This is the second part of a project concerning DNA Ancestry, considered through drawing. The first part is also published as an exposition on the Research Catalogue. While the first part is a consideration of the question of ancestry before an ancestral DNA test result comes through, this second part should at-once be informed by and propose a more knowledgeable way forward – with the proviso that unanswered, or at present unanswerable, questions of ancestry stretch back literally through millennia. The project is in response to a 'Call for Drawing – Genetics and Identity', requested from i3S Institute of Investigation and Innovation in Health, University of Porto, as part of their ongoing project 'Human diversity along the Magalhaes circumnavigational space: genetics, history and culture', 2023.
I am one of several participants, and this exposition constitutes an unfolding of my response. Rather than only reporting on the project, I consider the Research Catalogue format as itself a creative intervention. My involvement in the project has in part been determined by my own ongoing research into perception, considered through drawing, hosted by i2ADS, Research Institute in Art, Design and Society, Porto University.
According to the ancestry DNA test conducted by i3S, my genetic GPS is Germany, even though I was born and brought up in the UK. That said, I have lived and worked outside the UK since 1998. The point is, however, that while distances across time can be geographical, inasmuch as humans are involved they will also have their subjective effect. By subjective, I'm automatically placed as a sentient being amidst my physical actions and movements, and in part such sentience impacts on and determines the latter. Add to this the bias of painting as a medium of exploration. I say painting, rather than drawing, when drawing should here be the medium of the exploration, because my more developed drawings tend to move towards painting. While the two mediums therefore conflate, the opacity of painting, metaphorically as well as literally, contributes its own substantial degree of conflation towards one's thinking and intentions. Even with the relative variety of my working methods, and its interspersal with each of academic and creative writing, this intransigence and autonomy of a medium that veers towards painting, while oscillating between the latter and drawing, is a given in the project: more than this, the medium is the project, with some conveyance of extricable response and result in terms of the project brief.
Rhizomatic growth structure that only now and again shows itself from under the ground, analogous to fragmented light shed on knowledge, because of which only partial understanding is inevitable, is written into the project. I notice that the genetic GPS coordinates place me in Germany. I also have small proportions of Near Eastern and South Asian in my ancestry.
From this point on it's an aspect of the concept of the project to distance myself somewhat from the narrative, by placing the latter in the hands of a fictional other, M., who centrally features in the Part 1 of the project (see this once published on the Research Catalogue).
M. had had a slipped disc over the last two weeks. He had therefore been preoccupied with the concept of spine, which he considered in the project's context as rather like a vertical root that spans beneath the skin, as opposed to in and through the soil with growth from tubers as punctual intervals. By developing this association, M. could see a figural possibility connected with the idea of gait, and how in this case the folding forward or compacting takes one unhealthily back in time - thinking of the gradual development of upright posture.
The aforementioned thought resulted in M.'s sketch, Figure 1, which is concerned with a strip of light that reflected from between the top of drawn curtains in the early morning, onto the underside of a wooden window frame. The pulsating sense of movement that it suggests is also similar to the corrugation of cardboard that M. had previously (Part 1 of the project) associated with DNA visualisation.
If the sketch is turned upside down, the cord's extension vertically suggests upward growth where the strip of light, alternatively termed seam of light, may now be more usefully seen as buried: knowledge not so much unknown as tantamount to archaeological, waiting to be unearthed; knowledge, that is, pertaining to the spread of genetic movement through time and evolutionary place, Figure 2.
The following comment is prompted by the question of knowledge. Samo Tomšič(2017) writes on the influence of Koyré on Lacan in the context of knowledge and the Real. What’s of particular interest to me is regarding how the Real – the ineffable and impossible register of Lacan’s three psychic structural registers of the human subject, Imaginary, Symbolic, Real – can manifest in and as mathematics and technology. A possible reason for such manifestation, suggested by Tomšič (2017, pp.16-17), is between what he terms 'language of man', which is Aristotelian and becomes an existential idea related with being, and 'language of nature'. The latter, 'language of nature', is obviously much broader and more generic than man, who is but a product among nature's own infinite manifestations. For example, there is modern physics' understanding of nature at the quantum level, which is very driven by chance. In fact, Tomšič (2017, p.17) draws apart automaton, which he places in the domain of 'language of man', hence remaining originally Aristotelian, and Tyche, which he equates more with 'language of nature'. Tomšič, discussing in the context of Lacan and the influence on him of Koyré, cites the functioning of these phenomena to distinguish between pre-modern and modern thinking around knowledge. The Real, especially when considered as dissociated from existential ideas - subjectivity, transcendence, soul, etc - can therefore be a criterion of mathematics and technology, and of course language itself, and is the unconscious as the element of autonomy of language. Tomšič (2017, p.17) refers to the 'subject of science' not as a human agency within science, but as that within science that internally questions and subverts it from within, causing it to not fully work; i.e., the Real. Chance, or Tyche, is what operates within science that subverts it from within. This makes a lot of sense to me in relation to, say, the baffling activity of quantum particles that scientists can only ever half-determine at any one time. When Werner Heisenberg (2000, p.89), and David Bohm (2002, p.169) speak of the 'observer' affecting the observed system, they mean the apparatus that does the observing as much or instead of any human observer.
A reason why I'm drawn to this DNA ancestry project is that it puts me more centrally amidst this dehumanised, non-existential thinking of the Real. The ancestral DNA test report I now have is very scientific; abstract statistics that the layperson's lack of ability to read implies more than lack of knowledge: it implies the problem of knowledge at the core of the understanding that knowledge claims to present, which is knowledge in the Real. Peirce's 'firstness' also comes to mind when looking at the highly obtuse diagram representing the DNA maternal line. How to respond to this, through drawings, can place one in a different take on the Real than as a psychic condition of/in the human subject. If the distinction between automaton, as more or less pre-modern, and Tyche as more or less modern, is a reasonable one to consider, Tyche seems the more interesting, at least for the present, in relation to this project.
Bohm, D. (2002) Wholeness and the Implicate Order. (First published 1980) London; New York: Routledge
Hansen, Mark B.N.: Appearance In-Itself, Data-Propagation, and External Relationality: Towards a Realist Phenomenology of »Firstness«. In: ZMK Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturforschung. Verschwinden, Jg. 7 (2016), Nr. 1, S. 45–60. DOI: https://doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/18636
Heisenberg, W. (2000) Physics and Philosophy. (First published in English 1962) London; New York: Penguin
Tomšič, S. (2017) Mathematical Realism ans the Impossible Structure of the Real'. In Psychoanalytische Perspectiven, 2017, 35, 1: 9-34
Firstness is an element of the Dicisign, each of which are concepts of the philosopher Charles Sanders Pierce‘s semiotic propositions that are discussed by Hansen (2016) in the context of the diagram. The concept of Firstness may relate to why there is often a prevailing sense of the ineffable at the heart of visual practice, whether experienced by the artist or perceived/felt by the viewer, which comes to the fore in particular examples yet still without revealing itself. Hansen discusses the possibility of a phenomenology of the diagram, citing the work of German ‘media archaeologist’ Wolfgang Ernst, defining ‘diagrammatic phenomenology’ as ‘a logic of appearance’ that ‘…is rooted… in the self-manifestation of data itself’. This suggests that the diagram, whether analogue or digital, has and conveys what might be considered its own abstract aesthetic that also has the potential to be read experientially. Unlike a learned language, however, the vocabulary of the visual diagram is much less stable, relying on degrees of association between a high degree of abstraction of and from things. The choice of term things, rather than objects, may also provide a clue to what manifests as a between of referenced objects and an obfuscating veil of less or unconscious intentionality for such objects. Concerning the semiotics of Pierce, Hansen (2016, p.46) refers to a ‘Firstness’ of ‘diagrammatic appearance’, becoming a ‘Secondness’ as and when it is ‘…actualized in particular existent qualities or experience’. The diagram is ‘…pre-experiential… that enfolds potentiality into phenomenology…’ (2016, p.46) The appearance is a diagram’s ‘Firstness’, from which its enfolding into one’s experience constitutes its ‘Secondness’. Hansen (2016, p.49) states: ‘’…Firstness, cannot be directly known, or intuited, and is always at an unbridgeable remove from any direct access’. The diagram functions ‘…in relation to an excess that lies outside of the relations it actualizes’ (2016, 52). This suggests that Firstness is a quality of more, rather than less, that constitutes its operational systems.
Africa, with its divisions into West-, East-, South-, is divided from the Middle East by the Red Sea. The notes suggest that the first migrations of homo erectus out of Africa occurred 70,000 years ago, where they crossed via the Red Sea strait and began to interbreed with Neanderthal then frequenting Asia.
A point of interest is that the narrow southern-most passage between Africa and the Middle East – which is now Yemen – was a pivotal conduit towards the development of the European and Asian strands of the human species, with admixtures that were eventually to result in the present human demographics.
There are some likely keywords here, such as light seam, inheritance, and umbilical cord. The relevance of umbilical cord relates to the aforementioned question of GPS. I'm now shifting the ownership, as it were, of the genetic GPS to M., which should be as surprising to him as it has been to me. (More surprises up ahead, in terms of the Asian link M. had suggested of his adopted family in Part 1, the five near-relatives: great-grandmother, great-aunt, father; grandfather, mother, anomalous landlady of his adopted parents.)
Another question prompted by M.'s sketch concerns the apparent stain, which is actually of coffee seeping through the paper from one of his previous drawings (see Part 1 of the project). In Part 1, M. equates coffee with its origin in Ethiopia in the 15th century and the approximate site of homo erectus around 300,000 years ago. Such a proposition for the stain is still relevant, and here, coincidentally, it touches on two points, two undulations, of the seam of light. Might these be pockets of human migration, apparently unrelated at the time of their settlement yet admixing at a period further ahead in time, indicated by how the stain is actually singular, but with two apparently separate strands – again, rather similar to rhizomatic growth?
M. has two visual-material analogies; the closed curtains, and especially the suggestion of pulsation of their drape cast, as light, onto the underside of the wooden frame above them, and the cellular clustering of oil on water observed in a bowl of broth, Figures 5, 6.
Fig 7a/b: Digital collage of two pages from ancestry test showing genetic GPS. Variable dimensions © Michael Croft
The sliver of light undulates, and such undulations are like a pulse: the pulse of one’s ancestors through the millennia. In the sketch, M. had likened the narrow gap between the curtains where they hadn’t overlapped, coming perpendicularly out from the undulations of light, to a punctuation and a conduit, and hence appropriate analogy to the genetic GPS point as shown on the report’s ‘Genetic GPS’ map, which happens to be Germany, Figure 4.
While the oil droplets differ from the samples’ clustering in that they do not overlap, the suggestion of cells takes me back to Part 1 of the project and the interest I’d conveyed towards the Petri dish and even the roundel of my glasses frames perceivable as I wear them as receptacle of linguistic references I’d made to the microbiome. The microbiome is still relevant, inasmuch as this is the aggregate of life-enhancing bacteria, mainly passed to one from one’s mother, but acquired through one’s close human associates during earliest infancy. This will be a part of the microbiological material, the compulsion of which is handed down by one’s ancestry through the millennia.
Moreira (2023, part 1), defines the term ancestry as a person of any gender who ‘antecedes’, goes before, ‘…who yields to us their legacy. It is variously a ‘relation of intergenerational linkages’, ‘inherited through… linkages, in which ‘…legacy or inheritance is the fundamental property of ancestry’. Ancestry is a combination of ‘genealogies of knowledge systems and disciplines’ and ‘biological or genetic traits’, the latter of which is determined through and as ‘intergenerational DNA’. According to Moreira (2023, part 2), ‘biogeographic ancestry’ is different from the idea of ancestor. While ‘sociological ancestry concerns ‘a person or group’s identities in relation to narratives about their past’, biological ancestry concerns ‘”genes” or, more precisely, biomolecular configurations’.
Of the above-referenced, I need the idea of the ‘relation of intergenerational linkages’ and the composition of ‘biogeographic ancestry’ as an oscillation of sociological and biomolecular. Of the former, I have M.’s fictional family narrative, Part 1 of the project, and of the former I have the result of the DNA ancestry test and ideas that interested me in Part 1, of the microbiome.
Moreira, R, G. (2023, blog entry 11 May 2023) Human population genetics and the idea of ancestry; an anthropological perspective (Parts 1 and 2) Ancestry, Human Population Genetics, Identities, Social Anthropology blog: https://ancestrytraveller.i3S.up.pt (Accessed 22 July 2023)
The genetic GPS was obtained by a combination of 4188 referenced global samples and geographical coordinates. What’s interesting is that these are coordinates, or axes, which, on a ‘Human projection Diversity’ map, stem down from Scandinavia and up from South Asia. From two quite separate regions of the globe, therefore, the axes move towards and coalesce in Europe. Each generic starting-point on the survey, and its precise punctuation, is other in its demographic separation from one's known experiential location of origin. Otherness, in this case to mean both demographic disparity and psychological disparity within oneself, is an operative concept.
In Figure 6, the droplets of oil are comparable to cellular suggestion of the clustering of human samples shown on the ‘Human Diversity Projection’ map, Figure 7b, of two versions shown in Figure 7.
In Part 1 of the project I've introduced a fictional character that I call M. While this character has a particular role in the work's narrative, he also strengthens the sense of the work in its present medium as read, as a text that is also to a degree creatively written. M. through his role also challenges the factual legitimacy of the project, which suits both the speculative nature of the question of ancestry and art practice as a means of substantialising the latter. The arguments developed around the visual-material work emerged as a fiction as much as the latter's description and critique. I've attributed to M. several images from a family that are described as having been adopted by him. The use of fiction is therefore a strand of the research that develops ad-hoc, along with visual-material aspects and written evidence of theoretical reading. Where the project's textual content more appropriately concerns M.'s fictitious involvement as the artist responsible for the project's unfolding, I use 'Font Family' as the Research Catalogue's default font. Where I'm debating the project to myself – as I'm here doing – which will ultimately be available to the project's reader, I use the present Courier Prime and adopt a fairly informal writing style. M. therefore comes and goes, as it were, and will in any case have contributed more consistently in Part 1 of the project.
A given, however, in these three contiguously related circumstances, is that each of them is, or in the case of the artistic component can be, highly conceptual and therefore abstract in appearance. Diagrams – since one’s DNA ancestral report will show them, Ettinger’s matrixial theory suggest them, and the artist is often prone to work with and through them – in their first instance involving Peirce's ‘firstness’ (previously referenced) that conveys diagram separately from whatever is its purpose to communicate. This is arguably an awkward factor or inevitable difficulty with which one lives, due to the selectivity of knowledge pertaining to special fields of research and interest.
Ettinger, B. (2020) Matrixial Subjectivity, Aesthetics, Ethics Volume 1 1990-2000. (Ed. Griselda Pollock) SSBN 978-1-137-34516 (eBook) Palgrave Macmillan
It occurs to me that because the human genome is comprised of male Y chromosomes and female mtDNA (mitochondria), one cannot ignore the question of gender at the level of genetically explored ancestry and identity. While this may be an obvious point, at a more latent level gender is biased towards whatever gender one is, and feels in oneself, contrasted with all others who and what are therefore other to oneself. In terms of all others, there is not of course too much choice at the level of how the ancestral DNA results have on this occasion been presented: it's basically male and female in the contextual setting of mother and father and each of their gendered ancestry charted. One’s mother linked with her female DNA occurs across one spread, of which we have a statistical graph as evidence; one’s father and his male DNA occurring across another spread, evidenced as a statistical graph. Suitably to the fact that the female mtDNA offers more complex evidence of human migration, the graph representing female genetic movement in relation to oneself is more detailed – hence happens to be more difficult to read – than the male movement.
The latter consideration may itself map with the ‘biogeographical’ to bring to it a subjective dimension that is also, arguably in Bracha Ettinger’s psychoanalytical terms, drawn through at least from the immediate mother to her immediate child. Whether such connectivity is wider and therefore more collective, can at this time only be the subject of speculation. However, how the artist may intervene in such circumstances is in some way similar to Ettinger’s subjectively matrixial proposition, in that they bring to the table, as it were, subjectively processed tools and procedures that, because they need to be relatively familiar to the work’s prospective viewer, seek and find connectivity across a broad human spectrum. I’m therefore drawing two analogies to the dispersive power of mitochondrial – therefore female – DNA across the millennia; that of Ettinger’s psychically subjective matrixiality, and how the individual artist intervenes in the human collective through and as visual-material process.
Ettinger's (2020, p.109) concept of 'Matrix' is a circumstance of the human psyche that begins at the pre-natal stage third stage of the embryo in the womb, and as such, is feminine to both sexes, but also relates to 'female's body schema'. This is an important point, where, by implication, the in-utero infant's first encounter with the Symbolic is with the feminine, rather than, in Lacan's theory, the masculine via the advent of language. The matrixial, therefore, is drawn through from the stage of the womb to thereafter permeate the child and later the adult's personally subjective and externally environmental circumstances. Ettinger (2020, p.118) thus defines the Matrix: 'The matrix, as a feminine, is not the Other but rather a network of subject and Other in transformation linked in special ways in subjectivity'.
The following from Ettinger (2020, p.123) is interesting in terms of its adaptation to the sense of otherness of the DNA test result that shows links through the millenia not only with peoples disparately spread across a large proportion of the globe, but with the Neanderthal species; '...the matrix is a composition of I and non-I(s), of self and not-selves while they are unknown or even anonymous..... They co-exist and change one another though neither dominates nor submits in a recognised shared space'. As a psychological concept, Ettinger's matrixial theory does not of course embrace infinite expansion, limiting itself to an human individual's significant psychical range of interaction with others. Golding (2021, p.105) states of his main character, Lok, in his novel The Inheritors (first referenced in the Fiction section up ahead): 'And because he was one of the people, tied to them with a thousand invisible strings, his fear was for the people'. While this implied compass of matrixial connection is perhaps too broad to suit Ettinger's theory, there is nonethless the integration of internal and external in relation to Lok's personally subjective feelings of fear.
Fig 9: Coffee stain image 2. Coffee, index card fragments, ink, acrylic on corrugated cardboard, 71 x 57.5cm © Michael Croft
Fig 8: Coffee stain image 1. Coffee, white gesso, Dermatograph pencil on corrugated cardboard, 29 x 41cm © Michael Croft
The tiling on the left, Figure 13, is from the balcony of the flat in Porto, Portugal, where the coffee that's a main medium of the project gets poured. On this occasion a stain of coffee appears in the middle of the photo of the tile, which both repeats the pebble patterning and runs across it to suggest mutation.
This is the important comparison; the idea of mutation of the shapes, which are in the project's context also suggestive of cells, due to their coupling. The coffee in this respect both enables and is the result of such coupling.
This reading of the coffee stain in a sense further theorises what's happening in Figure 9, above.
The image to the left is technically upside down. M.'s decision to turn the drawing this way is based on his need firstly to suppress the image's origin in curtain drapes, since his purpose was merely to capture the undulating light that now appears as the lowest horizontal axis. Secondly, an associatively anthropomorphic form appears in the middle of the brown shape, which might at some point be useful to the idea of morphological development of life forms through time implied by the project.
The brown shape is actually a dried coffee stain – continuing its use from the project's Part 1 – the reaction of the corrugated cardboard support, which on this occasion has been to substantially warp, leaving a surface reminiscent of geological terrain.
Stemming up from the lowest horizontal axis, the vertical black and tinged blue axis was meant to be the projection of the genetic GPS punctuation. However, M. also had in mind the idea of umbilical cord. Both ideas, other-national geographical location and disarded lifeline, are now Other to himself, the psychoanalytical implications of authority of the latter term, as capitalised, of which are not without relevance to the project as a whole.
The vertical striations, which render the palimpsest of the cardboard's corrugations, partially fill in the shape M. had drawn of the roundel of his glasses' frame scaled in relation to the drawing's other imagery. M. has yet to explore the similarity between the glasses-frame roundel and Petri dish, which is something already mentioned in the project's Part 1.
Figure 9, on the left, is M.'s prototype image of a hand holding a Petri dish that ranges over a single instance of two overlapped index cards conveying the syllable thal- (of Ne-an-der-thal-) and Af- (of Out-of-Af-ri-ca-) respectively.
The idea is that the Petri dish should actually contain the syllables as if they were an interaction of cells, in this case that of Homo Sapien and Neanderthal.
The stain, which is of coffee, conceptually may suggest the spread of mutation – coffee of which happens to have originated in Africa (Ethiopia), which is the centre of origin of the human species.
The maternal side of M.’s family – remembering that M. is in Part 1 of the project a fictional character whose role is to develop his own fictional history, and had adopted a family from among black & white snapshots found in a box in a junk shop – had in the near past stemmed from a hill tribe in S.E. Asia, a people who are often without citizenship. There are a couple of implications here: firstly, what M. was considering as the past has little or no bearing on the question of millennia of ancestry; secondly, that as hill tribe his ancestors, albeit more akin to distant relatives, are still indicative of roaming and settling, and living from hunting and gathering. While the ancestral origins of hill tribes will be additionally complicated by their relative lack of documentation, in S.E.Asia at least there may be a strong connection in recent centuries with China. If Homo sapien ancestral migration had stemmed initially from Africa towards both Asia in the East and Europe more northwards, meeting and interbreeding with Neanderthal, then a DNA ancestral result that shows a small percentage of Near Eastern and South Asian biogeography is not too far removed from M.’s idea of having some hill tribe blood via his mother’s line.
Could M. stay with this idea? Why not, when the enormous gaps in types of knowledge about one’s millennial ancestry are a gift to one’s subjective imagination! While a scientist may be obliged to remain moot as to their lack of evidence-based knowledge, or at least clearly distinguish any use of mere supposition from evidential fact – the artist may tend to intervene either centrally or obliquely in such a gap. One errs on the side of caution, of course, through tendencies towards the oblique. The fictionalisation of one’s ancestry will serve to obfuscate any sensitive information that might enter the public domain, and an imaginative response to statistical information will bring such statistics to life, as it were, through terms in which we all participate to one extent or another as creatively inclined beings. Ultimately it’s a matter of degree, and how one couches the fictional in relation to the scientific evidence, when a motivation of the artistic, albeit often itself moot, is to call out the limitations of scientific method in the first place. Albeit from a different field of science, although not so very different at the level of the microbiological, the author of books on both quantum physics and creativity, Bohm (2002, p.169) – among other quantum physicists – states that one cannot separate any observation from whatever is the instrument of the observation. In other words, whatever is the observing apparatus, whether mechanical or human, has its role to play in determining the result. When I look at the graph of the maternal line, for example, and don’t doubt its efficacy as ancestral findings, there is in a sense a massively subjective override that makes it very difficult for the layperson to understand. What I’ve termed subjective override is in other words its encryption, which is readable and communicates in some domains but not in others. The artist could conceivably take such encryption on its aesthetic level and work with it, resulting in diagrams that do not communicate, which is a level at which the diagram operates in any case (Hansen, 2016, regarding Charles Sanders Peirce’s theory of diagrams, especially their ‘firstness’.) In this respect, the idea of subjectivity implicit in the observing instrument at the scientific level is perhaps not so difficult to accommodate.
M. started to re-read William Golding’s novel, The Inheritors (1955), a story of a small group of Neanderthalers encountering the more assertive and advanced Homo sapiens for the first time. In a sense, this was to M. a first reading, since he had forgotten almost everything about the novel, itself an encounter to him so long ago, except that he’d enjoyed it. On this re-visit, however, he realised that it had been of seminal influence; the question of other, for example, which was the term Golding had used to qualify the alien strangeness of Homo sapiens when first seen and sensed, mainly through Neanderthalers’ very keen sense of smell, for the first time. The main Neanderthal character of the story, Lok, in tracking and absorbing the scent of a Homo sapien, to an extent becomes the latter, that transformation of which, during such terms of intense absorption, Golding terms ‘Lok-other’ (2021, p.75). Otherness, for M. at that time, as yet had no theoretical equivalent.
Another influence on M. was the abstractness of the language used by Golding to convey at-once the way in which the Neanderthalers thought, which was in what Golding terms ‘pictures’, and the animistic relationship of them to and within their environment, where every aspect of nature is personified. The figural functions of language in the context of the story are conveyed through the opacity of the language itself. The ratio of language’s presentational and contextual capabilities to the abstract density of the medium itself as means of intervening in complex and sentient experience concerns the fact of language as a creative medium, which is comparable to the visual-material medium. Such creative use of language in a sense dissociates it from language as a generic term, which one might also apply to the visual-material medium when used creatively.
M. considered that in Golding’s novel an example of this is where the character Lok, who tends to clamber and scurry, and one might consider malleable, first encounters a Homo sapien’s erectness of gait. Already Lok had noticed the greater chiselling of the other’s face, which Golding attributes his character to comparing to bones above the eyes and below the lips (2021, p.107). When first seen standing, however, in clear view, such erectness is conveyed by association with what may have been a spear, or a bow seen from in front, with a bone in the middle. However, the lack of understanding of Lok towards what he was encountering for the first time is conveyed through a degree of abstraction of the language itself:
Bohm, D. (2002) Wholeness and the Implicate Order. (First published 1980) New York; London: Routledge
Golding, W. (2021) The Inheritors. (First published 1955) London: Faber and Faber
Hansen, Mark B.N.: Appearance In-Itself, Data-Propagation, and External Relationality: Towards a Realist Phenomenology of »Firstness«. In: ZMK Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturforschung. Verschwinden, Jg. 7 (2016), Nr. 1, S. 45–60. DOI: https://doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/18636
In the present project, such oscillation between description and what one may term presentation, the language as projection of itself on its own terms, finds equivalent in the undulating shaft of early morning light that is discernable between the top of the drape of the curtains and the underside of a wooden frame of a glass door viewable from the bed on which M. lay, and his back problem at that time. Similarly, where the curtains meet in the middle and emit a narrow shaft of light is comparable to an umbilical cord; at least, that was the direction of M.'s initial reaction, more transient than an interpretation. The narrowness of light’s first hesitant presence, felt fragility of the spine – which is actually more akin to brittleness, as if it’s likely to snap – and the conduit of life symbolical of the umbilical cord, cooperatively contribute to the project’s question of genetic ancestry as M. is approaching it, where the latter conditions as observed are more like operational events than facts – often statistical – in the project’s scientific context.
The man turned sideways in the bushes and looked at Lok along his shoulder. A stick rose upright and there was a lump of bone in the middle. Lok peered at the stick and the lump of bone and the small eyes in the bone things over the face. Suddenly Lok understood that the man was holding the stick out to him but neither he nor Lok could reach across the river. He would have laughed if it were not for the echo of the screaming in his head. The stick began to grow shorter at both ends. Then it shot out to full length again. (2021, pp.107-8)
The phrase Out of Africa and the name Neanderthal taken and their syllables hyphenated: Out-of-Africa; Ne-an-der-thal
The syllables Out-, of-, Af-, ri-, ca-, spread across a page from left to right, biggest cluster on left, colour coded blue – without looking
Syllables clustered Ne-, an-, der-, thal-, on right of page, colour coded green – without looking
All instances of overlap of syllables looped from one set with syllables from the other set, colour-coded red, Figure 8a/b
Detail of how two of the random overlaps look, ri- over ca-, and Af- over ca-, Figure 11a, and detail of the vertical axis of light in the curtain join superposes what's already there on the drawing that could be called a geological trace.
Fig 12: Further continuation of large drawing from Part 1 of project. Coffee stain, ink, acrylic, index cards, on crumpled tablecloth paper, 100 x 124cm © Michael Croft
Digitally collaged syllable groupings, Figure 8a/b, with a map of the alternative/contested first routes out of Africa towards Europe northwards, and Asia southwards (New Scientist, 2022, p.101), Figure 9a/b.
The method of the above sketches, Figures 8a/b and 9a/b, employs chance to an extent through the controlled random distribution of syllables, and then adjusting them to their best fit within an approximate map of what's considered to have taken place as the first migrations out of Africa by Homo sapiens around 40,000 years ago. It was from that point onwards that Homo sapiens interbred with Neanderthal.
Apart from this, there's the more totally random coincidence of stains from the paper of drawings from the project, Part 1, that bled through to these new blank pages. In some ways, especially in the context of the graphically drawn map, they're reminiscent of geographical terrain and islands. While the syllables pages are equipped with some stains, the graphic map page is equipped with others, which variously accumulate on the collaged layers.
Fig 10: Continuation of large drawing from Part 1 of project. Coffee stain, ink, acrylic, index cards, on crumpled tablecloth paper, 100 x 124cm © Michael Croft
Fig 14: Further continuation still, of large drawing from Part 1 of project. Coffee stain, ink, acrylic, index cards, on crumpled tablecloth paper, oil paint on clear plastic overlay, 100 x 124cm © Michael Croft
Fig 11a/b: Details of continued large drawing from Part 1 of project. Coffee stain, ink, acrylic, index cards, on crumpled tablecloth paper, variable dimensions
© Michael Croft
Fig 15: Still more continuation of large drawing from Part 1 of project. Coffee stain, ink, acrylic, index cards, on crumpled tablecloth paper, 100 x 124cm © Michael Croft
Fig 17: Detail of a later development of large drawing. Coffee stain, ink, acrylic, index cards, on crumpled tablecloth paper, oil paint on clear plastic overlay, variable dimensions © Michael Croft
The paper basis of the drawing overlaid with clear plastic sheeting
A plan-map of Germany copied and a perspective elevation onto the drawing State 2, Figure 12, above, each at a point corresponding to the genetic GPS, the plan-map version obtained by placing the ‘Human Diversity Projection’ coordinates, as shown in Figure 7a; the second version by having gridded and copied to the scale the sketch shown in Figure 4 onto the drawing
Sketch, Figure 13, above, gridded and copied to scale onto the plastic overlay of this larger drawing
A sketch of a human spine, profile view facing left, applied to the paper layer of the drawing only, behind the shaft of light
Coffee spilled randomly over the already coffee-stained surface
Top and drape of curtains sketched, showing the undulation of light between their top and the underside of the wooden frame of the glass door that they cover
The drawing ranged over a perspective elevation of a map of Germany, the first drawn vertical shaft of the curtain pinpointing a genetic GPS on the map, which had then been stained with coffee
The large drawing taken at the state it was in at the end of Part 1 of the project and considered what's already there almost as geological traces – having already applied the light undulation form Figure 4 across the top, the vertical axis of light between the curtains traced down to a point that conceived as genetic GPS – the coordinates from Figure 4 having been applied and placed a white dot where the genetic GPS is mapped on the Ancestry report, as shown in Figure 7a.
Index cards strewn with two sets of syllables for Out of Africa and one set of Neanderthal across the drawing at random, accepting whatever overlaps occur (three in total)
The index cards aligned symmetrically and glue to the drawing
Liquid coffee spilled and the overall shape delineated with burnt umber (brown) acrylic
Detail of the work in its completed state as shown in Figure 19, to show how the gap between vertical shaft of light and spine referenced in the video clip, Figure 16, has been kept and the spine retrieved from its subsequent overlay by blue on the clear plastic.
Fig 18: Still more continuation of large drawing from Part 1 of project with additional index cards. Coffee stain, ink, acrylic, index cards, on crumpled tablecloth paper, 100 x 124cm © Michael Croft
Fig 19: Out- of- Af- ri- ca- / Ne- an- der- thal- finished drawing-based painting. Coffee stain, ink, acrylic, index cards, on crumpled tablecloth paper, oil paint on clear plastic overlay, 100 x 124cm © Michael Croft
Cell clusters and main mapping shape differentiated from ground by painting around them with white
Horizontal undulation of light, vertical shaft of light, and spine, emphasised with white
Main mapping shape differentiated with white on clear plastic overlay
Horizontal undulation of light, vertical shaft of light, and spine, emphasised with white
A hand holding Petri dish painted over the three instances where syllables from Out- of- Af- ri- ca- and Ne- an- der- thal- overlap, thereby emphasising and dissociating them from their co-parts on the finished underlay (see Figure 18)