Some primitive forms

By chance I found the image above entitled 'Some Primitive Forms', it reminded me of Hokusai's 'how to' drawings, whereby he shows us how to construct images out of basic geometry.

Hokusai

I was also reminded of William Latham's 'Family of forms' and his involvement in the Organic Art product. The idea was to show how organic forms could be 'bred' by asking a computer program to develop more and more complex forms from combinations of basic units.

William Latham

William Latham: A Family of Forms

Reflections bring about connections and I was soon thinking again about the time when I used to teach on the Foundation Course at Leeds. One of the processes we used to engage with was building complex forms out of simple shapes. We used to get students to draw simple 'primitive' shapes in the form of three dimensional solids and then to use them to construct more and more complicated forms. We would begin by constructing images similar to the ones immediately below. Occasionally I need to remind myself of how useful and important an idea this was.

The concept that the world can be constructed from a series of basic building blocks is an ancient one and relates to Plato's idea that beneath the complexity of appearance, there lay a basic set of simple forms, in his case we have what we now call the Platonic Solids, five simple forms whereby each face is made up of the same regular flat polygon and the same number of polygons meet at each corner. These forms would also come to have symbolic meanings, the cube representing earth, the octahedron air, the tetrahedron fire, the icosahedron water and the dodecahedron the whole universe.The thing about primitive forms is that you can gradually make them more convoluted, which is great if you are thinking about drawing complicated things. 

The first form to draw three dimensionally is usually the cube. This can be done in perspective as above or it can be an isometric as immediately below. Once you are able to do this, the first set of complicated forms most students produce are made by cutting slices and blocks out of the first set of primitives.

Isometric rectangular blocks being cut into

You can also twist a basic shape, or elongate it by pulling it. If you have sliced it, you can gradually change each slice, so that a form begins to bend or get larger or smaller as it is built. 

Once you have grasped the basic concept you can go on to create organic looking forms such as the shell below. all you need to do as a drawer, is to have a basic grasp of perspective and the time to practice drawing these forms over and over again, so that in your head you have a good three-dimensional understanding of possibilities. 

Drawing for snail votive

This notebook drawing for a snail votive may seem a long way from the concept of primitive forms but without time spent doing the work of drawing those forms many years ago, the what seems to be a quickly thrown off sketch, would not be anywhere near as convincing. 

Snail votive

In the world of CGI, other techniques and processes have now been introduced that build on more sophisticated rendering systems to do something similar, but with an inbuilt awareness of light interaction as forms evolve, so that the changing form of shadows becomes a vital part of the process.  

Some primitives made by raymarching 

For instance, raymarching is a 3D rendering technique that iterates rays step-by-step through a scene, often using Signed Distance Fields (SDFs) to determine safe step distances, (the distance an object travels between frames, to achieve natural, weight-accurate, and smooth movement). Unlike traditional polygon-based rendering, it is frequently used to render complex, procedural or fractal geometry by calculating, rather than intersecting, surfaces.

It gets more interesting when you begin putting forms together. Nature of course got there first, anabolism is the process where cells build complex molecules from simpler ones. Examples include amino acids joining to form proteins or nucleotides forming DNA strands. 

I'm always looking for visual metaphors and the idea of building images from 'primitive' units, is an interesting one, as it suggests that you can build an image in a similar way to how nature constructs complex forms of life. 

This is an old idea, in the 5th century BC the Greek philosophers Leucippus and Democritus articulated the idea of 'atomism'. This concept which asserted that all matter consists of indivisible, invisible particles called atomos, is at the root of why we now call atoms, atoms. The Roman poet Lucretius, then re-articulated this view and in his influential text 'On the Nature of Things' he wrote that atoms are eternal, vary in shape and combine to form all the physical substances that we experience.

However over the last hundred years or so, we have been breaking down the atom and discovering that it is not indivisible, but that it is made up of quarks, electrons, positrons, neutrons, charm and it seems more and more bits, the more scientists probe into the nature of matter, the more it seems to slip away from our understanding of it as a physical substance.

In India at roughly the same time as Leucippus and Democritus were thinking about atomos, a similar idea was being developed by Kaṇāda of the Vaiśeṣika school of thought, he proposed indivisible particles (paramāṇu) too, however he also proposed the idea of atoms having momentary (instantaneous) presence, a presence that flashed in and out of existence. Kaṇāda asserted that all that is knowable is based on motion. He also asserted that all substances are composed of four types of atoms, two of which have mass and two being massless. These ideas were presented within a larger moral framework whereby he defines Dharma as the cosmic order. He understands that duty, law, and a right way of living sustain our universe. This is a foundational principle out of which Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism will develop concepts of virtue, morality, and righteous conduct. Kaṇāda's explicit mention of motion as the cause of all phenomena in the world, does seem to echo the realisation that it is the flux of energy and solid mass that is fundamental. Our present understanding of the basic interactions governing the universe is based on an agreement that there are four fundamental forces; gravity, electromagnetism, strong nuclear force, and weak nuclear force. There are though still little bits in there in terms of the way physicists think. These four forces dictate how matter and energy interact, but in order to interact there needs to be a factor that allows them to do this and this is where we come across exchange particles or bosons. There are various types and some most of us have come across already, Photons carry the electromagnetic force, Gluons the strong nuclear force, W and Z bosons the weak nuclear force, the Higgs boson that gives mass to particles and the hypothetical Graviton that is supposed to carry gravity.

It would be nice to think that our present understanding of the universe might also come with a moral framework, whereby our understanding of the cosmic order, was reflected in a way to approach life. The interconnectedness of everything makes us aware that we are part of an ever forming universe and therefore any religions or forms of thinking that attempt to fix or hold down our conceptual grasp of who and what we are, should be seen as suspect. Over the centuries we have witnessed terrible wars and conflicts, often initiated by one party or another refusing to see the point of view of another. The inflexibility of thinking that comes from a belief in dogma, has caused us to forget that we need to be in constant dialogue with the world and not see it as something separate from us. Empathy with the not us, could perhaps be the starting point for a new moral framework, one that also saw duty, law and a right way of living as principles on which to sustain our world. 

As an artist I have to sustain my practice with some sort of underlying belief. Perhaps this is a curse as much as a strength. It would be wonderful to just 'know' what is right, I use up so much energy worrying about what stance to take but as I get older I get even more thoughtful as to what it is to make art and in this instance perhaps all I can do is leave you with an unformed blob, something waiting for realisation, something on the way to being something else.

I spend time every week with lumps of clay not too unlike the form above and as soon as my fingers begin to push and pull its surface into different directions, ideas of possibilities begin to emerge. Perhaps that is the point, everything is full of potential and all we need to do is to play. Out of play emerges wonder and it is through wonder that we finally find our place in the world. 

See also:

Paul Neagu

Abstract comics

Is drawing a language?

Connecting the singularity 

Children's play in the work of Francis Alys

Observer Patch Holography

Drawing and street games

My granddaughters live in Glasgow and one time when I was up there we went for a walk and they took a few fat chalks with them. We had stopped for a rest and they began to make chalk drawings on a road that went through the local park. It seemed to be such an obvious and natural thing to do and it took my mind back to the 1950s when as children we used to draw in the road using any broken bits of stone that would make a mark. Most of the drawing was done in my day to aid the playing of games. This might be hopscotch if there were girls involved or football and cricket if it was boys. But we also drew people and things including roads and other places for our toys to inhabit, tiny towns like those play-mats you can now buy from the shops. There were far less cars about in those days and streets were as much for children to play in, as for ease of automobile transport. 

Hopscotch was always a favourite game and like so many games its origins lie in warfare. It was originally a way for Roman soldiers to train in full uniform and with heavy equipment on their back, hopping was a way that they could learn to keep their balance and dexterity when laden down. If you can't remember the rules, they go like this: each player needs a marker of some kind either a rock, stick, or some other object like a glove or hat to pickup when they return. The first player throws the marker into the first square without it touching any of the lines. If it touches the lines or goes out of bounds they are out and it’s the next players turn.

Once a player has successfully thrown the marker, they hop on one leg (often through squares 1, 2, 3) or two, (when two squares are side by side as above, 4/5) until the course is complete, always avoiding touching the lines. The game can be made more challenging by hopping on one foot throughout the course to the end of the first leg. Players must only make one jump into the last double foot square. Therefore in order to be set up for the return, players must jump from the second to last square and spin 180 degrees to land in the top (in the case above the 7/8) squares facing the starting point. From what I remember, the game got faster and faster as it went on and this was how the best players were finally eliminated.

Tony Luciani: Elia Luciani plays hopscotch

The artist Tony Luciani was still working with his mother, when she was 93 and had dementia. By engaging with her around the game of hopscotch, his mother could get both physical and mental exercise. Tony was also able to make an image that contracts time, the game being one his mother remembered playing as a girl and as he worked with her to make his images, she was brought into his world, rather than being excluded because of her condition. Hopscotch allows Luciani's mother to return to the innocence of play, her dementia allowing her access to an inner child, her adult life being gradually erased. What we tend to see as a terrible illness perhaps in some cases is a journey back into a time of innocence, a time before the cares of life have weighed us down. 

Frances Alys has for years been filming children playing games. He filmed 'Hopscotch' in the Sharya Refugee Camp in Iraq. Children are forever inventive and able to construct imaginative worlds out of whatever and wherever they find themselves. In amongst a situation that could drive them to the edges of despair, these children remind us that we are all born with the ability to play games and that the simple ability to mark out ground can lead to a communal idea, perhaps even more easily than lines scratched into the earth to demarcate ownership.

Frances Alys: Hopscotch 2016

Hopscotch somewhere sandy   

Just as children will draw in the sand, so will artists. 

Picasso

The artist Andres Amador also makes drawings on the beach, drawings that he is happy to see being washed away by the tide. Using a drone, he takes a picture of the work from above once completed, his geometric structures in many ways resembling lines of giant hop scotch squares. Perhaps he is reliving his childhood, being an artist gives you the licence to be a child, or as Picasso put it, “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.”

Andres Amador

When boys we often made makeshift goals by roughly drawing an outline on a wall. These outlines are everywhere if you keep a lookout for them, I pass some on my way into the university every time I walk in and sometimes scratched lines in regular use become traced over with chalks or even painted, to form a slightly more permanent idea. 

Sometimes I am reminded of the history of art by things you can see in the street. In the case of the image below the painted football goal is on a plaster skimmed wall and we are very aware of this because the plaster is breaking away and the image is already incomplete. So much of our historical reference to painting is on similar surfaces. 

From photographer Michael Kirkham's 'Football Goals'

A damaged fresco

Just as the painting of a football goal is now revealed to have been done on plaster that was itself laid on to cover a brick wall, the damage to the fresco above has revealed the layers of its making. The football goal it could be argued is rather like a minimalist abstract painting, the construction of it being very similar to that of fresco painting. 

Cricket stumps

Cricket stumps used to be as common an urban image as football goals, but recently I have noticed a decline, I suspect this means that the game is in decline too, but not invention. In the case of the wheeled bin, a rupture has occurred between an object and its intended function; object and meaning are destabilised and the cricket bat leaning against the bin, reinforces this, the bin is no longer primarily for waste disposal, it is now operating as an adjunct to the game of cricket. 

The streets are where we used to play and where play begins so does art. Perhaps we need to reclaim our streets from the car. In the late1990s Methley Terrace in Leeds was greened to see what would happen if the cars were taken out. So it is possible. 

Turfing the Methley's

Kolams, an art using rice flour laid down as drawings on the ground in front of homes by women gives sanctity to the spot where they are drawn. These drawings are a welcoming sign to the Goddess Lakshmi who is believed to bring wealth and prosperity. 

What was a daily morning ritual has recently spun off as a Chennai kolam competition. However this tourist trade development, has not destroyed the core motivation for ritual, reminding us that it is possible to inventively engage with the streets of our cities.  

Murmurations: Lou Sheppard

During the time of Covid19, artists found that they were still needed, in particular as they were able to quickly and inventively rethink how people could interact with the surrounding environment, especially if there was a sense of some sort of ritual engagement. Lou Sheppard was one such artist. Murmurations: Scores for Social Distancing were a series of dance works based on bird flocking behaviour. The choreography required seven dancers to perform an interconnected set of movements while never coming within two meters of each other. As a public art work Murmurations consisted of the notation-directional markings that formed a choreographic score painted onto the road surface. The markings referenced the social distancing directions that began to be seen everywhere in public spaces. The work was in effect a visual score for the choreography of social distancing and it highlighted an awareness of the new collective public rituals that were being developed.
I remembered Lou Sheppard's work because it was very similar to hopscotch, a game that I participated in when I was a boy. The ritual chanting of the girls, which if I remember was something like, "Wibbly-wobbly turn around. Wibbly-wobbly touch the ground. Wibbly-wobbly tie your shoe. Wibbly-wobbly that will do", set alongside the queuing up to wait your turn and the sound of the hopping feet, rasping breath, all set around the chalk drawn diagram for hopping. It was a ritual that I can still feel the excitement of, it continues to sit inside my body; the waiting for your turn, envisioning how to do the game faster and without mistakes and how this as an achievement would make me appear, even if only for a moment, a winner amongst my peers. I look back on those moments as being some of the best times of my life. Out of such games were being made social bonds, physical tests of skill and dexterity and group dynamics that were ritually being encoded. To paraphrase Bob Dylan:

! wish, I wish, I wish in vain
That we could play simply in that street again
Ten-thousand dollars at the drop of a hat
I’d give it all gladly if our lives could be like that

Perhaps I'm thinking of hopscotch in these terms as a way of reflecting on my own loss of innocence. The photographer  Andy Wright recorded the image below of a hopscotch layout in Barcelona. When I first saw it I was reminded of the fact that the shape of the drawn elements are very similar to the basic layout of the human body, the head in this case having being cut off by the drop. Whoever drew it was very aware of making an image to represent the end of innocence. 

Andy Wright: Hopscotch to oblivion 

See also:

Lines in the road

Walking and drawing

Graffiti was always a serious art form

Asemic writing

Drawing as the trace of.a touch The Mohs hardness test: Something every child will have done instinctively. 

A history of drawing as thinking The line as a territory marker

The Drawings of Anna Barratt

Anna Barratt's art is centred on vulnerable and transforming bodies in flux. This is why I am interested in her work, as she has had to engage with a similar materials invention to myself, in the search for a visual language that can carry both emotional and physical information about how we feel about inhabiting this strange thing we call a body.
She is obviously dredging up some of her imagery from the depths of her unconscious, but at the same time the tensions of everyday life and what we can think of as the domestic come into play. Indeed in one review of her work it states, "transforming the everyday into the carnivalesque and back again."

Anna Barratt’s figures are often disembodied, an expressive use of her materials giving life to the various characters that inhabit her images. The interplay between material flow and image, helps to create a liquidity of attention, that flits from an attempt to work out the consequences of an image's form and a sense of needing to let it all flow and become an always becoming entity. All of which are issues that I have at one time or another tried to engage with.

Like myself she has made simple animations and she also uses notebooks to develop ideas, something that again I tend to do. I also love the fact that she recognises that when an animation is looped, it completes a process of transformation, that moves from the losing of an image's initial form to its restoration. All of which is lo-fi.

Cardboard bodies

Barratt's cardboard bodies are another reminder that you don't need expensive materials in order to make interesting work. The way a cardboard box comes apart, reminds me of a body and when opened out, it still has a memory of its former three dimensions. A memory that pokes thoughts into the flatness of any image laid on top of it. Thoughts such as those in my head that arise out of a memory of reading as a boy the H.G. Wells short story "The Plattner Story," as well as a little later Arthur C. Clarke's "The Reversed Man", both involving the inversion of a man's body. Turning human bodies "inside out", is something I now attempt to do on a regular basis, but now more concerned about hidden interoceptual feelings and attempting to visualise them. I still remember as a boy thinking about what might happen when you took a human body through a fourth spatial dimension and in my mind picturing all the guts and blood falling out as the skin was inverted. It's strange how an idea lives with you.

Thinking about how other artists work and why they might create the things they do is something I suppose most artists need to do at some point. Our ways of working are not unique, in fact the main reason work communicates to someone else, is that they have an overlap in feeling tone or type of sensual perception. Indeed it could be this overlap that builds the totality of the universe we are aware of. In my last post on OPH, it was suggested that the fundamental elements of the universe aren’t objective states, they’re 'observer patches', subjective descriptions made by observers and that subjectivity is what physics is built out of. Whether or not this is true, I'm pretty sure that is what art is built out of and without other artists we would be lost in an empty world, which is why at times I need to take a look at who else is out there. 

See also:

Anna Barratt's isolation colouring book

Barthelemy Togue

Still thinking about what I do

Our death is drawn
Drawing and healing traditions

Observer-Patch Holography

In OPH, 3+1D de-Sitter space emerges as the conformal group of the S² screen supplies the 3+1D Lorentz symmetry, while modular flow and generalized entropy stationarity project boundary data inward to construct temporal and radial bulk dimensions. Each observer experiences a 3+1D universe.

I've been looking at what is called Observer-Patch Holography. Any reader of this blog will realise that every now and again I dip my toe into what's going on in science, because it can illuminate what I'm trying to think about in refreshing, if often challenging ways. OPH as it is known, is a recent development in the struggle to find a unifying theory, that will explain how everything fits together and works as it does. OPH proposes that gravity, particles and quantum mechanics all emerge from the same idea. That is that no single observer sees everything. Wow, this seems totally counter intuitive but at the same time somehow obvious. I have been hosting workshops whereby I get two people to work together in order to take their individual responses to visualising an interoceptual experience and to see how between them they can push the various visual elements they have invented around and adjust them, so that what they come up with communicates something to both of them. This is a basic process that explores how one person's subjective experience, can when overlapped with another's, gradually become something that can be communicated to someone else. I. e. what was an invisible subjective experience, eventually become part of someone else's reality.

Two people developing a cooperative image during a visualising interoception workshop 

OPH proposes that reality is a structure that any consistent set of observers must produce. But no one observer can see everything, therefore reality has to survive agreement across overlaps. I'm no mathematician, so I don't understand the underlying equations, however it seems as if you give each observer a holographic like screen into which is embedded their view of what is happening and as well as this you determine some sort of locality or co-ordinates within which this observer is observing, then you can develop a series of equations that embody that from one standpoint reality. Then imagine other observers' realities also being similarly fixed into being by a set of equations and adding into this the idea that you can overlap all of these realities. This overlapping is what makes one observer's subjective reality, into a reality that is everybody's objective reality. This is as if the observer aspect of quantum theory, becomes central to the theory, instead of it being a bit of a problem. This article, Observers are all you need is a useful read if you want to get a proper scientific understanding of the idea. 

Each observer's reality will overlap with another's

What I like about this is that my reality overlaps with yours and that we are all embedded into the unthinkably vast holographic screen S2.

OPH tries to explain several of physics’ deepest open questions as symptoms of the same underlying architecture. For instance; general relativity predicts that spacetime must have a boundary in the past, something we usually call the big bang. Some proposals replace the Big Bang with a “bounce” from a previous contracting phase. Others suggest the universe emerged from quantum fluctuations in “nothing.” None is established. The assumption is that spacetime is fundamental, so asking “what happened at t = 0?” is the fundamental question. However, OPH reframes the question entirely. spacetime is now emergent, it is reconstructed from the consistency of overlapping observer descriptions. So instead of an idea of a single point in time when everything began, we need to think of zooming into a digital photo. At some point you hit pixels. You can’t zoom into the underlying structure any further, not because there’s a “wall,” but because the structure doesn’t support a finer resolution. The image doesn’t have a “beginning” at the pixel level. It just doesn’t have sub-pixel information. The holographic screen has limits, a finite capacity (about 10¹²² states). In OPH, time is relational, defined by how observer patches correlate. At the “earliest” times, OPH theorists believe that patches become maximally mixed. There’s no meaningful “before” because there’s no information to distinguish earlier from later.

I have posted before on the hard problem of consciousness and how I think drawing might help us to think about it. There is an OPH answer to this question too. I like so many other people before me I have asked the question 'why is there a something that is the feeling tone that is me?' Subjective experience, is questionable, but I have it, so I believe in it. Physics and science describe matter and forces, but not experience, which is where I always felt art came in.

In physics equations describe objective states of the universe. Observers are incidental. But experience is inherently first-person. You can describe every neuron firing in my brain, map every chemical reaction and still not explain why there’s a “what it’s like” to be me feeling. However, in OPH, the fundamental elements of the universe aren’t objective states, they’re 'observer patches', local, partial, subjective descriptions made by observers. Subjectivity isn’t something that emerges from physics. It’s what physics is built out of. OPH starts with subjects (observers with partial descriptions) and derives the appearance of an objective world from the consistency of their overlapping perspectives. Stuff like atoms and gluons are what my perspective, your perspective and others agree on. Essentially, you get the appearance of matter from the consistency of minds. Observers are therefore the foundation of everything.

I do worry that OPH begins with an idea about screens though. I suspect this is a reaction to their every present nature in our times. But it's an interesting enough idea to follow, so bare with me. OPH uses a holographic screen, that has a topology S^2.  My understanding of the associated expressions with grouping symbols is that S1 is a circle, S2 is a standard sphere, and S3 exists in 4D space. The particular topology is important because it enables someone to use the geometry of motion using variables like displacement, time, velocity and acceleration to analyse position over time, in this case the kinematics of a 3+1 dimensional Lorentzian spacetime. The holographic screen has a finite-capacity that has within it overlapping observer patches. So if the physics we use is derived from this, it explains why the ordinary physics we already use turns out to be the natural thing to see. For instance; in OPH, particles are stable excitation patterns in the overlap and transport of data. If a transport propagates coherently across patches, and can be read consistently by many observers, that’s is exactly the sort of thing we call a particle. OPH equations give us photons, gluons and even gravitons, as well as more detailed mass outputs. 

In OPH, particles are stable transport obstructions across patch overlaps

In OPH, all particle masses are derived from a single constant P ≡ a_cell/ℓ_P², the shared dimensionless “pixel-area” constant that converts the holographic screen’s regulated microphysics into absolute lab units. Once P has been fixed, everything comes from it.

The researchers behind the development of OPH ask us to metaphorically, think of P as a “simulation setting”. The only way of determining this setting is by reverse-engineering its value from certain properties of reality. 

The architecture of OPH is based on a finite octahedral cellulation of the holographic screen. Overlapping patches communicate via a specialised synchronisation API, (mechanisms that enable two software components to communicate with each other using a set of definitions and protocols) which extracts shared readout packets to detect mismatch syndromes. When discrepancies are found, a dedicated repair loop executes local corrections to the registers, ensuring that the disparate observer perspectives remain unified and physically consistent. This again reminds me of my interoception workshops, whereby either myself or another person in the workshop helps with the communication between two other people trying to establish a shared idea of what might constitute for instance, the shape and colour of a particular type of pain. 

The researchers behind OPH have arrived at the strange loop hypothesis, whereby human consciousness is arrived at because the complexity of active symbols in the brain inevitably leads to self-reference. It goes like this, reality is a timeless structure that closes on itself; physical evolution gives rise to complex structure. Complex structure gives rise to minds. Minds give rise to ideas. Among those ideas comes an understanding of the structure of reality itself. This understanding is not external to the universe; it is one of the ways the universe becomes what it is. Physics gives rise to chemistry, chemistry to biology, biology to minds, minds to ideas and ideas are what we create physics from. In an OPH reality, everything is self-referential and the strange loop hypothesis is used to explain its own creation.

Escher visualises the strange loop hypothesis

OPH theorists believe that a consistent reality would be a self-referential, observer-bearing, timelessly consistent reality that closes on itself, eliminating the need for an external creator. Friedrich Nietzsche’s declaration that "God is dead", signified that Christian, metaphysical and absolute moral foundations had become unbelievable due to scientific, rational thought; something he believed would lead to a profound moral disorientation. However when I see images of evangelical nationalists and their tattoos that serve to signify their allegiance to Christian values, I sometimes feel that it is the God fearing that are destroying any moral world order we once had.

When I work as part of the group 'Drawing a life' I have to ask myself a question. "In what way is it different to draw a person speaking about him/herself from drawing somebody I have no idea about?" There is a difference, but there is it seems to me much slippage between the two experiences. The people I have no idea about still have their own phenomenal worlds and they will experience life in terms of species-specific, "self-in-world" subjective reference frames that are sometimes called their 'umwelt'. The structure of their 'umwelt' will though, just as the structure of any other creature's 'umwelt', such as the phenomenal world of the crab or the hedgehog, be one that has a certain commonalty amongst the species. In my case I am just one member of a species that is highly social, bipedal with a large, complex brain, that has a vertical forehead, smaller than average mammalian jaws and a high capacity for self-awareness and the pursuit of meaning. Therefore what I can do is project in my mind an idea that although I don't know someone, I might be able to guess something about what they are thinking; another OPH overlap. 

Again I'm brought back to empathy as being central to any overarching moral view on how we co-exist with the rest of the world. OPH suggests that although we all have subjective viewpoints, we also overlap in our beliefs. It is this area of overlap that allows us to communicate and come to some sort of agreement with others. In my view the overlap also exists in relation to my relationship with the wind, a stone, a kangaroo or a tree, by agreeing that we all have something in common, I am hopefully less likely to abuse these things and spend more time thinking about their needs as well as my own. I can see the attraction of a religion as it helps some of us come to terms with what can be seen as a meaningless life. But life is full of meaning and is a wonderful song of interconnectedness. A blackbird knows this and when I hear its song I know it too. 

Reference: https://floatingpragma.io/oph/

See also:

What is it to be human?

Life lines

The geometry of consciousness 

Visualising energy flow

What is embodiment? 

Invisible worlds

The Cosmographical Diagrams of Opicinus de Canistris

Opicinus de Canistris was a thirteenth century Italian priest, mystic, writer and cartographer who created fantastic cosmological diagrams that literally, turn the world on its head. Unlike our present science whereby we strive to dig down until we find the tiniest element that might lie underneath everything, he was trying to give to his society a picture of how everything fits together. In order to do this he gives non human forms, both spiritual and human attributes. I think we can still learn something from his approach.

Comparison of the Natural Versus the Spiritual world in Relation to the Church of the Spirit

 Diagram of the days of creation: With Africa as infidelity, speaking to Europe as Faith

Commentary on a Passage from Aristotle on the velocity of the planets

I had been thinking about how images could be used by an audience or perhaps more accurately how I would like the images I make to be used. In the minds of certain mystics imagery could be simultaneously informational, pedagogic and meditative in function and it is this complexity that I am aiming for when developing ideas for my art work. 

I like the idea that images can be looked at again and again and that their meaning could be unravelled slowly over time. As always I'm looking for antecedents and in Opicinus de Canistris I  found a precursor who used a combination of visual and written approaches to explore his very personal ideas about the cosmos, self-knowledge and God. He made a series of intricate cosmographical diagrams based on late medieval maps and charts of the Mediterranean and other drawings and diagrams of what were then contemporary ideas, whereby the spiritual and the material worlds were understood as interacting and intermingled. This fact was I thought very interesting, as it reinforced my own belief in an entangled experiential happening and that what was perhaps needed was an art form that could be used as a support for some sort of meditative experience. 

Opicinus de Canistris was often found reflecting on the microcosm within the macrocosm and was concerned to renounce sensory experience, during a 'cleansing of the windows of the soul, so that the light of spiritual reality would transform his understanding'. Which is for myself a powerful indicator that he was taking this work very seriously, but not only that, he used diagrams as an aid to a process of self-reflection and analysis, something that I have also come to see as another aspect of visual awareness that reoccurs often in contemporary drawing practices. However I would like to embrace sensory experience rather than renounce it, as I believe that it is sensory experience that is vital to our experience of life. 

The map of Europe as an idea containing several bodies

If you turn the image of 'Comparison of the Natural Versus the Spiritual world in Relation to the Church of the Spirit' on to its side, you can easily see a quite contemporary looking map of Europe centred on the Mediterranean. As this was drawn in the mid 13th century, it is a pretty good contemporary vision of the best mapping available at the time, but the personification of the landscape is something that has emerged out of much older traditions, ones that go back to ancient myths of the Earth's genesis; myths that pre-date the Bible. 

Babylonian Map: 6th century BC

In the stone map made in Babylon above, you can just about make out the outlying regions, which are the triangles that project out past the edge of the circle. We still have the descriptions of regions three to seven, all of which must have been strange distant places in relation to the people of Babylon. So many of the stories about far off places would in those days have been more myth than reality, but you can sort of guess what is being referred to. The third region is where "the winged bird ends not his flight", the fourth where "the light is brighter than that of sunset or stars"; the fifth, due north, lay in complete darkness, a land "where one sees nothing" and "the sun is not visible"; the sixth, "where a horned bull dwells and attacks the newcomer" and the seventh, "where the morning dawns". In such maps we can see a fusion of reality and fantasy. As maps become more attuned to the realities of politics, they change shape and can reflect other ideas such as the fact that we need to pass through the landscapes of the world if we are to interact with them. We pass through one place after another.

A linear tube map

Maps can operate in a variety of ways, just think of how our London tube maps are simplified into linear forms that can be printed up and placed over the doors in train carriages. This is an old idea, one the Romans used to use.

From Iberia in the west, to India in the east: an ancient Roman road map

Map of the cursus publicus 

The cursus publicus was a system that allowed for the flow of power to operate. Rome needed to set up a complex communication system to allow its agents to travel throughout its territories unimpeded. Each identified town, village, site or area would have been responsible to the needs of any travelling dignitaries such as magistrates; providing horses, food and safety for public servants as they passed through. I was interested in the maps of the cursus publicus, as they don't look like the ground from space as current Google maps do, they are very much the product of information, one area of responsibility having to follow the next one, similar to the way names are placed on tube maps, so it is very clear what places a traveller would have to pass through. However there was no need to show how this relates to some sort of accurate geographic positioning. As long as the traveller knew that on leaving area one at some point area two would take up the responsibility for their safety, all was well. This I realised could be used by my own visualising of the interior of the body. I am trying to express something about emotional shape and colour; something that I know exists and that it does so within some sort of inner body map, but that map doesn't have to be located in any sort of one to one correspondence with the interior of the body as laid out in contemporary anatomical diagrams. I am reassured therefore that my idea of taking a long journey through an imagined body/landscape, might after all be a viable one.

Two tests from part of a journey through an imagined body/landscape

Interoceptual portrait

I would like to feel that there is a connection between my own attempts to create an Interoceptual portrait like the one above and images made by Opicinus de Canistris, such as his diagram of the mystical body of Christ. The overall shape can be enough to state that this is an image of a human being. Embedded into the image is partly the idea of a map, partly the idea that a body could represent something much more than itself and partly the idea that any individual can go off on a tangent and discover something mystical about both themselves and their vision of how things might be and that is always something wonderful. 

Reference:

Opening to God: The Cosmographical Diagrams of Opicinus de Canistris

See also:

Diagrams: Visualising the invisible

The diagram as art and spirit guide 

Emotional landscapes