and decorative objects typically found on mantlepieces and other places around the house'. These were objects that had a special significance for my gran in particular, as they were tied into her forever grieving for her brother who had been shot through the heart in1917. If I ever asked about these shell cases, my gran would tell me all about her brother, and at the time I thought they must have been made by him, but I don't think that was actually the case. I think they were bought as memory souvenirs after the war or maybe even brought back by my grandfather who had been stationed in India, away from the horrors of trench warfare. Whatever their provenance, I was fascinated by them. You could examine the bottoms and they were clearly working devices, devices made to carry the cordite propellant for the firing of shells. They were embedded into the history of their use and as a boy I was very aware of war and what shells were used for. On the other hand they were decorated and you could see how someone had worked the metal by punching it from inside and engraving it from the outside. The craftsmanship exhibited quite a sophisticated understanding of metal, so these may well have been made by Belgian metal workers using some of the thousands of shell cases left over after the war.

Many years ago I drew them and I have found two images of the drawings on an old hard disk file. Both images though for some reason cropped. The shell cases were used as flower vases and perhaps I was reminded of them because of a recent visit back to Ukraine by our lodger, who has been staying with us as an escape from the war over there. She came back with some photographs she had taken of bullet holes turned into flowers. Apparently this image is now common in Ukraine, and I was able to find several online such as the one below.

War is a horrible but very human thing, my generation being the first for a while in the UK to avoid having to go and fight. I remember wanting to draw the shell cases because of their transformation from objects of death dealing violence into reminders of the fact that humans can also be creative and can build intense relationships with materials that don't lead to destruction, and instead open out a potential for beauty.

Detail: Shellcase vase

As I was making the drawings I realised that the foliage emerging from the top could also be read as marks made to represent a gun or cannon firing.

After a long search brought upon myself because of my failure to organise files, I eventually found uncropped images of the two drawings. Seeing them again reminded me that at the time I was making drawings about looking, which means that the images read as much about the struggle to claim a relationship with a space, as about the shellcases as objects. At the time, drawing for myself was about trying to find a relationship with the space both objects and myself inhabited. I have a lot of empathy with a past self that struggled to make the white space of the paper into an extension of both mine and the brass shellcase's space. I have had a similar obsession for many years now, each time perhaps approaching it in a different way, but always associated with a puzzlement about how to engage with looking and how to re-create the energy of the experience. The conjunction of flowers and armaments, also reminded me of another image, an image from the time when I was a hippy and we were all convinced of the reality of flower power. Each of us feel the continuing effects of history, but each experience of it is unique.

October 21, 1967: March on the Pentagon by the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam. Protester George Harris placing a carnation into the barrel of an M14 rifle held by a soldier of the 503rd Military Police Battalion

Drawings in pencil, wax crayon, watercolour and ink.

Because as a boy I was the only member of the family interested in my great uncle's fate, his diary and other personal effects were passed on to me not long after my grandparents died. He had been shot through his breast pocket, therefore the bullet went through the notebook and diary he had in it. These items had a powerful resonance and still do.

The Human body English / French: Great Uncle Harry's soldier's notebook

It was expected that a soldier was at some point going to need to speak some French and in particular it might well be in a situation whereby some part of his body was in need of treatment. Therefore soldiers were issued with a handy reminder of what to say.

Great uncle Harry's diary indicating the day he went on the Somme.

The bullet that killed him went through the bottom edge of the diary, almost going through an image of an underwater mine, an image I would redraw just over 100 years later for an article 'Revealing the invisible: The virus is looking at you', whereby I looked at how the corona virus had been represented and how it could be read as a type of ‘dark star’ or anti-sun. In the article I used my own very simplified drawing of a mine to show how closely its structure echoed the way the virus was sometimes represented. I was very aware that World War I claimed an estimated 16 million lives, but in comparison the influenza epidemic that swept the world in 1918 killed an estimated 50 million people. The drawing of a mine was my private acknowledgement of how great uncle Harry still shapes some of my thoughts, his memory passed to me by his sister, and now passed on to anyone who cares to read this blog.

The corona virus

Drawing of an undersea mine