Ornaments - excerpt from "Across the Melodies of Change"

O R N A M E N T S  are more than narratives, much more. They are cultured, i.e., made in the scale of human beings, expressions of patterns, of repetitive structures, of actions and behaviours present in nature in every one of its endless performances. Yet, the idea of “nature” in itself is a constantly changing human invention, as nature is defined and perceived through the eyes and bodies of human beings, and even this perceptual and conceptual modulation is ornamental, patterned. 

Narratives are finite and pretentious, they lay claims: this and not another meaning, the plot and its frame, a superficial frame that is perceived, is made to be thought of as a “natural” one. Ornaments are endless; they overcome every possible frame. They can exist in the absence of frames and they can cover or erupt them, when frames do not comply with the ornament’s structural rules (this can be noticed when the scale and rhythm of the ornament and that of the object it covers do not correspond). Ornament can include in itself countless frames that become its elements. 

The arbitrariness of the rules of ornaments is not based on the pretence of meaning, but on visual “genetics” or on a code/imprint which is not human in the narrow sense (“human” as original, as one and only, as external to “nature”). On the level of design and of perception, the ornament—founded on a system of rules (geometry for instance)—works through a never-ending oscillation between the detail and the whole. It is perceived by gliding of the gaze in the attempt to discover the rule in the ornament and thus the rule in the beholder herself— as a beholder, as an experiencer, as a perceiver—directed and guided on the one hand, and free to focus on a specific detail on the other (Grabar, 1987, p. 189). It is another kind of freedom—the ability to concentrate on the detail and to discover the rule in it. It unleashes a potential of an endless development and growth, both into the inside (the depth) and into the outside (the surface). This strange freedom is aware of the pattern and does not argue with it, but invents every time anew the experience of it.

Those ruminations gain additional relevance when applied in the context of the digital communication, to which we have grown so quickly accustomed. What if we were to adapt a bird view on those texts and images that we produce and reuse, encompassing our loves, glories, sorrows and pursuits? We produce and view them each time as a single narrative chain of frames provided by the specific technology (Messenger, WhatsApp, email etc.). Yet the accumulation of such chains grows inside endless screens of interlinked devices, erupting, overcoming the single consistent narrative. Our devices communicate with each other via hidden electronic nerves, maintaining the entire ornamental system of feeling and reason unfolded in the depths or the surfaces of the World Wide Web. Each singular frame - love, glory, sorrow, pursuit - an endlessly variable formula, a detail to concentrate on in the unfolding field of the carpet.