WHAT
does the research look like when lived?
Here I’m collecting some of the flotsam and jetsam of my journeys across landscape and thought. Forever a work-in-progress, this site is re-membering creative debris into a coherent, navigable representation of the lived purpose of my life. As such, it is a nomadic archive rather than a staid and proper monolith, picking up and pitching tent when and where it sees fit.
DIVERGENTE is the artistic and phenomenological expression of the same inquiry that Neural Coherence Ecology pursues scientifically. Where NCE describes the human being as a coherent internal ecosystem interdependent with an external one, society, and meaning-making as an organism-wide process, DIVERGENTE explores what it feels like to live inside that ecosystem through narratives across media. The creative work generates phenomenological material that the science alone cannot access. The theoretical framework sometimes precedes and sometimes follows this creative work, providing inspiration before, or structural depth and conceptual precision after the fact.
The tagline “art as life as art” mirrors and inverts the ARTESIAN maxim “life as art as life.” This inversion is intentional. DIVERGENTE functions as the expressive, experimental, and cultural articulation of the research, frameworks, and methodologies developed within ARTESIAN. Where ARTESIAN establishes foundations, DIVERGENTE explores their lived, aesthetic, and human consequences.
The Three Divergences
Each of the Three Divergences, grounded in biology, defines the point from which its concern, Sex, Neurodevelopment, and Love, diverges and how.
In this work, the human brain’s continuous meaning-making process is referred to as reading. It is crucial, perpetual, and part of how we establish a sense of belonging and purpose for ourselves and each other.
Reality is complex. Humans have the capacity to navigate it without the use of constructs that reduce the complexity and misrepresent actual life. The work advocates and demonstrates a way of reading, available to all, that honors the complexity of reality. It is a practice that concerns every human, as the way we read each other is how we understand ourselves.
DIVERGENTE expresses the work creatively to demonstrate how the goal may be lived.
Sex Divergence: Being & Body
Sex Divergence concerns the existence of sex in humans. The being, sustained existence, movement through space and time, and function of sex is realized in the domain of the body. More than reproduction it facilitates a baseline of person’s wellbeing.
The divergence described is from asexual reproduction, just before sexual reproduction emerged, roughly 1.6 to 2 billion years ago in single celled organisms. What resulted from that split as it concerns humans is the full range of ways a human body can be sexed, and no two are exactly alike. Most fall into two dense regions, and the lives those regions represent we have gendered female and male. Yet substantial variation exists inside each region and lives sit between and beside them.
This work is particularly concerned with existences in or near the region we have gendered as female, and, distinctly, with how those lives are read. Why that existence in particular has drawn so lasting and severe a response is the question at the centre of it.
Neurodevelopmental Divergence: Processing & Mind
Neurodevelopmental Divergence concerns how a nervous system forms over time, what it becomes, and how it works. Processing, what that formation makes possible, is realized in the domain of the mind, which extends past the brain to the entire nervous system and human being.
Every human being develops through the same processes, and no two run those processes identically. In each person, the processes begin and finish at different times, at different rates, under the real conditions they meet. Every person has a developmental course of their own. A course that runs far enough from the others in any way can be called “divergent.” Yet still, there is no “correct” course to run, and no course predicts the processing it produces, still less the person.
This work is interested in what capacities relevant to sustained homeostasis have gone unexamined because the expressions that carry them have been read as disorder. And what would be understood about human development generally if these expressions were studied for what they afford rather than for what they cost.
Love Divergence: Connection & Society
Love Divergence concerns how the wellbeing of one human being comes to be sustained through the presence of others: the systems that carry it, how they form, and how they operate across a life. Connection, what those systems make possible, is realized in the domain of society, the external ecosystem that the internal one of the human being depends on. Love here names the draw toward others and the bonds that draw forms and holds.
The divergence described is from an organism whose regulation is complete within its own boundary, with nothing in its internal state running through another animal. That is still how most animals live. On the far side is an organism part of whose wellbeing is carried by the presence of another, so that losing that other disturbs its internal state rather than costing it an advantage. The passage runs through the mammal lineage, roughly three hundred to two hundred million years ago, and every human being is on the far side of it by descent. What resulted is the full range of ways a person’s wellbeing can be sustained through others, both particular people and the group they live among. Unlike the other two fields, this one never settles: it is formed in relation and it keeps being formed in relation across a whole life.
Because wellbeing runs through others, how a person is read by others bears on it directly. A misreading held over time is not a social injury that happens to hurt; it is interference with an arrangement a person’s regulation runs through, and the cost falls on everyone inside it. What becomes possible for sustaining wellbeing once those misreadings are removed is the question at the centre of it.
Readings & Constructs
Horatio Jackson: “I’m afraid, sir, you have rather a weak grasp of reality.”
Baron Munchausen: “Your ‘reality,’ sir, is lies and balderdash and I’m delighted to say that I have no grasp of it whatsoever!”
— The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988)
For the purposes of this work, a reading is the brain’s meaning-making process, a loop of predicting and then checking that prediction against reality, carried through many cycles, and shared and enacted by individuals in groups. When a reading is not allowed to adjust to facts, experience, and insight, it becomes a misreading. A construct is a reading sustained over so many cycles and among so many people that its persistence guards it from adjustment. It becomes a frame in which further readings happen inside.
Sex Divergence is constructed as a binary. Neurodevelopmental Divergence is read as a disorder, and for some, an identity. Love Divergence is read as a choice, and a binary. In each case a complex structural configuration is reduced to a category, a pathology, or a decision. Each of these constructs assumes a simplistic default: that every person is clearly male or female, that every brain matches a neurotypical template, that heterosexuality is a coherent thing and where people start. No such default has ever existed. A construct that measures people from a point nobody ever occupied makes everyone divergent by its own logic, which leaves it nothing to separate.
Each misreading imposes evaluation and meaning on a neutral condition that an accurate accounting of its reality does not contain. This is why a misreading cannot be corrected by adjusting its output, a label. The process of reading needs to change. The same holds when a construct is used as an identity, which can be an act of defence against imposition but does not address the process that formed it.
Everyone inside this meaning-making loop is affected by the process, those doing the reading as much as those being read, so the cost falls on everyone regardless of what is intended.
The DIVERGENTE Triad
The triad is a ring of blurred edges, because none of these forces precedes the others and the boundaries between them are porous.
These divergences are event horizons, for good or ill. Good when respected as an opportunity, ill when repressed. An event horizon is a portal and causes distortion and disruption, where the maintenance of the “normal,” observable world breaks down. Like an event horizon, these divergences cannot be ignored.
Why These Colours
These colours are boldly neon as they express the structural immutability of each divergence. The colours are not “normal.” Like structural divergence itself, they “queer” normal.
Luminous Cyan functions as a threshold colour, bright, clear, and structurally poised between blue and green without collapsing into either. It sits perceptually on a boundary in human vision, which mirrors the reality of Sex Divergence: categories dissolve, rigid binaries fail, and existence occupies spaces conventional systems cannot parse. Its higher brightness is appropriate, because Sex Divergence is often the divergence that reshapes social perception first. On a dark background, cyan becomes a membrane of light, precise, liminal, and unmistakably transitional.
Electric Magenta behaves like a cognitive artifact, high-saturation, high-energy, and perceptually synthetic. It does not exist as a single wavelength of light. The brain constructs it by reconciling contradictory signals. That makes it the precise visual analogue for Neurodevelopmental Divergence: pattern-making under tension, complexity becoming coherence, and signal-processing that does not follow conventional routes. Its slightly darker value is the correct asymmetry for representing depth of internal processing. It reads as an interior intensity rather than a surface signal.
Neon Chartreuse acts as a salience colour, immediate, directional, and impossible to overlook. The visual system assigns priority to this yellow-green range because it signals relevance, attention, and relational orientation. That placement aligns exactly with Socio-Sexual Divergence, which concerns attraction, desire, and the patterns by which people turn toward or away from one another. As the brightest of the triad, chartreuse correctly occupies the role of relational signal. In this synthetic intensity it feels like a flare or a vector.
What Is Here
The site holds short films, interviews with divergent artists, narrative experiments, creative writing, installations, and other exploratory forms that test these ideas in human, aesthetic, and social terms, particularly where dominant cultural narratives tend to smooth over difference or erase it entirely.
The Coherence Athenaeum is a traversable artistic universe of narrative film, ergodic literature in digital and physical form, sculpture, painting and prose, existing simultaneously in digital and physical space. The Codex Scroll is the traversal atlas for moving through the work across media.
The Very Present Future (2011 to present) is a long-form interview series articulated around one question: how is the world better because this person is in it?