Stefan Arteni

The Form of The Form

SolInvictus Press 2006

Note: The illustrations of this essay reproduce collages by Stefan Arteni

Ultimate dream The path will descend Straight and so weightless Toward the abyss
Adrian Maniu

Cybernetics is the art of creating equilibrium between possibilities and constraints. Ernst von Glasersfeld A fractally constellated visual structure of echoes and correspondences, of reflexive loops, an operational logic of visual graphic relations, schematic rendering and graphic archetypes, a system of notational graphic marks, a semasiographic articulated symbolic system which contains layers of encoded information and is not tied to spoken language, are embodied medially as a joint product of the artificer's cultural constraints and the sort of traces produced by the available tools and mediums. The empty mark acts as a visual suggestion. "But perceptibility itself as a (however conspicuous) optical mark does not yet constitute communication," writes Niklas Luhmann. He continues: "And even if someone recognizes that the object of perception (the 'sign') has been produced by way of an intentional act, that is, 'technically' or 'artificially' in the original sense, this does not yet mean that it can be understood as the communication of a piece of information." The first mark is arbitrary, contingent, and discriminatory. Though it is empty, its emptiness confers upon it a ritual perfection. It exists in a continuous space, it generates form systems, and it marks the interface between itself and the unmarked space. Compositionality is a way of organizing marks as distinctions. The operational distinction indicates the artist's existence. "Ultimately, the formis the form of the distinction that 'it' makes," remarks Louis H. Kauffman. Sign systems (signs, i.e the distinctions they stand for) are historically contingent and culturally divergent. Or, to put it another way, in the logic of Nagarjuna, the closed net of distinctions is defined in context - the net of memory appears as if it were the universe. "The drawing of a distinctionis an operation of cultivation: we have to presuppose the unavailable without which nothing is going to happen, " writes Dirk Baecker. Louis H. Kauffman remarks: "As the closures occur, that sign becomes a sign for itselfThe mark is a sign for itself where 'itself' is a distinction drawn in the plane. The mark signifies a distinction and the distinction that is signified is made by the mark itself. The mark refers to itself, but that self is a sign in a context of signs..." William Edmonson indicates that arrangements of signs are themselves signs, with conventional aspects of their interpretation.

Lotfi Zadek interprets possibility as a constraint on variables. C.S.Peirce saw change or chaos as a firstness of primary potentialities, constraints as secondness, and patterns as thirdness. Peircean semiotics is deeply rooted in the scholastic tradition and is known for its resumption of premodern themes. Ernst von Glasersfeld makes reference to the apophatic view in connection with the seed of radical constructivist ideas. "Buddhism moves toward radical apophasis, denying any positive role for language in the awakening experience," writes David. R. Brockman. The interest in non-verbal manifestations of Lakoffian culture-specific idealized cognitive models, accounting for visual prototype effects by means of image-schemata, metonimy and metaphor models, is still a fairly recent development. Investigating and theorizing pictorial and other non-verbal models is important not only as a means to test, and elaborate, George Lakoff's project of charting idealized cognitive models, but also as an instrument to help integrate cognitivist approaches with culture-oriented ones, that is with thought styles or cognitive models where particular modes of experience are favored. As Michael Kimmel underscores, "every cognitive cultural template is chosen against a ground of other possibilities." Drid Williams' semasiological theory presents image-schemata as sets of potentialities that each culture will utilize differently. R. Langacker indicates that a schema is an organized abstract framework of objects and relations, whereas a prototype consists of a specified set of expectations. A prototype is a highly typical instantiation or instance of a schema. When one considers culture, it is the intersubjective schemas pertaining to the 'consensual domain' that are relevant. Roy D'Andrade employs the term 'cultural models.' According to D'Andrade, "a cultural model is a cognitive schema that is intersubjectively shared by a social group." A reinterpretation of Michael Kimmel's notion of dynamic switches between culture-embedded ontologies through image-schemata transformations and encompassing cases of partial compatibility, may be horizontally extended to include non-linguistic phenomena.

A paradigm shift needs to take place that embraces the counter-intuitive concept that something without meaning or intentionality can be a recursive visual structure or pattern. Katie Bentley argues that stigmergic systems provide better generic tools to investigate optimal and indeed aesthetic designs. She writes: "Stigmergic swarm intelligence occurs as a representationless and distributed pattern producing process. Similarly, parallel rule-based systems [Lindenmayer systems or L-systems, introduced by Aristid Lindenmayer] exhibit the curious phenomenon of data base amplification, they have the ability to generate complex structures from small data sets. Polyglossia [including the contestation of cultural systems, hence of ways of thinking] enables both the centrifugal and the centripetal, both dissimilation and assimilation, to co-exist. Inter-contextural transitions, that is transjunctional operations, produce multi-simultaneous heterarchical formal domains, that is a polycontextural formal matrix where, instead of a semio-translation, there is a polyfactorial intra- and meta-artistic awareness. Transjunction causes ludic inter-tanglings including a creative misinterpretation of surface topology. Meta-awareness allows one to step back in order to consider the form and structure. Antony Adolf remarks that such formalizations are self-conscious, insofar as, having more than one system at one's disposal, the artist will decide which to use. Intertwined sequences and processes, reiterated acts and the impossibility of invariant repetition, an embodied algorithmic performativemeditative-improvisational state, constitute a multi-negational heterarchy, the transjunctional parallelism of the network. Such interacting processes constitute a higher order of circularity and parallelism and a correlation between circularities and antinomies. De- and/or re-semiotization highlight the inherent instability of signification and the looseness of reference of high-context signs. 'Originality,' therefore, does not suggest the modern notion of an erasure of tradition as a breakthrough, but rather the sense of utilizing the highest potential of a millennial legacy of traditioning which has recourse to preformulated, prefabricated building blocks as it relies, on the one hand, on recurring patterns within a creative-formulaic continuum and , on the other hand, on the paradoxical combination of contingency and necessity.

The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Milan Kundera Byzantine legacy is a way of being in the world, a high-context matrix of visual, intuitive, contemplative, indirect communication, releasing visual events into a mytho-cultural appreciation which privileges material instantiation of images over informational pattern.The field of perception was conformed by an oral-plus-chirographic culture. J.P.Lewis suggests that fuzzy structures or class of patterns specified by example may lead to novel visual constructs. This is achieved by means of a sort of creative computation which 'refines' random creations in correlation with the input pattern. The archetypal imagic constitutive similarity and otherness subsist in spite of the many physical-material variations from one instantiation to the other. Figuration as trans-figuration rests on the relational aspect of the image, on a notion of equivalence, not on an exact resemblance. This has as direct effect a ritualist dimension of any activity, a ritual cultural imprinting, where the expressiveness of the style conceived as an interplay of directed visual tensions and ocular memory is syntactically strengthened. Niels Brgger differentiates between medial substratum and medial material content. The substratum is part of the medium on, or in, which the material content is placed. An example is the artwork in which the paper is the substratum and what is put on the paper, for instance black ink, is the material content. Jesper Taekke gives further comments: "Material content must not be confused with content (the meanings that might emerge through knowledge about the coding system). In this sense the material content is meaningless. Second, the substratum must not be confused with the medium as such. The substratum is part of the medium but only one part, the other being the material content. The media must also be divided into three areas - production, distribution and consumption. According to Brgger to characterize, for instance, the area of production of media, one must answer the following threefold question: what is the substratum of the medium, how does it make the production of material content possible, and what is this material content?" The medial quality itself introduces a feedback and reveals a certain perception perspective. "Communication generally is observation of form in a medium", notes Dirk Baecker. He suggests "to turn any possible form into the medium of a possible different form and to considers these forms as a calculus on the codependence of marked and unmarked states."

The image construct medium, the endless chain of appropriation and transfer, is form in the material medium, exemplifying the reduplication of the difference between medium and form in forms that in turn can be used as medium. Whichever material medium the work appears in, there are inherent medial features which deflect and deform the message. In this transitional zone between materiality and symbols, constructs have a fractal and mosaic topology - visual perception itself may be inherently non-Euclidean. Every medium implies a certain community. "Eveything takes place in the irreal world of sensesense is a certain model of reality as presented by representations we use", writes Andrzej Chmielecki. Lucian Blaga speaks about a magical-mythical awareness, while Mircea Eliade describes a "mystical empathy with the cosmic rhythms". Aaron Gurwitsch remarks that visual appearance, the perceptual datum, "has its phenomenal identity only within a contexture" - a culture is often observed to be latent, a tacit knowledge or habitus. Vittorio Benussi argues that "mental habit is a simulation of evidence". Primacy of the eye establishes and legitimizes a visual paradigm - visual parainformation, the primordial elemental type of information, and structural information composed of pieces of parainformation. Vision becomes haptic and generates a haptic space. The eye is trained to navigate through the complex visual semiosphere - the act of seeing is not instantaneous, it spans through time and it is associated with ocular motility. "Seeing consists of a series of gestures," remarks Brian Rotman. Art has a complex antinomical nature - it is both ideal and real, universal and individual, ergon and energeia. A picture plane is energy. Context and changefulness are the attributes of seeing. Pavel Florensky speaks of the bewildering view of the kaleidoscope. A kenotic space destabilizes perception, repositions and deploys an open-ended experience which gathers the meanderings of memory. By modulating emptiness through a calculus of distinctions, all form may be seen to arise from a void. Relations are replotted into an aesthetic axis. Color qualities act as attractors. Cognitive mapping does not cease to reach for an invisible yet tangible universal. "The symbolis mediating and mediated life a form through which reality flows", writes Viacheslav Ivanov.

"The Greek eikon, meaning image originating in likeness and semblance and recalling mimesis, becomes icon, which no longer imitates but offers now, by means of its unity, a prototype to imitate", remarks Constantin Noica. The virtual space of painting is neither fully present nor fully absent, it is a space for which the existence of referents would be irrelevant, it implies a distinction between patterns and interpretation of patterns. Reticent and laconic, the icon is separation that joins or, in the Areopagite's words, a "dissimilar similarity". "The meaning of meaning is both richness of references and tautological circularity", notes Niklas Luhmann. Roland Barthes speaks of a 'negative semiosis' - the sign becomes apophatic in nature, it always refers to another sign and never to the actual object itself, or, as Floyd Merrell suggests, "given the disconcerting irretrievability of a first sign and the impossibility of reaching a final sign, there can be no interpretant without a predecessor and a successor". The context of an interpretant is a perspective. Visual rhetoric is integral to communication. Bruno Latour suggests that, on the one hand, the overload of images leads to iconoclasm, while, on the other hand, "images demonstrate transformation, not information". Only the whole series iterated diachronically, from antiquity all up to nowadays, has meaning. "To study an art form is to explore a sensibility", notes Clifford Geertz, "such a sensibility is a collective formationas wide as social existence and as deep". It is assumed of any viewer that he/she knows the images - hence deliberate omissions, ellipses, parallelity and conformity, self-similar syncopations, indirect and covered-up references, rupturing of the narrative, abstraction and unreality. It is certainly possible to view apophasis both as overflow and as paring away - both can be placed under the category of play. Apophasis leads to a positive valuation of images. This multiple negation and ludic tautology leaves what is as it is, but only in a painting that centers on the citational plurality of the material sign-vehicle and refers endlessly to painting. In terms of encoding, there is only recursivity of formal selections and of their performative functions, that is transformation of the diachronic flow of formal visual constructs. "In cybernetic terms, observer and observed are unconsciously merged during the act of makingthis stage depends upon procedural memory," writes Terry Marks-Tarlow. The ritual is an actual standing and living within art, a participation in it, and at the same time an active partaking in maintaining the process or, as Dirk Baecker puts it, "unmarked states do not exist for first-order observers, and they only exist for second-order observers as marks ofmatters excluded." The relationship between the forming of ritual form and the emergence of possibility from within virtuality becomes autopoietic. This is the relationship between the emergence of play and ritual.

The indeterminacy of signification noted by the Schoolmen became a component of Peirce's theory, drawing attention to an apophatic trend grounded in what Gregory of Nyssa named diastema (distance, ontological gap,) a concept that may be used as a metaphor for the distinction between the graphic identity of visually presented marks and content. Relations of determination are emergent properties of formal systems, but the artist feels free to move from one to the other by evading reduction to a referential play and by taking into account presemiotic operational appropriation, the diachronicity of the iterative process and the spectrum of glyphic variation, the graphic aspect of glyphic systems, the mythoglyphs and the iconical graphemes which gesture the movement of life itself. "Art rests on all-pervasive entropy against which anything that persists must organize itself", writes Niklas Luhmann. By cultivating an agonistic relation with predecessors, the artist reinvents visual literacy. It is the topology of processes and experiential formal structures and their interdependence at very different time scales which is truly a heterarchy opening to elsewhereness and implying adaptive, dynamic multiconnectivity, every new actualization being a manifestation of a newly envisioned possible. Dumitru Staniloae argues for the significance of 'potential' : "The East intuits the unbounded wealth of potentiality without which any act is something limited ". The nothing is a meon, or a potentiality of being. Reality is actualization of the potential. "The Real is, by definition, forever veiled, while Reality is accessible to our knowledge", writes Basarab Nicolesco. The symbol is a case in point. Yuri Lotman indicates that "symbols represent compressed mnemonic programs", while Z. G. Minc argues that "formerly abandoned symbols wereconveyed from a current symbol set to a potential symbol set". Mark making appears to derive from the rhythmic repetition of gestural routines. Marks become chronotopic indexes of practice. The organized mass of marks is itself a mark, a complex mark. The etiology of ritual art is vestigially present in the ancient meaning of the terms grammata, that is scratchings, and semata, that is marks not necessarily attached to human speech. Marking strategies represent cognitively and semantically different systems, explaining 'otherness' as a product of unshared 'image-schemata', but implicit here is the question of a continuous spiritual thread which links the successive sources. Though culturally refracted, the same light shines in the East and in the Far East. This perspective emerges in a Zen story's reference to the plane of virtualities: anything that happens was already in existence - as a potential. What is present becomes contingent, and what is different becomes comparable.

Thorsten Botz-Bornstein is convinced that there is a striking parallel between Byzantine and Japanese aesthetics. The mute-optical element has priority. Acts of formalization create a reality of their own, a reality that is strictly a formal one, a style mediated only through style, a reality which presents nothing but itself - style as a virtual world, or, paradoxically, as virtual irreality. Self-organization of visual communicative interactions plays a major role in the emergence of symbolization. Autopoiesis theory indicates that self-producing systems cannot be controlled exclusively from within or without and their constitutive events are difficult to forecast. Complexity theory suggests that the Edge of Chaos is more than a balance point - instability with order - it is also a point of unpredictable emergence within the context of a ludic cybernetic view of art. Simple rules, non-random events, act on random events and can produce complex patterns. The details of these applications have various connections to the ideas of convergence toward eigenvalues seen as attractors. Eigenvalues or perceptual regularities are stable self-produced values that result of recursive operations and thus imply circularity. "Eigenvalues [stable structures] represent the externally observable manifestations of the introspectively accessible cognitive operations," writes Heinz von Foerster.

Being begins anew in every moment: around any 'here' revolves the sphere of 'there'. And the center is everywhere. The way of eternity is curved. Friedrich Nietzsche Cultural ecology and cultural geography engage with specific complex systems and systems of systems as well as with the construction of boundary zones and their inherent elusiveness. Brian Ward writes: "recursive symmetry in chaos theoryechoes Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophy of 'eternal return'(we should see eternal return as a cyclical process where events return to similarevents)complex systems come back again and again to near the same situations".. According to John R Van Eenwyk, the oscillatory dynamics (tensions of opposites) that generate myths and rituals enliven them as well, by bringing up new possibilities. Thus, creation occurs over and over again....So, the eternal return is an iterative dynamic: it allows the present to be fed back into the original equation. While all archetypal processes generate feedback dynamics, the eternal return is the epitome of all such aspects of archetypal processes. It is the archetype of archetypal dynamics, so to speak. Archetypal vortices form the boundarylayer fractal stochastic phenomena The borderland of the Byzantine cultural space "is a world governed by good or evil forces, by calls and silences, by displays, appearances and screeningsby fatalism defined as an integration of the human being into the universal rhythm", writes Mircea Vulcanescu, reinforcing the palimpsestic metaphor implying multifacetedness, polyglotism, illegibilities and erasures. Nae Ionescu observes: "The lonely humancan not intervene in historyhe can only 'cultivate' " [the Latin colere, to cultivate, refers to both culture and tilling the soil, and is related to cultus, care, adoration]. The stress on visual interfaces, discontinuity and metamorphoses, is underpinned by an evasive and implied topography of moveable roots and pasts. By the geographic accident of locating one's origins in a borderland, one becomes a dweller of the in-between and of the margins. This entails a foundational polyglotism across cultural and artistic habitats. The existential chronotope hinges on the emergence of fractality that encompasses networked systems where thresholds change the nature of relationships between formal repertoires.

From the beginning, a translocal multi-identiy web and a recursiveness of identity recreation, a being between and astride cultures and moving across languages and visual contextures set side by side, imply a second-order perspective, an experiential metacultural sensibility - that is a shift toward looking at the gaze itself. An inner metalanguage, multiple inheritances and multiple codings, are at work. Second-order culture delineations are continuously reconstructed. The new entities produced by the peripatetic impulse open up a situational space which revels in the freedom of a horizonal in-between transcending untranslatable knots - a polyphonic monologue. Doris Runey points out that polyglots are "not 'in the world' but rather 'in worlds', dwelling in the liminal space of simultaneous belongingness and non-belongingness. By taking a proper approach to the notions of paradox, the paradox of simultaneous identity and alterity, and to the notion of self-reference, one may argue that on this level of second-order observations all statements become contingent. Second-order cybernetics is more concerned with morphogenesis and positive feedback loops, a behaviour which is recursive and generates variety. The virtual borderland of culture, a place where increasing entropy could be overcome, works as a memetic attractor in the surprising intersections of fractal chaos and embedment. Communication will pass across but will be modified on the way. Nobert Fenze indicates that many authors define information as a measure of 'quantity of form', to inform means 'to put in-to a form'. To be clear, in congruence with Luhmann, this definition reveals a distinction between information and the selection of the form of its utterance. The relation between the two sides of the distinction is fuzzy - one may be unaware of information and one may be aware of uncommunicable things. Understanding will decide which side of the distinction is meaningful. Communications as utterances are syntactic forms where utterances are preceded and followed by other utterances orienting themselves through consequences of former selections within a context of potentialities. A basic requirement of the syntactic system is that it must keep producing new signifiers out of old ones. In syntactics, transformability is of relevance, if transformations of signs into [other] signs are formalized. As Niklas Luhmann puts it, the medium in which the autopoiesis of art occurs is purely that of syntax.

"A cybernetic model works by setting up constraints," remarks Ernst von Glasersfeld. Art operates with constraints rather than with efficient causes - it only eliminates what does not fit, and this means learning the viable path. "Forms are created from the concatenation of operations upon themselves andarerather indications of processesThe closed loop of perception occurs in the eternity of present individual time," writes Louis H. Kauffman. Thus one may speak of circular operationality, of the recursive self-implication of form, and also of indirect recursion when two or more procedures cyclically call each other. Form implies itself as a meta-distinction, as a form of form. All our past coexists with each present. Gilles Deleuze "Newness manifests itself contrary to intention and accompanied by the consciousness of its own inevitability, and this is its profound distinction from avantgarde innovation, self-enraptured and aggressive", writes Mikhail Epstein. One should not universalize the gloomy temporariness of the Western dominant code, the fetishization of certain ideas of artistic and cultural quality, the nihilistic essence of the contemporary art world and its infinite acceleration toward a non-destination ultimately leading to disintegration - an "act of self-abolition", as Nietzsche wrote. "The nearer the center, the more petrified the action field", notes V. N. Toporov. Luc Ferry remarks: "The break with tradition itself becomes tradition".To put it in Niklas Luhmann's words, if art communication is seen as "technical codes through which systemic operations arrange and perpetuate themselves", the avantgarde consists in "the self-negation of art being realized at the level of autopoietic operations in the form of art, so that art can continue". The paradox consists, on the one hand, in the comodification of the avantgarde, and on the other hand, in the characteristic move of avantgarde prophets who will veer towards totalitarianism. Paul Virilio suggests that "beyond a certain threshold la diffrance begins to work in reverse, against itself, actively promoting a state of general undifferentiation". One should recall Susan Buck-Morss' advice and "blast holes in established interpretations of the twentieth century".

Milan Knzk points out that globalism and universalism in art are nothing new, they are perduring and uneven. Patrick Boylan argues that pragmatic accommodation (viewing oneself through the eyes of another) will not subsume cultural accommodation, the 'outgroup' has a different 'mode of being' - a memory community consists of conventions 'netted' through time. Facing the decay of form, the artist works in opposition to a 'public sphere' which glorifies 'bad painting' and anticulture as the apex of contemporary practice - an opposition entailing recognizable schismogenetic differentiation of distinct ideologies. The artist produces a dissonance with a 'global antiart' whose massive forgetfulness is grounded in a negativity based on ideological concordance with an obsessive adversarial relation to cultural memory and on the invisibility of any 'unofficial' art - after all, the 'death of the author' has meant only the overbearing dominance of the critic and the birth of the curator-author. The Moscow-Tartu school speaks of antithetical self-description and of enantiomorphic symmetry: global antiart is constructed isomorphically to art, but it is art with a negative sign .Once the role of suspicion in communication processes is defined, it then leads to a framing of the problem connected to the concept of 'noise' as dependent on the observers position - the entropic propensity resulting from stamping out diversity leads to structures being less differentiated and to their decay into deafening and irrelevant noise masquerading as content. More referentiality does not result in communication. Robert Axelrod's culture model suggests that, once the number of traits is reduced, noise (unwanted input to a system) drives the system into a state of global monoculture. The interaction wipes out diversity.

The paradox of our times is that one talks about world art without having a world system of art. It is still directed from particular centers of power which decide what is right and what is wrong for the world. In other words, the system of art is not yet an autopoietic system of communications. It is rather a system comprised of many individual systems or, to use Jeno Bango's concept, of many individual socio-regions, a socio-region being here defined as a non-topographical mind region. The hegemonic region thus represents an obsolete historical residue in that it, as no other system, still uses the pernicious marxist fantasy retromeme and its constricted wooden language as a basis for its operations. "Ironically this situation in itself provides us with a nice example of how knowledge of evolution acquired in the realm of biology can help unravel analogous situations in the realm of culture," writes Liane Gabora. She continues: "In both genetic hitchhiking and its cultural analog there is indirect selection for useless (or even detrimental) patterns through their association with beneficial ones. The concept of hitchhiking is closely related to that of exaptation." Milan Kundera pointed out in an interview some years ago: "The Western intellectual finds it easy to deny his own values and to mock centuries-old gardens..." The ideological theoretical constructions of the timeless 'no-place' of Western intelligentsia based on the Gramscian prescription result in evidence of punctuated, stressinduced and sometimes maladaptive culture change caused by status- or prestige-biased imitation and indirect bias or meme hitchhiking. Political communication often parasitically enters the art code. Niels Akerstrom Andersen argues that parasitical communication is characterized by having a particular codified communication, a parasitic codification, which uses the plus side of a particular foreign code as a supplement in the attempt to pursue its own value and never seeks to question the truth through falsification. Overload, noise, lack of precision and ignorance, construct their limited and contradictory knowledge under systems of sense that reduce cultural complexity to chiliastic ecstasy. Systematic erasure of all cultural memory is implicit. Leszek Kolakowski had predicted: "The specter is stronger than the spells we cast on it. It might come back to life."

If nihilism, as says Nietzsche, consists in the loss of memory, recovery of memory is a means against nihilism. Czeslaw Milosz Julia Kristeva defines the twentieth century as an "ageof exile", an age described by Asen Davidov as a possible "twilight of the individual". Hamid Naficy identifies as an 'accented' art "certain ethnocultural, exilic, and authorial sensibilities", that is to say marginocentric forms which have axiological dimensions of their own and adopt transclassical operational strategies. Accent changes the grid and coordinates by which one understands art - there is, afterall, a pervasive East-Central European accent to the cole de Paris. The large undefined border zone apparently suffering from a deficiency of universality - Jaan Kaplinsky argues that borders can be seen as an "irreducible space" - the Europe Between, the Third Europe, is never on center stage. The metaphoric dynamic of centrality, marginality, and in-betweenness, proves unable to decipher the borderland hieroglyph. It continues to remain unread. "The Europe made up of little countries is another Europe", writes Milan Kundera. The marginalization-misrecognition of East-Central and South-Eastern Europe by Western aesthetic ideology is part and parcel of interpretive models which intend to manipulate or even incorporate the other, it is a kind of blind spot on the map of visual anthropology, or, to use Giorgio Agamben's words, an inclusive-exclusion. An accent can lift one out of the routine. Thus, an outsider may sometimes perceive the unique qualities of a formal system with peculiar clarity. Accent signifies upon painting itself, it signifies upon painting tradition by means of its production modes and by playfully crossing generic and stylistic boundaries. Once reinscribed, image systems become nonfunctional, the artist populates them with his own accent. Simultaneity and polyvalency as strategies suspend individual referentiality.

Anthony Judge points to the notion of sacrifice (the term sacrifice, from the Latin sacrificium sacer, "holy"; facere, "to make - means to make sacred and can also be understood as the act of sanctifying or consecrating an object; offering is used as a synonym, or as a more inclusive category of which sacrifice is a subdivision, and means the presentation of a gift; the word offering is from the Latin offerre, "to offer, present", and yields the noun oblate; the Latin operari, to perform, accomplish, evokes once again the idea of sacred action.): the images are grouped and regrouped, creating and erasing boundaries, in a centripetal process converging on a unique configuration of forces in a final efficient-moment of sacrifice which reveals the underlying common body of the norm, the efficient centre of creative action, or embodied-vision. The image of sacrifice stands therefore for an activity of eternal return to the radical originating power through which the multiplicity of perspectives is engendered. It is the efficient centre of the discontinuities of space of perception and time, or the link between efficient acts and discontinuous acts. It is not a renunciation of action, but rather a renunciation of the limits of perspectives which interpretations attach to the structured subject-object sensorium. It cannot be stressed too much that indifference to the notion of a telos can be related to the development of a mythico-ritual mode of apprehending and of a ritual orthopraxy - dromena, litterally things performed, which have endured in an a-modern East and are connected with the spirit of play for its own sake. Joseph Needham has beautifully discussed the correlative view prevalent in premodern cultures, that is layered traditions and the dissipative forces involved in transmission. Following Steve Farmer, it is perhaps worth pointing out that correlative perspectives or correlative systems and their self-similar and fractal structures have deep neurobiological roots.

Marcel Griaule speaks of 'graphic facts' constituting a shared repository of materialized memory. The function of the concrete mark is conceived by Simon Battestini in an experiential ritual context, ritual being viewed as a crucial process in the texture of memory storing and communicative cultural behavior. Roger Schank introduces the notions of dynamic memory framework and Memory Organization Packet theory, that is continuously refined experience-based memory schemata. "An observer is the link between himself and his observing self," suggests Ernst von Glasersfeld. Elaborate but thrifty graphic formulaic symbolic clusters of notation and their metrical rhythmic systems are trans-linguistic, they are not tied to any language. Graphical processing re-makes, re-creates, re-members the system each time it is actualized. The artist is a thoughtful guardian of lore. The play of art is a shift in reality. Art appears as a principle of setting up an involved relation. Making a collage-web of de/recontextualized transferable commentarial and synecdochic quotations which absorb and transform each other and become always different by reproducing themselves, of self-borrowings, paraphrases, and allusions processed through a kind of mis-reading which helps overcome influences, is part of the culture of East-Central Europe which defies dominant Western 'progressive' narratives by evolving a strategy of the radical existential questions of our time: Is there a supreme telos? Can 'nonhistoric' peoples experience a 'return of history'? Where and why did history go wrong? What would have been if it had been otherwise than it was? Within the context of Erving Goffman's dramaturgical metaphor, the people barely mentioned in history, the people that history forgot, will be defined as being removed from the stage - their senseless suffering, a suffering without redemption, is described by the obscure folktale riddle: "If you turn right, you will be in sorrow, if you turn left, you will be in sorrow as well". The artist is condemned to live inside style and live through style. The fragmentary style is both an ontological principle and an artistic principle. By fragments one searches, in a discontinuous manner, the ontological fundaments of any activity, including art. Creating a fragmentary existential and visual formal adventure characterized by the will for unfinished, the painter makes a comment and a reflection on a massively fractured culture.

We're living in a world which is, after all, ruled by Manichaean, hostile gods. Leszek Kolakowski The artist is the messenger, the bearer of an utterance which has the "color of the fate in which it arose", as Hoelderlin once said. Michel Serres has drawn a cogent analogy between the ancient role of the messenger - the Greek angela means message - and the apparently secularized information society. The unfolding message is transposed into wholly visual constructs shown sequentially or simultaneously. The artist is the manipulator of an evocative contingent repertoire and a multiplicity of stylistic perspectives filtered by means of what Virgil Nemoianu calls "patterns of substitution", an oblique evocative re-vision and refraction modeled on musical composition strategies. The whole work is a tightly woven web of improvisational self-reference, of imagic and diagrammatic iconicity as characters in sign-system complexes, based on what J. Drucker and J. McGann call a pictographic composition or metagraphic rhetoric of graphs in relation to the abstract ordering of their visual form at a level of structure. Jack M. Greenstein argues that "Alberti's definition of composition gives surfaces theprimacy". Sets of self-reflexive systems connect to or generate identifiable artistic practices. Different structures of meaning coexist - purely artistic relationships, programmatic, and artisticphilosophical, including thus all levels of perception. "Meaning emerges as a self-organizing web of fuzzy patterns," writes Ben Goertzel. The painting game focuses attention upon implicitly reflexive relationships, the 'gap' between image and painting, painting as object-language and metalanguage at the same time, and the self-reference of all communication.

A work is, in and of itself, a re-reading of cultural signifiers. By engaging a work's indeterminacies the viewer recognizes that filling the empty signifier with content cannot be regulated except in the context of a cultural code, a perceptographic code, which ritualizes and lays down patterns. Leonid Tchertov opines that from a semiotic point of view a configuration of spots and lines stimulating perception can be considered not as a single sign, but as a set of "sense-distinctive" relations forming together a visual-spatial construct of a particular kind. Such visual-spatial construct functions as a "perceptogram", which, on the one hand, acts expressively regarding the creator, and, on the other hand, acts impressively in relation to the spectator, and only by this condition may perform also a representative function relating each perceptive construct to an external referent Despite the fact that the signal-indexical means of such perceptography are derivative from the perceptual code, they can be distinguished as an autonomous group and considered as a special perceptographic code. As an external artificial modification of the perceptual code it does not mediate intra-subjective processes of cognition, but inter-subjective processes of visual communication. Its semiotic means differ from the means of the naturally formed and unconsciously used perceptual code, because they are selected as results of reflection in processes of inter-subjective visual communication, and are medially embodied in a cultural tradition. Within the compositional organization system the artist uses a recursive dynamic stochastic operational algorithm for generating medium constrained structures which must be interpreted in the context of perceptographic domain knowledge to produce a symbolic representation. As Tchertov puts it, the perceptographic code is rather a characteristic of form.

On the surface, an intelligible lie; underneath, the unintelligible truth. Milan Kundera The contested core/periphery notion yields to the concept of shifting centers and peripheralization in core regions. Czeslaw Milosz implies that centers can move and suggests the end of the French universal - Paris is extinct, at most a continuity of ruins. Southeast Europe may be paradoxically problematized as both the cradle and periphery of Europe. Crossroads, once considered to be the most magical places, may undoubtedly become infernal liminal zones. East-Central Europe must be reconceptualized as a border-space - it consists of borderlands lying at the intersection of cultures, the East of the West and the West of the East, and therein lies its fascination.The cultural borderline, however, is blurred. It becomes that from which multicentricity and crisscrossing of flows and counterflows and the aesthetic articulation of identity begin their presencing. It is time to demand once again a maximum of complexity from the artwork. It is time to use again constraints in order to expand the room of art. Art can be reconnected with the chain of predecessors by reclaiming and renewing archaic memory, by restoring a larger and deeper constellation of sense beyond egolatry and egophany and beyond dominant ideologems. Zen emphasizes a transhistorical present in terms of an ever-renewable cyclicality, such as the play of condensed and interwoven mythologems, the return of recalcitrant myth, the cultural matrix concerned with archetypal fields and with damnation and redemption, the matrix which has survived displaced or camouflaged in contemporary secular culture or as a secular caricature, lurking in the subterranean memory and waiting to spring forth. Experience-oriented spirituality in Eastern and Far Eastern practices come together in layers of complexity and inspiration that resonate beyond the temporal realm. Continual endless juxtapositions explore ways to manipulate and restructure perception. The mark appears as a chronotopic palimpsest, the gesture and/or the performativity of the self as immediate enstatic experience. If one looks upon a medium as form, it is visible.

Haiyan Shen comments on the hermeneutics of marks, as formulated by Chih-i [Zhiyi], the founder of the T'ien-t'ai [Tiantai, in Japanese Tendai] Buddhist school: "By pointing out how the 'black ink as form' (Hei-mo-se) can possibly work out in the development of various strokes in formulating various characters (with their different meanings), Chih-i [Zhiyi] presents an ontological concept about one dharma containing all dharmas, and all dharmas being identical to one dharma. 'One dharma contains all dharmas' is demonstrated by Chih-i from the black ink (as form) that functions to draw multitude strokes, from which various characters are formed. Since all characters are derived from strokes and all strokes are derived from the black ink (as form), this demonstrates that all dharmas are identical to one dharma." Loreta Poskaite describes the empty mark modulating emptiness: "The cosmogonic and cosmostructural conception of the process of painting was formulated and summarized in Shi Taos (Yuan Jis) theory of painting. According to him, painting is the great way for changing (hua) the universe. Its essence lies in One stroke (yi hua, yi bi) that was conceived by Shi Tao as the sign of the transformation of being and non-being, embracing all the universe and bringing out the idea or principle (li) nurtured inside. The One stroke is the microcosmic embodiment of the macrocosm, as it reveals what is great through what is small. The One may be associated with Dao, the absolute, which was talked about in Laozi, Zhuangzi, Yijing. It is hidden in and beyond every thing, giving birth to the two (yin and yang, the strong and weak line) wherefrom ten thousand things spring up. The variety of their configurations is expressed through the sixty-four hexagrams of Yijing, understood as the transformations of the One stroke (yi hua). In the final instance, the all-embracing interwoven web of operational cultural dynamics, strongly embedded in Eastern spirituality and entwined in paradox, disseminates over different models a practice simultaneously underpinning and negating human understanding. Eugene Gorny suggests that experiencing is a result of autocommunication - in autocommunication the content of the message is less important than its form and it involves a constant reviewing under a more marked formal organization - while Francisco Varela speaks of a selfless self, of perceptually guided embodied action and sensorimotor contingency. The artist shapes and is shaped by the work. As George Spencer-Brown underscores, "logic and computation, grammar and rhetoric, balance and perspective can be seen in the work after it is created, but these forms are, in the final analysis, parasitic on, they have no existence apart from, the creativity of the work itself.

Stefan Arteni