In the attached file, there is an analysis of the concept of gradient made across several fields with the mention of key terms, definition, and etymology of the words "gradient" and "gradation" that signify different concepts
As an archival impulse, I observed and artfully documented the change of matter across space and time embodying through my experience as a spectator concept of "spacetimemattering" formulated by Karen Barad as part of her new materialist theories.
The snow falls and accumulates into slopes then melts revealing the history of the environmental events that happened in the area over time, behind which there are laws of gradients. There are also layers of the residue of dirt and chemicals on its surface as a manifestation of a gradual change revealing itself artfully through the language of gradients and described in the language of visual art as an assemblage of shapes, colors, shades, textures, movements, and rhythms. A change in the matter over the space and time engendered and documented in the experience of a human as a spectator.
When walking on the streets, I go through space previously occupied by other people who walked before me. Can I trust and safely go into their spaces?
Following other's paths, can I trust them? As a response, I set my body across a snow dump field on the edge of the town, an empty flat space covered in snow and cut through with a few trails made by humans.
Can I trust my device, my smartphone that holds all the information about me, through the screen of which I receive the information about the pandemic by browsing news websites, reading feeds of my friends on social media? Is it a true image of the world and the pandemic that I see on the screen? How much truth is there and how much is there of representation and interpretation?
As a response, I walked relying only on the image displayed on the screen. The image calculated mathematically by the neural network of my device as a set of gradients, where the contours of objects are gradients...
The path made by others, is it the safest? Will it help me to go my distance to my goal? Decisions made by others for me, are they in my favor? Can I trust other people around me if they respect sanitary measures, do not have COVID, and if they do, they will stay home? Can I trust myself that I follow all the measure as it is recommended all the time considering that I work at school? Can I trust the government cutting my liberties, restricting, and controlling my everyday life which I do not have a true fulfillment of for a year? The inquiry suddenly becomes an immediate response to the need to move and get out of the apartment and see other than the screen of my computer.
The tension starts to build when walking on the edge of a cliff with a very steep slope and a cold, rapid river in the bottom. I want to trust the path and I look further away, toward my goal of reaching home, towards my goal of having a future.
Windows as holes and openings into the “outside” where the virus is. Windows are a metaphor for pores in a body and entries for the virus to invade. Windows as a form are reminiscent of the element of the traditional Ukrainian embroidery - "solovjini vichka (nightingale eyes)". The distinctive feature of the pattern is that it made of holes holding together by a thread – like a porous body of the society. With this viewfinder, I look at the surroundings to see the tensionalities and intensities generated by the pandemic that appear within the holes.
“Zernyatko” of the footprints on the snow is a motif, a representation of the motive, of what is not visible, the absent – humans in public spaces where strings of wet steps on the floor or imprints of shoes on the snow around a metro station are just traces of presence, an illusion of the place being public. Although it is not empty. It is an assemblage of all other entities that inhabit the place, including the coronavirus, along with the traces of human stories on the ground and in the air. The falling snow is the emptiness that fills the public space, a metaphor of the corona disease being both a virus, the other, and the absence of humans. Being at a metro station gave me the most intense feeling of emptiness. Once being the most crowded space in the city, the heart of metropolitan life, it is now empty... Just restriction signs pop up here and there making this space even more "prohibited".
On these images, there is emptiness represented in a graphic language of an embroidery scheme; as nods tied on the intersections of warp and weft, "on hold" but ready to start new patterns once the time comes.
“Knowing one’s distance” and “keeping one’s distance”.
The encounters with the human traces pointed me at the further directions to explore the in/tensities of “knowing one’s distance” and “keeping one’s distance” through the inquiring into the difference-in-itself of public and private, engaging with the questions of trust, obligation and care, freedom and restrictions.
In-tensities of intimacy and entanglement
In my walk, windows work as openings through which I look at the multiplicity of public and private. Windows of homes and windows on a screen became portals through which public leaked into individual homes, and the intimacy of private transferred outside into public spaces devoid of humans becoming a new private. In pandemic times, homes bear all the concentration and intensity of the public life while the latter is “on hold”.
Before I looked at windows of homes as barriers to private life, as something rejecting that I would be shy to look through. They are wholes that we look through into the outside and the outer looks at us, not the inside. In the pandemic reality, one invites others, people that they barely know, inside of homes, inro families, one’s used-to-be-intimate space. Apart but close as never. This new mode of being is enhanced and is mashed together even more with physical and virtual windows in individual homes as connectors tied by telecommunication cables, online networks, and platforms like Zoom, and the worldwide web in general. Moreover, in Quebec, we have an “arc’n’ciel” movement where people across the region, in private and public places, put pictures of rainbows on windows to communicate a message of “ça va bien aller (it's going to be fine)”. Like this, windows become spaces where people unite in solidarity, mutual aid, support, and where the arch of a rainbow is a function of multiple hopes.
To talk about connections, I employ a thread as I would when making an embroidered pattern in a Ukrainian traditional counting technique. The way we do it is to start with a nod around a single thread. To lay an ornament, one has to run the thread through the structure of the fabric where each stitch has a coordinate to calculate in the system of warps and wefts. Gradually, the ornaments are being created as a set of coordinates forming an artful multiplicity of shapes, lines, rhythms, values, colors, textures, etcetera.
In-tensity of virtual and actual, digital and bodily
The Images are engendered by the physical and visual tensionalities produced through the entanglement of the body and digital matter. These images are the interplay of the movements and trajectories of the body, visual art elements and principles, and the neural networks of numeric devices, such as a camera, a computer with all its processes programmed employing gradients as mathematical concepts.
In these examples, I gradually engage with a digital image through the tools provided by the editing software. Through the gestures like zoom-in and -out, crop, displace, change the color scheme, value of color, etcetera, the smallest and marvelous entity, a pixel, is enacted. It is a coordinate of a single spot on the function of all the variations of color that constitute the image as an assemblage of differences.
Thinking of the gradients as a measure, a value, of the intensity of change, intensity of differences, I followed the vectors of “begunets” which revealed the artful nature of its smallest unit - “zernyatko”, a step, and “human traces” as “contour plots”, graphs of functions of differences.
On my way, I encountered plain snow, single as well as multiple strings of steps, ones being intense, screaming presence of an individual in the world, and others being an inter-meshed assemblage of humans as a society. Seeing these graphs and the intensity of the overlapping strokes-steps on the snow made me think of the public and individual spaces flipped due to the pandemic; it made me think of how individuals and plots of their stories become entangled when one simply walks on the street. Most of the time, we do not account for the presence of the other in the traces of steps until one sees them revealed by the snow… Space is never empty as Karen Barad says.
Gradient as tensionalities in the motif-motive structure of multiplicities
Thinking with gradients inspires me to approach the (living) inquiry as a space of multi-variable entangled functions. The way I employ the gradient is as a measure of the intensity of differences in the three-dimensional sign-signified-signifier space and as a vector that points to the highest intensity in this relational structure. My immediate response to the proposition of “going distances” was to go into the unknown and walk in fresh snow and be the first to explore the snow-covered roads of my neighborhood. I walked within the triad of motif- self/other-motive structure as an embodiment of the sign-signified-signifier space, as a multiplicity and difference-in-itself (Deleuze). It allowed for reverberations, openings, and excesses to happen. In my search for connections and meanings of “going distances”, I walked my past experiences of “unknown distance” as a metaphor of learning and meaning (value) making as an immediate response to the drastic changes, like ones that individuals, communities, and society faced with the COVID-19 pandemic.
Walking on the fresh snow evoked the notion of stepping in the “abyss of the unknown” to trace “lines of flight” (Deleuze). The traces of these lines took the form of “bigunets (runner)” – a distinctive element, a motif, of a Ukrainian traditional vernacular art and craft of “Petrykivka” painting that I practiced when I was a child and lived in Ukraine. The curve that appeared on the snow, the graph, immediately became a function in my set of subjectivities describing the distance across the space of differences of childhood and adulthood, my dis/connection to the family that stills lives in Ukraine and in annexed Crimea; the distance between immigration and emigration, my cultural past and present – the in-between universe that is “mine to discover” (Deleuze).
Digging more into the gradient as a geographical concept, I traced parallels between the “bigunets” and the “contour plot” - a visual two-dimensional representation of a curve’s level on a topographic map. The smallest motif of “bigunets” is “zernyatko (a seed)” that works as a “step size”, a component of a gradient that determines the optimal degree, a step to take, enough to reach the goal – the most intense spot on the function, the global min or global max if saying in the field-specific terms. In my motif-motive system, the motif of “zernyatko”, a signifier, forms a “bigunets”, the motive, a signified of thinking, making, and inquiring. All together, they form a sign marking the direction to go the distance.
Zernyatko is an artful metaphor of step size, a “gradi” part of the word “gradient” as a present participle of the Latin word “gradi” – walking. Bigunets is an artful metaphor of a graph of a function with multiple related variables. Embodied experience is a gradient, a measure, a value of the change between the multiplicities of the function, a vector pointing at the direction of the highest intensity of difference.
The following sets of visuals are the “in/tensities” that I discovered while “going distances” pointed by the vector of a gradient generated within the motif-self/other-motive structure of multiplicities.
A linguistic exercise
In the attached file, there is an analysis of the concept of gradient made across several fields with the mention of key terms, definition, and etymology of the words "gradient" and "gradation" that signify different concepts
Space, time, and matter
As an archival impulse, I observed and artfully documented the change of matter across space and time embodying through my experience as a spectator concept of "spacetimemattering" formulated by Karen Barad as part of her new materialist theories.
The snow falls and accumulates into slopes then melts revealing the history of the environmental events that happened in the area over time, behind which there are laws of gradients. There are also layers of the residue of dirt and chemicals on its surface as a manifestation of a gradual change revealing itself artfully through the language of gradients and described in the language of visual art as an assemblage of shapes, colors, shades, textures, movements, and rhythms. A change in the matter over the space and time engendered and documented in the experience of a human as a spectator.
Gradi-ality
Safe to trust
When walking on the streets, I go through space previously occupied by other people who walked before me. Can I trust and safely go into their spaces?
Following other's paths, can I trust them? As a response, I set my body across a snow dump field on the edge of the town, an empty flat space covered in snow and cut through with a few trails made by humans.
Can I trust my device, my smartphone that holds all the information about me, through the screen of which I receive the information about the pandemic by browsing news websites, reading feeds of my friends on social media? Is it a true image of the world and the pandemic that I see on the screen? How much truth is there and how much is there of representation and interpretation?
As a response, I walked relying only on the image displayed on the screen. The image calculated mathematically by the neural network of my device as a set of gradients, where the contours of objects are gradients...
The path made by others, is it the safest? Will it help me to go my distance to my goal? Decisions made by others for me, are they in my favor? Can I trust other people around me if they respect sanitary measures, do not have COVID, and if they do, they will stay home? Can I trust myself that I follow all the measure as it is recommended all the time considering that I work at school? Can I trust the government cutting my liberties, restricting, and controlling my everyday life which I do not have a true fulfillment of for a year? The inquiry suddenly becomes an immediate response to the need to move and get out of the apartment and see other than the screen of my computer.
The tension starts to build when walking on the edge of a cliff with a very steep slope and a cold, rapid river in the bottom. I want to trust the path and I look further away, toward my goal of reaching home, towards my goal of having a future.
Porous bodies
Windows as holes and openings into the “outside” where the virus is. Windows are a metaphor for pores in a body and entries for the virus to invade. Windows as a form are reminiscent of the element of the traditional Ukrainian embroidery - "solovjini vichka (nightingale eyes)". The distinctive feature of the pattern is that it made of holes holding together by a thread – like a porous body of the society. With this viewfinder, I look at the surroundings to see the tensionalities and intensities generated by the pandemic that appear within the holes.
In-tensity of Emptiness
“Zernyatko” of the footprints on the snow is a motif, a representation of the motive, of what is not visible, the absent – humans in public spaces where strings of wet steps on the floor or imprints of shoes on the snow around a metro station are just traces of presence, an illusion of the place being public. Although it is not empty. It is an assemblage of all other entities that inhabit the place, including the coronavirus, along with the traces of human stories on the ground and in the air. The falling snow is the emptiness that fills the public space, a metaphor of the corona disease being both a virus, the other, and the absence of humans. Being at a metro station gave me the most intense feeling of emptiness. Once being the most crowded space in the city, the heart of metropolitan life, it is now empty... Just restriction signs pop up here and there making this space even more "prohibited".
On these images, there is emptiness represented in a graphic language of an embroidery scheme; as nods tied on the intersections of warp and weft, "on hold" but ready to start new patterns once the time comes.
“Knowing one’s distance” and “keeping one’s distance”.
The encounters with the human traces pointed me at the further directions to explore the in/tensities of “knowing one’s distance” and “keeping one’s distance” through the inquiring into the difference-in-itself of public and private, engaging with the questions of trust, obligation and care, freedom and restrictions.
In-tensities of intimacy and entanglement
In my walk, windows work as openings through which I look at the multiplicity of public and private. Windows of homes and windows on a screen became portals through which public leaked into individual homes, and the intimacy of private transferred outside into public spaces devoid of humans becoming a new private. In pandemic times, homes bear all the concentration and intensity of the public life while the latter is “on hold”.
Before I looked at windows of homes as barriers to private life, as something rejecting that I would be shy to look through. They are wholes that we look through into the outside and the outer looks at us, not the inside. In the pandemic reality, one invites others, people that they barely know, inside of homes, inro families, one’s used-to-be-intimate space. Apart but close as never. This new mode of being is enhanced and is mashed together even more with physical and virtual windows in individual homes as connectors tied by telecommunication cables, online networks, and platforms like Zoom, and the worldwide web in general. Moreover, in Quebec, we have an “arc’n’ciel” movement where people across the region, in private and public places, put pictures of rainbows on windows to communicate a message of “ça va bien aller (it's going to be fine)”. Like this, windows become spaces where people unite in solidarity, mutual aid, support, and where the arch of a rainbow is a function of multiple hopes.
To talk about connections, I employ a thread as I would when making an embroidered pattern in a Ukrainian traditional counting technique. The way we do it is to start with a nod around a single thread. To lay an ornament, one has to run the thread through the structure of the fabric where each stitch has a coordinate to calculate in the system of warps and wefts. Gradually, the ornaments are being created as a set of coordinates forming an artful multiplicity of shapes, lines, rhythms, values, colors, textures, etcetera.
In-tensity of virtual and actual, digital and bodily
The Images are engendered by the physical and visual tensionalities produced through the entanglement of the body and digital matter. These images are the interplay of the movements and trajectories of the body, visual art elements and principles, and the neural networks of numeric devices, such as a camera, a computer with all its processes programmed employing gradients as mathematical concepts.
In these examples, I gradually engage with a digital image through the tools provided by the editing software. Through the gestures like zoom-in and -out, crop, displace, change the color scheme, value of color, etcetera, the smallest and marvelous entity, a pixel, is enacted. It is a coordinate of a single spot on the function of all the variations of color that constitute the image as an assemblage of differences.
In-tensity of a stroke – in-tensity of a step.
Thinking of the gradients as a measure, a value, of the intensity of change, intensity of differences, I followed the vectors of “begunets” which revealed the artful nature of its smallest unit - “zernyatko”, a step, and “human traces” as “contour plots”, graphs of functions of differences.
On my way, I encountered plain snow, single as well as multiple strings of steps, ones being intense, screaming presence of an individual in the world, and others being an inter-meshed assemblage of humans as a society. Seeing these graphs and the intensity of the overlapping strokes-steps on the snow made me think of the public and individual spaces flipped due to the pandemic; it made me think of how individuals and plots of their stories become entangled when one simply walks on the street. Most of the time, we do not account for the presence of the other in the traces of steps until one sees them revealed by the snow… Space is never empty as Karen Barad says.
Gradient as tensionalities in the motif-motive structure of multiplicities
Thinking with gradients inspires me to approach the (living) inquiry as a space of multi-variable entangled functions. The way I employ the gradient is as a measure of the intensity of differences in the three-dimensional sign-signified-signifier space and as a vector that points to the highest intensity in this relational structure. My immediate response to the proposition of “going distances” was to go into the unknown and walk in fresh snow and be the first to explore the snow-covered roads of my neighborhood. I walked within the triad of motif- self/other-motive structure as an embodiment of the sign-signified-signifier space, as a multiplicity and difference-in-itself (Deleuze). It allowed for reverberations, openings, and excesses to happen. In my search for connections and meanings of “going distances”, I walked my past experiences of “unknown distance” as a metaphor of learning and meaning (value) making as an immediate response to the drastic changes, like ones that individuals, communities, and society faced with the COVID-19 pandemic.
Walking on the fresh snow evoked the notion of stepping in the “abyss of the unknown” to trace “lines of flight” (Deleuze). The traces of these lines took the form of “bigunets (runner)” – a distinctive element, a motif, of a Ukrainian traditional vernacular art and craft of “Petrykivka” painting that I practiced when I was a child and lived in Ukraine. The curve that appeared on the snow, the graph, immediately became a function in my set of subjectivities describing the distance across the space of differences of childhood and adulthood, my dis/connection to the family that stills lives in Ukraine and in annexed Crimea; the distance between immigration and emigration, my cultural past and present – the in-between universe that is “mine to discover” (Deleuze).
Digging more into the gradient as a geographical concept, I traced parallels between the “bigunets” and the “contour plot” - a visual two-dimensional representation of a curve’s level on a topographic map. The smallest motif of “bigunets” is “zernyatko (a seed)” that works as a “step size”, a component of a gradient that determines the optimal degree, a step to take, enough to reach the goal – the most intense spot on the function, the global min or global max if saying in the field-specific terms. In my motif-motive system, the motif of “zernyatko”, a signifier, forms a “bigunets”, the motive, a signified of thinking, making, and inquiring. All together, they form a sign marking the direction to go the distance.
Zernyatko is an artful metaphor of step size, a “gradi” part of the word “gradient” as a present participle of the Latin word “gradi” – walking. Bigunets is an artful metaphor of a graph of a function with multiple related variables. Embodied experience is a gradient, a measure, a value of the change between the multiplicities of the function, a vector pointing at the direction of the highest intensity of difference.
The following sets of visuals are the “in/tensities” that I discovered while “going distances” pointed by the vector of a gradient generated within the motif-self/other-motive structure of multiplicities.