This artistic research is a contribution to a larger research project titled ‘The Observation of Perception, considered through drawing’, hosted by i2ADS. The research begins with the hypothesis that perception can be diagrammed, in this case through and as a form of drawing that indicates how perception is for this investigator conceived and works in action. One of the two visual motifs of the work is also a meta-motif, in that as an action-camera placed over the eyes, it is the means by which the investigator records himself at work on the second main motif, which is his image as viewed in a circular hand-held mirror. The investigator approaches the initiative as a question of diagramming the self-same initiative, accepting whatever are its developed implications as the aesthetic of the work. Peirce's division of the diagram into elements of firstness and secondness, with the elusive recognition of diagram as an abstract entity before any communicative purpose, keys into a working practice that in any case veers towards the diagrammatic. The investigator's tendency to audio-visually record his working process has led him to a position where the logistics of the purpose paradoxically reveal the subjectivity – if not absurdity – of the self-same process. In this case, little by little, a contingent factor of a wart takes centre-stage as blind spot; at-once a torn hole within the drawing's material surface, the action camera as an illusory obstruction, and a factor that oscillates with and as the circular self-portrait. The presentation takes the viewer/reader through the process, largely perceptual, that is diagrammed on and as the artifactual outcome, the drawing.
