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Some Lines is an artist’s book that emerged from research into the earliest known branching diagrams. My interest lay in the complex computer science of artificial intelligence. However, as a layperson wishing to comprehend AI, I felt the need to go back to the very essence of how computers are taught to “think”. This lay in Aristotle’s Categories, out of which came the Porphyrian Tree—a branching diagram simplifying Aristotle’s ontological categories into their most basic, visual form.

During further research, I discovered another early diagram, but with a narrative structure—the genealogy of Jesus. The earliest form of this long horizontal branching tree is in a manuscript of the Beatus, painted by the monk Facundus in 1047. This early Christian infographic shows each figure from Adam and Eve through Jesus as a roundel linked to another roundel through a line of birth or marriage.

This diagram holds within its form many complex questions that interest me—about the nature of authority, narrative through abstraction, and drawing through time. The subject of artificial intelligence is for another artist’s book, one that I may or may never complete. In the diagrams within this book, I feel confident that I started at the beginning, literally and figuratively. Some Lines is the abstraction of a large mythos, a reduction of the original to pure visual information, black circles connected to other black circles with lines. Yet patterns of narrative remain, even in abstraction.