Text page
Harper, Andy Mackay, Robin - A two-hander (2015)
A dialogic secondary page that brings Robin Mackay into a more public conversation about the conceptual and aesthetic stakes of diagrammatic thought.
Archive condition
The page uses the canonical extracted text as its reading layer while preserving the original file paths as the archival source of record.
Core idea
The page matters because dialogue slows numogram-adjacent concepts down without stripping them of complexity. It turns diagrammatic speculation into exchange.
Conversation produces clarification by pressure and reformulation. The page's value lies in how public explanation becomes another mode of conceptual practice.
That matters because the numogram's afterlife depends on exactly these translational scenes between specialist vocabulary and broader discussion.
How to read this text
Read it for points of clarification and reformulation rather than for a single thesis statement.
Track how the conversation keeps returning to form, abstraction, and practice. Those returns are the conceptual spine.
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 4
Andy Harper | Robin Mackay 328 YKCOWREBBAJ sevot yhtils eht dna,gillirb sawT’ ebaw eht ni elbmig dna eryg diD ,sevogorob eht erew ysmim llA .ebargtuo shtar emom eht dnA – Lewis Carroll Does not a hinge always imply closure? Presiding over a twofold and its mirrored relation, it sides with neither facet, but is their vanishing point.
Definition · paragraph 6
Meillassoux, Q. (2012), The Number and the Siren: A Decipherment of Mallarmé’s Coup de dés, Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic and Sequence Press. Rorschach, H. (1942), Psychodiagnostics; A Diagnostic Test Based on Perception, New York: Grune & Stratton. Suggested citation Harper, A. and Mackay, R. (2015), ‘A Two Hander’, Journal of Contemporary Painting 1: 2, pp.
History · paragraph 1
English language. doi: 10.1386/jcp.1.2.321_1 JCP 1 (2) pp. 321–330 Intellect Limited 2015 Andy Harper and Robin Mackay A two-hander Abstract In a series of works dating from 2013–2014, the British painter Andy Harper ‘doubles’ painted images using a direct form of contact printing.
History · paragraph 1
321–330 Intellect Limited 2015 Andy Harper and Robin Mackay A two-hander Abstract In a series of works dating from 2013–2014, the British painter Andy Harper ‘doubles’ painted images using a direct form of contact printing. This operation on the part of the painter brings together the traditional practice of painting with the purely mechanical act of printing, a doubling of the image.
History · paragraph 6
Andy Harper | Robin Mackay 330 Kant, I. ([1768] 1992), ‘Concerning the ultimate foundation of the differentiation of directions in space’, in P. Guyr and A. W.
Appears in sections
Numogram and Occult Numeracy Primary section
Decimal labyrinths, syzygies, left-zero, and the archive's experiments in number as orientation.