14 Stock Frequencies: Variations on the & Manifold

14 Stock Frequencies: Variations on the & Manifold explores the conceptual and practical affordances of a formal operator (expressed at the common ampersand “&”) in the context of pastoral usages of tavolette by Dominican confraternities in 15th century Renaissance Italy.

As Feinberg has noted, these instruments were principally applied as ‘contemplative aids for the condemned’. A tavoletta would be executed as part of a larger ritual ceremony ‘[entailing] extensive songs, prayers and consoling dialogue. Many parts of this ceremony evolved from much older, even ancient rituals conducted for those facing imminent death, the gravely ill as well as the criminal or the martyr.’

The ligature “&” effectuates a process of graphic autophagy. I retrofit the ligature with a token “a” to produce a phrase “(e)(a)(t)” where the retrofitted item precipitates the protocol it helps to name. Operationally, the ligature is clarified at the phantom retrofitted field upon which the tokens (e) and (t) would like to graze. These tokens, as the poet Maz Himyari has pointed out to me, might prepare placeholders for all manner of mixed/nominally opposed referents, and are reconciled via an alchemical coniunctio or centripetal traversal about the retrofitted terrain.