The Calibrated Column presents itself as taxonomy, instruction manual, perhaps even manifesto. Sixteen horizontal planes stacked vertically, each bearing a neologism in clinical yellow text against grey industrial metal. To the right of each shelf: musical notation fragments paired with ovoid forms containing graphic marks consisting of eyes, dots, waves, crescents. The system appears to organize. What it organizes remains deliberately uncertain.
This is notation that has abandoned the pretense of transparency. Where traditional musical scores promise univocal translation. This symbol produces that sound. The calibrated column offers something closer to a periodic table of unnamed elements, each slot containing a term that feels almost recognizable yet resists definition. MYTHOSCAPISM. PANARCANISM. ECROPELISM. The suffixes suggest systems of belief or practice, the roots suggest nothing at all.
The Architecture of Invented Language
What distinguishes this from mere whimsy is the precision of its construction. Each neologism occupies its designated shelf with the confidence of established terminology. The musical notation beside each term functions not as explanation but as parallel mystery. The visual language of Western musical literacy is present but scrambled, recombined, made strange.
The ovoid forms operate as a third layer of encoding. Some contain single dots, others multiple. Some show curved lines, others celestial bodies in phases. Are these pictographic? Diagrammatic? The eye searches for pattern: does DOBOVISM's three-dot configuration relate structurally to its position between OPIOIDISM and SYNTELISM? The column refuses to answer.
Calibration as Concept
The term "calibrated" implies measurement against a standard. But when the entire system exists in isolation, calibration becomes a recursive gesture. The column calibrates itself against itself. Each shelf measures its relationship to the shelves above and below, but the absolute values remain unknowable.
This is notation as cosmology rather than communication. The stacked planes suggest stratification, hierarchy, perhaps even evolutionary progression (MYTHOSCAPISM at the apex, ALOPPISM at the base...why?). The rigid geometry implies order. But order of what? The system presents as complete, internally consistent, and entirely opaque.
Space as Compositional Element
Unlike linear notation that moves left to right across time, the column asserts verticality as primary organizational principle. To read it requires not scanning but surveying. The eye must take in relationships between distant shelves, trace connections across the vertical span, understand the work as simultaneous rather than sequential.
This spatial arrangement transforms meaning-making into an act of navigation. The viewer becomes cartographer of unknown territory, attempting to map a landscape whose features remain unnamed. RETIGRATISM sits between EXOFORMISM and ONTOGENISM and what does this adjacency signify? The column offers no legend.
The musical fragments beside each term compound the spatial complexity. They exist in parallel to the neologisms, neither illustrating nor contradicting them. Two columns run simultaneously: one of invented language, one of deconstructed musical grammar. The relationship between them must be inferred, constructed by each viewer according to their own pattern recognition protocols.
The Ovoid Index
Those strange forms on the right are neither purely abstract nor clearly representational. They function as yet another layer of possible signification. They recall cellular diagrams, astronomical notations, alchemical symbols. Some are filled (black moons), others outlined (empty vessels). Some contain concentric marks (ripples? orbits?), others show asymmetric distributions of dots.
If the neologisms suggest concepts and the musical notation suggests actions or processes, perhaps the ovals represent states or results. Or perhaps they're portraits of the practitioners themselves. They may be adherents of CYTROPISM marked by their particular configuration of internal forms. The column refuses disambiguation.
Curatorial Context
This work belongs to a lineage of notational systems that prioritize invention over communication: Hildegard's pneumatic notations, John Cage's time brackets, Cornelius Cardew's graphic scores. But where those systems eventually reveal their logic the calibrated column maintains its opacity.
It suggests instead the notation systems of lost or fictional cultures. The taxonomies in Borges' "Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge." The elaborate classificatory schemes in Perec's Life: A User's Manual. Notations whose primary function is not to enable performance but to assert the existence of a complex system operating just beyond comprehension.
The Performer's Task
What, then, does one do with the calibrated column? Attempts at decoding prove circular. There is no code, only structure. Attempts at performance encounter the same problem. How does one enact BELOEMICISM? What sound does the paired notation produce?
Perhaps the work asks us to simply inhabit its systematic mysteriousness. To recognize the human impulse to organize, categorize, notate and to sit with the discomfort when those systems refuse to resolve into meaning. The column calibrates nothing except our desire for calibration.
The sixteen shelves stand there, precisely rendered, each term confidently proclaimed. PHOLOTIRISM. DECOMIDISM. PREQUATISM. They sound like they should mean something. The notation looks like it should instruct. The ovals appear to diagram. But the system remains sealed, complete, and gloriously useless. It is notation as pure form, space as pure structure, language as pure surface.
This is the calibrated column's final gesture: to present organizational clarity as its own kind of content, to make taxonomy itself the territory being mapped. We are left not with what these terms mean but with the shapes they make when arranged in vertical space, the patterns they form when viewed as architectural elements rather than carriers of sense.
The column measures nothing but the distance between language and comprehension. That, perhaps, is calibration enough.
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