Foundational Principles
Artwork:
RT Latchman — Field of Conditions
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Polyphonic (Contour-Shared) Portraiture
This work introduces RT Latchman’s ongoing practice of Polyphonic Portraiture:
“A newly defined form (and a new body of work) formalising contour-shared, multi-reading portraits into a disciplined method.”
A single portrait constructed so it can be read in more than one coherent way—face, figures, and meaning held together within one continuous contour logic.
At first, a profile appears. As the eye settles, the image opens into three aligned presences: a central monk in debate, a contemplative meditator, and an onlooking witness. A cross-axis threads through the composition, not as decoration, but as structure—binding action, reflection, and perspective into a unified field.
For non-specialists, the experience is immediate: the image shifts, yet remains whole.
For specialists, the difficulty is architectural: shared contours that serve multiple forms without collapsing, layered legibility, and a disciplined economy of line where each stroke carries more than one role.
Placed alongside the accompanying text, the portrait becomes a visual statement of dependent origination: what looks like a single event is shaped by near causes and conditions, while those conditions themselves arise within a wider world-field—the character of an era. Seeing both levels together is the deeper seeing.
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Field of Conditions
Arising, Ending, and the Structure of Reality
What we call an event— a beginning, an occurrence, a manifestation — is never isolated.
It arises from near causes and conditions: the immediate interactions, mechanisms, and circumstances that bring something into appearance.
Yet those near conditions themselves do not stand alone. They exist within a broader world-field of conditions — the character of an era, a regime, a context — that shapes what can arise at all, what can persist, and how things come to an end.
This world-field is not an abstraction added after the fact. It functions like the season of reality: determining what flourishes, what fades quickly, what stabilises, and what must change course.
"To see only near causes is to see partially.
To see both the near conditions and the world-field together
is to see dependent origination more completely." - R. Latchman
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Arising and Ending Are Not Opposites
In the energy–matter domain, no arising is absolute and no ending is final in the sense of nothingness.
What arises is always a structured mode: a configuration, regime, excitation, pattern, or identity that becomes manifest under conditions.
What ends is not substance itself, but the persistence of that mode — its stability, coherence, or defining identity.
An ending may take many forms:
• relaxation into equilibrium
• decay of an excited state
• loss of coherence
• transformation into another regime
• absorption into a wider system
• disappearance relative to a chosen boundary of observation
Thus, every arising implicitly carries a space of possible endings, defined by the same conditions that allow it to arise.
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On Spontaneity and Impermanence
Even phenomena described as “spontaneous” in physics are not unconditioned.
Spontaneous emission, tunnelling, and metastable transitions are decays of configurations that cannot persist indefinitely.
So-called vacuum phenomena depend on field structure, boundary definitions, and interaction possibilities.
There is no fundamental entity that is free of conditions,
and no condition — even the vacuum — that stands alone without further relational grounding.
Arising depends on prior configuration; often it depends on the ending of a previous regime — not the disappearance of substance, but the reconfiguration of structure.
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R. Latchman