A defining techniques of contemporary neurobiology is spatial transcriptomics. Through spatial transcriptomics, we can know what genes are active at what coordinates of a slice of a donated or cultured brain or brain organoid. Consequently, we can start mapping what types of cells exist where at what time in developmental trajectories and their multiplexed interactions. This spatialization of the informational layer of the brain invalidates a now outdated 2D approach – decoding beads on a string. Instead, the interpretative task at hand is one of navigation, of moving through a multidimensional landscape of physiological and informational cuts and closures.

Beth von Undall’s Angel Permutations, sifts through a sequence of permutations that make up the IQ-test Raven’s Progressive Matrices used in the 1930s as a non-verbal measure of cognition. On the far side of psychogeogprahical inquiries, lie the tomographies of the self. Angel Permutations belong to this second category. It is a blurred Z-Stack derived from cognitive auto-interrogation and stitching the the duality of enunciation and miasma into a single breath of delirious patternicity. When intuiting its latent proposal, this form of inward mapmaking suggests that cognition is not a function, nor a tool but rather a landscape whose navigating agent is our approximation of the generic itself. Any flaneurs left in this world?