a founder of the codex

Pointillism

Punctopsia miscens·the Distant Speckle

From Latin punctum, a dot, and Greek opsis, sight, and Latin miscens, mixing, a sight made of dots that the eye mixes.

Level: Conceptorganism
Phylum: Part and wholeimage schema
Class: Dispersalits halftone screen
Niche: Consumerother ideas
Mode: Techniquehow it keeps existing
Stage: Matureindividuated
Status: Living
Habitat: Classroom

Its kinds · Roget, 1852: Communication of Ideas · Wilkins, 1668: Operation · WordNet, 1990: Act · Llull, 1308: K · Instrumentative

Distant Speckle, the whole specimen — Plate XLIII. Punctopsia miscens, the whole specimen.

Pointillism builds an image from separate dots of pure colour that the eye fuses at a distance, so the picture is finished in the viewer's eye.

Separate points of pure colour become one image only for an eye standing far enough away to mix them.

behavior It looks like a scatter of specks up close and gathers into a single shimmering scene as you step back.

provocation

From how far away do the scattered parts of your days make one picture?

Each draw is the being derived afresh by the current laws at another seed (laws §11); the chosen one leads (where they sit in the morphospace).

I Dissection

Each organ answers one question about the idea. The framed one, its dispersal, is the dominant organ: the being's class, the one the idea could not lose and stay itself.

Kernel of Pointillism — Fig. 1. Kernel
Optical mixture
Which premise, if it were false, would kill this idea?
Colours set side by side in dots too small to tell apart are mixed by the eye into one tone. Distance does the mixing that a brush once did on the palette.^{2, 1}
drawn as: optical mixture · view: exploded

Boundary of Pointillism — Fig. 2. Boundary
Painted border
What sets it apart from what it is not, and how does it keep that distinction?
It keeps every touch one pure hue, laid beside the next and unmixed on the palette. Seurat dotted a border around his canvases to hold the picture apart from the room.^{4, 3}
drawn as: painted border · view: magnified

Intake of Pointillism — Fig. 3. Intake
Chromatic circle
What must it feed on to work? What has to be present, noticed or supplied?
It feeds on the science of colour, the laws of contrast set down by Chevreul and the measures of light and hue made by Rood.^{1, 2}
drawn as: chromatic circle · view: microscope

Mechanism of Pointillism — Fig. 4. Mechanism
Retinal mosaic
How does it turn what it takes in into what it gives out?
From far enough away each dot falls below what the eye can resolve, and neighbouring dots blur together on the retina into one mixed light.²
drawn as: retinal mosaic · view: exploded

Output of Pointillism — Fig. 5. Output
Irradiation
What does it make possible, visible or knowable?
It makes forms glow at their edges. Each shape is ringed by a seam of lighter or darker dots, set by the law of contrast, so figures stand in a trembling light.^{3, 1}
drawn as: irradiation · view: at work

Dispersal of Pointillism — Fig. 6. Dispersal
Halftone screen
❦ dominant organ
What part of it travels into other minds, ideas and fields, and by what vector?
It travels into print and screens. The halftone dots of the printed photograph and the pixels of every display build images the same way, from separate points the eye fuses.⁵
drawn as: halftone screen · view: cast

Decay of Pointillism — Fig. 7. Decay
Neutral grey
What can it not digest, where does it fail, and what does it leave behind for others?
Seen from too far, complementary dots fuse into grey, and close up the picture falls back into dots. Its painters soon widened the dots into broad square strokes.^{2, 4}
drawn as: neutral grey · view: cross section

II Meaning associations

No relations recorded yet.

descent membership food web resemblance or friction

Lineage

A founder, dissected by hand.

Kin

same kind in Roget Echolalia, Glossolalia, Syllable, Symbol, Babelhum, Poetry

same kind in Wilkins Lullaby, Mimesis

same kind in WordNet Geomancy, Mimesis, Ritual, Knowing Trust

same kind in Llull Chiaroscuro, Faith, Geomancy, Innocence, Lullaby, Music, Patience, Ritual, Syllable, Symbol, Foresilence, Tide of Days, Subtractive Phenomenology

same phylum Chimera, Emergence, Petrification, Syllable, Babelhum, Subtractive Phenomenology

same dominant organ Ash, Breath, Miracle, River, Sand, Wind, Witnessed Relief

Genome

dot
distance also in Aura
mixture
contrast also in Chiaroscuro
method

III In the world

Echoes

Seurat's Sunday afternoon on the Grande Jatte
the halftone dots of a newspaper photograph
the pixels of a screen
a school art lesson in painting with dots

IV Record

How it was drawn

its draw 1, a point in the morphospace (laws §8), drawn by flux-2-klein-4b.safetensors.

axis	value
book	artes
symmetry	helical
organization	solitary
silhouette	cage
scale	immense
proportion	swollen latent
growth	faceted
articulation	jointed latent
openness	lattice
skeleton	spicules
locomotion	gliding latent
pattern	plain latent
coloration	countershaded latent
substance	silica glass
surface	perforated
palette	abyss
luminosity	sheen
transparency	opaque latent
gesture	gathers
unity	composite latent
modality	necessary
causation	formal latent
determinacy	dissolving latent
fusion	built of
anomaly	one break
graft	origami
technique	silverpoint
viewpoint	profile
value	unmarked latent
balance	grounded latent
density	graded detail latent
rhythm	regular latent
saturation	muted latent
appendages	plumes
anchor (body)	stalactites, slow hanging columns of dripped stone
anchor (detail)	a diatom, a glass shell in two halves perforated with ordered pores

Sources

Michel Eugène Chevreul, De la loi du contraste simultané des couleurs (1839)
Ogden N. Rood, Modern Chromatics (1879)
Georges Seurat, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte (1884-1886)
Paul Signac, D'Eugène Delacroix au néo-impressionnisme (1899)
William M. Ivins Jr., Prints and Visual Communication (1953)

❦