PS-REP-177 · r2 REPRESENTATION OBSERVED ENGAGED

NO NATURAL DEPICTION

Every picture of it is a choice, and the reader has nothing to check the choice against.

01 DEFINITION

Condition in which what has to be understood carries no appearance of its own — it is a decision procedure, a delegation, or a state held in software — so any depiction of it is an invention, and the reader cannot tell a sound invention from a misleading one by looking at the thing itself.

02 CONDITIONS

UNCERTAINTY MISSING There is nothing to compare the depiction against; the subject has no appearance of its own.

TIME PRESSURE LOW The choice of figure is made calmly, and its consequences arrive later and elsewhere.

ERROR ASYMMETRY DEFERRED A misleading figure costs nothing when it is drawn and everything when it is acted on.

OPERATOR STATE SUPERVISORY The reader is judging something being carried out by something else, from an account of it.

03 WHERE IT APPEARS

AI EXP.What a model is doing has no form, so every account of it is a chosen metaphor that the reader accepts or rejects whole.

FINANCEExposure and risk are constructions rather than objects, and the figure chosen to show them decides what feels large.

MEDICALA computed likelihood has no appearance, and the way it is drawn is what determines how far it is trusted.

ENERGYNetwork state and contingency margin exist only as calculations, and the diagram that carries them is an argument about them.

PUBLIC SERVICEProcess, eligibility and authority are rules rather than things, and any depiction of them is a reading of the rules.

DEFENSEDelegation between elements and the reasoning behind an automated choice have no physical form to be shown.

04 WHAT AEON WORKED THROUGH HERE

What had to be shown could not be photographed: something noticing, a direction carried in sound, a pulse felt in a finger. Each was given a figure — a scan spreading across the ground, a ripple at the edge of the frame, a wave travelling along a hand — and every one of those figures was invented. An audience could tell whether a figure read clearly and could not tell whether it was true, and the people it was about were in no position to check it either. The work went into what each figure commits its viewer to believing, and into which of them we were willing to be held to.

The question it keeps returning to is what a depiction of something unseeable owes the reader about being a depiction — a figure that announces its own artifice is discounted, and one that does not is believed further than it can carry.

05 LINKED TERMS

PS-TRU-112 TRUST TRANSFER ACROSS TOOLS PS-REP-174 DEPTH DRAWN FLAT PS-REP-178 LEGIBLE OR CREDIBLE PS-REP-187 PRECISION OF THE UNBUILT PS-REP-197 FORM ASSERTS KIND PS-REP-204 HELP SHOWN AS NEED