Sacred Geometry — Rule-Based Meaning Across Traditions

Kunz and the drawings of 2026

The artist uses the term once in his own voice. His statement on the drawings of Entfaltung (2026) begins: "The research was into sacred geometry, and in particular into the pendulum drawings of the Swiss healer and artist Emma Kunz (1892–1963)" (sources/ingested/entfaltung-drawings-statement-2026.md). Kunz built her figures on graph paper from points, straight lines and the forms on them, and described the order she followed as "a particular lawfulness that I feel within me". In 1953 she published her method twice, once as a revelation and once as a drawing method (→ Entfaltung, Kunz's method). Entfaltung rebuilds that construction in code.

One of the drawings takes a construction from another tradition. Entfaltung (Wending) is built ad quadratum, the masons' square turned inside a square; the artist links it to the Amsterdam School and to esotericism, and its title is a Dutch term from theosophy (harm.work; → Entfaltung on Paper).

The traditions in the exhibition texts

The Senescenence press release (Interface Gallery with Nguyen Wahed, New York, 2026) names three traditions:

"References to Anni Albers' textiles, Buddhist mandalas, and stained-glass windows evoke rule-based systems in which local decisions accumulate into forms that exceed their individual construction. In these systems, structure becomes a carrier of meaning. This aligns with a much older cross-cultural intuition: that geometry is not merely descriptive but generative. Within traditions of sacred geometry, structure and spirit are intertwined rather than opposed."

The text for Struggle for Pleasure (Verse SOLOS, London, 2024), written by William Kherbek from a conversation with the artist, applies the mandala to simple pixel operations, "mirroring, rotation, repetition, and in particular subdivision": "The outputs often paradoxically took on an exceptionally complex, transcendental quality not unlike, for me, the way the apparently straightforward components of a mandala can. Simplicity of operation can become a window into territories of complexity where knowledge itself breaks down" (sources/ingested/struggle-for-pleasure-press-release.md).

The Cloud Writings statement (2026) adds heraldry once: "Their designs touch on religious and heraldic imagery" (→ Cloud Writings).

The press release sets its cellular automaton beside these traditions. No text calls the automaton itself a sacred geometry; that would be the wiki's analogy.

Anicca and the sand mandala

A diamond-shaped heap of dense zigzag marks in red, orange, green, blue and white rises on a black ground, like coloured sand poured into a mound.

Anicca (2025) is, on harm.work, "a series of eventually 8 two-phase animations, inspired by Buddhist sand drawings: an exercise in patience and reflection on impermanence"; the Pali title names the absence of permanence. In the Murayama Q&A the artist names the Tibetan sand mandala and the Japanese Ryōkai Mandala as the mandalas he looked at, calls Anicca his "first attempt to construct them algorithmically", and says he went deeper in Quantizer (→ Mandala Q&A). A sand mandala is swept away once it is finished. The Senescenence press release says of its automaton that "death is not failure but the system's natural feature"; the wiki reads the sand mandala and the automaton as two constructions with their end built in.

The artist's own filing puts the mandala earlier than Anicca. He opened an are.na channel called Mandala on 18 October 2024, described "or Thangka", and began it with his own work: Wyn (generation unknown) (2018), a Nested Exchange panel (block), then a screenshot of nested rounded rectangles dated 1 October 2017 (block), then Struggle for Pleasure #110 (2024, block). On the panel, circles, framed squares and groups of parallel lines are printed on a pale ground. By October 2024 he counted his nested compositions of 2017–2018 among mandalas, and a working render for Our Inner Child was saved under the name mandala in September 2023 (→ Mandala Q&A). The mechanism he gives Murayama, in which each step is "stochastically determined by the parent the new shape is in", is a nesting rule: a shape takes its place from the shape that contains it (→ The Grid, under From nesting to the grid).

Agent's reading: meaning initiated, not assigned

Thesis. The Senescenence press release: in rule-based systems "structure becomes a carrier of meaning".

Antithesis. The artist, answering Murayama: "I myself generally do not assign a meaning to the outputs of algorithms. Sometimes I title them after creation, based on how they appear to me, but it happens largely beyond me."

Synthesis: meaning initiated, not assigned. The same press release gives the joint: "The works are less composed than initiated." The structure carries a meaning that the artist did not put there. He sets the rules going and meets what comes out as its first viewer: "I sometimes experience awe by staring through a simple construed surface, into the depths of complexity." Kunz stood in the same place. She followed a lawfulness she felt within her, and she told Peter Burri that she never knew at the start what a drawing would look like.

As above, so below

Asked by Murayama how local algorithms square with the mandala's cosmic scale, the artist answered: "The hermetic observation 'as above, so below' is at work in that I sometimes experience awe by staring through a simple construed surface, into the depths of complexity." The phrase condenses a line of the Emerald Tablet, attributed to Hermes Trismegistus: what is below is like what is above. He uses it for an experience, depth seen through a simple surface, and makes no claim about the cosmos. The wiki reads it as the counterpart of recursive self-similarity, the same structure at every scale (→ Recursion and Self-Reference).

See also

• Entfaltung and Entfaltung on Paper — Kunz's method, and the drawings the statement introduces
• Mandala Q&A — Goro Murayama (2026) — the mandalas he names, Anicca and Quantizer, Jung
• Senescenence — the exhibition whose press release names Albers, the mandala and stained glass
• Struggle for Pleasure (2024) — the mandala applied to pixel operations
• Cloud Writings (2026) — heraldic imagery; Stairs and Crosses (worn)
• Algorithmic Archaeology — Albers, Kunz, Molnár and Posenenske, artists he has researched since 2019
• Quantizer — the trait names tibetan, thangka and mandala
• qubibi's hello world — impermanence and ma in a parallel practice, with Anicca
• Recursion and Self-Reference — self-similarity, the technical side of "as above, so below"