Text page
Unfolding the Middle East Kristen Alvanson's Nonad - Robin Mackay
A commentary page that uses the nonad to unfold geopolitical and diagrammatic relations through a numogram-adjacent frame.
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 nonad matters here as an extension of diagrammatic thinking beyond the most canonical numogram pages. Numerical form becomes a way of unfolding region, orientation, and relation.
The page works by letting a diagrammatic structure organize interpretation rather than merely illustrate it. Number guides the reading.
That matters because it shows how numogrammatic habits migrate into adjacent analytic and geopolitical frames.
How to read this text
Track the nonad as a reading machine first, then expand outward to the geopolitical material it is organizing.
Read it beside the more explicit numogram pages so the family resemblance in method stays visible.
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 6
A popular, vernacular numerology surviving on the peripheries of official religion, ABJAD has been used for centuries for spell-casting, charms, protection, fortune-telling and koranic interpretation. According to Alvanson, in Middle-Eastern occultism, nine is the number of ‘unceasing collectivity’: it is the number which, in ABJAD, acts as a base element to which other numbers can be transformed, thus acting as a conduit between otherwise unrelated texts.
Definition · paragraph 6
Unfolding the Middle East: Kristen Alvanson’s Nonad – Robin Mackay http://readthis.wtf/writing/unfolding-the-middle-east-kristen-alvansons-nonad/[4/26/2023 2:47:18 PM] of the nomad people of the region is characterised by highly-coloured, patterned, sequined or diaphanous fabrics.
History · paragraph 4
Unfolding the Middle East: Kristen Alvanson’s Nonad – Robin Mackay http://readthis.wtf/writing/unfolding-the-middle-east-kristen-alvansons-nonad/[4/26/2023 2:47:18 PM] principle of the baroque, extends to labyrinthine structures enfolding infinite complexity (or implexity) without yielding to any form of transcendence.
History · paragraph 8
Unfolding the Middle East: Kristen Alvanson’s Nonad – Robin Mackay http://readthis.wtf/writing/unfolding-the-middle-east-kristen-alvansons-nonad/[4/26/2023 2:47:18 PM] art scene, has declared that, in order to take this touring show designed to promote Iranian artists worldwide, the organisers together with their suitcases of artworks ‘will travel like nomads’ – making Alvanson’s participation in the upcoming event highly appropriate.
Method · paragraph 4
Kristen Alvanson, an American artist working in Iran, suggests that we read the Middle East, in all its obscurity, inscrutability and hybridity, in terms of such a topological model, as a fabric folded and refolded into a baffling surface where disparate elements abut unexpectedly and overlap each other in paradoxical fashion.
Appears in sections
Numogram and Occult Numeracy Primary section
Decimal labyrinths, syzygies, left-zero, and the archive's experiments in number as orientation.