Implexitude

In the big picture, a gradient background sustains a myriad of colourful, multipying boxes converging to a singular point and afterwards continuing sparsely downwards.

The singular black box in the centre anchors the piece. It is the ego, the focal point of weight from which meaning is derived and into which all meaning collapses. Its darkness represent absorption of all traits and bloodlines, the accumulation of everything that came before into one living point of consciousness.

Boxes across the canvas speak a tacit genetic language encoding complex traits passed on, be it directly or atavistically. Beyond aesthetics, boxes deform and colours mutate, translating concepts that are both biological and symbolic:

• Shapes deform, colours vanish and reappear abruptly, just like mutations.
• False colour and similar shades appear concurrently across non-adjacent peer boxes, denoting mimetism and family resemblance.
• Identic colours skipping generations, revealing atavism;
• Colour-dominating boxes, hinting genetic bottlenecks where diversity is narrowed.

Ego's offspring drift apart sparsely into turquoise and sea tones, diverging like diffusing light. Each carries fragments of the original colours, recombined into new configurations put forward. The diffusion invites for a symbolic, metaphysical reflection: the illusion of control over legacy; but what is passed on is inevitably transformed, dissolved, fractured, ultimately metamorphosed and is only fortuitously amalgamated into a much larger whole. By amalgamation it means the achievement of a tipping point of offspring variety, spread, and count to such an extent that ego perceives continuity as guaranteed beyond the foreseeable horizon.

A pattern emerges displaying ancestors doubling at each generation, becoming smaller and tighter, denoting gradual disconnection from the ego, until their individuality is lost in upper horizons of indigo and violet haze. These are ancestors. The choice of shorter wavelengths (blues and violets) for the upper two ranks are not merely aesthetic, it alludes to Rayleigh scattering, the physical concept in sunlight's shortest frequencies disperse the most when entering the atmosphere translating to blue skies. Likewise, the identities of ancestors disperse backwards in time, fading into violet edge where individuality dissolves recursiving to singularity.

Reading upwards, the canvas encodes implex: the paradox where, although ancestors seem to increase boundlessly, ancestors collapse into the same individuals —and in the limit the same individual. The beauty of it is we are all but terms in a great recursion. We are merely elements within a vast, self-referential process that calls back upon itself, like dominoes falling back to the very first piece.

For the ego's perspective, ego is history's apparent point of singularity. But in truth it is a mere transient vessel: both an ultimate byproduct and a fleeting cause. Only a thin band surrounding the ego exists in the present; the rest of the weave is imaginary, belonging to its own ontological plane.

Ancestors are observed as the transcripted, the recorded, and the forgotten. Above, forebears collapse into singularity: we are recursive folds of the same few ancestors, with the illusion of individuality collapsing into one.

Descendants are observed as the byproduct subject to future resolution whether will hopefully stand the test of continuity. Below, ego expresses expansion into plurality, it fractures into countless forms, dispersing traits and hope into the unknown future.

We are simultaneously an exciting singular bloom and yet just another fresh version of the same tired pattern. We are concentrated repetition of the past, scattered possibility for the future, suspended here as a single black dot: a living whole craving for awareness.