The Sovereign Zone: A Defense of Artistic Praxis and the Delay

 

Peter Davidson - pomegranate delay and scintillation on rock hook

Perspex drypoint etching on paper

8 cm on 10 cm 

The Sovereign Zone: Art Finished Through Delay and Scintillation

I’m building a language for artists — not for art historians, critics, academics, or bureaucrats. They’ve made their own languages, but those dialects fail to capture the actual delay between the optical and the spatial.

That delay manifests as a scintillation of influence — a vibration that only stops when the artist decides the work has reached its apogee. This is why an artist refuses to paint or draw all the way to the edges. To do so would be to finish a "graveyard image," dead and static.

The nature of that delay is where true influence happens. It’s the gap where every viewer sees the work differently. That isn’t a mistake; it is the fundamental nature of how we perceive space, light, and material.

The Sovereign Zone: A Defense of Artistic Praxis and the Delay

The Architecture of Restriction

In the traditional studio, rules function as a form of architectural order. They regulate the margin, the edition, the depth of line, and the cleanliness of the surface. Often, these standards restrict the artist before they even begin, crushing the scintillation of the original idea at the edges of the plate in a rush to produce a "finished picture". These standards claim to be neutral, but they rest on a shaky assumption: that the artist, the institution, and the world occupy the same synchronized present. They do not.

The Language of the Apogee

In my own studio, I work with salvaged Perspex, exploring the interaction between perception, action, and material. Printing free from historical rules—ignoring whether a plate is perfectly straight or beveled—forces me to see the work differently every time. I have stopped chasing the “perfect edition,” which is often just a static, dead image. Instead, my focus has shifted to the sovereign space of the print itself—the territory where experimentation, friction, and discovery happen.

Through this practice, I have observed a perceptual interval:

t_0 + D

(The Sovereign Delay: the interval between perception and action).

By the time perception becomes action, the moment has already shifted. The artist does not inhabit institutional time; they inhabit this interval. While galleries, museums, and schools operate on coordinated schedules, the studio—both historically and today—is a temporal outlier. This delay is where true influence occurs.

The Studio as Sovereign Jurisdiction

At Two Dogs Art Space, I treat the studio as a laboratory for independence. I do not work according to rules imposed from outside. I negotiate with materials, perception, resistance, and time, tracing the friction that makes the work my own. Praxis is not compliance; it is negotiation. To impose institutional criteria too early collapses the delay and stifles discovery. Without delay, there is no risk; without risk, there is no innovation.

Material as Data: Witnessing Delay

Across printmaking, painting, drawing, or performance, the medium records the delay. The tool acts as a seismograph, capturing friction and resistance:

• Printmaking: Using salvaged Perspex introduces a field of prior events—scratches, marks, and resistance. The burr is the crystallization of delay; plate tone is atmospheric evidence. Cleaning the plate into uniform compliance erases the trace of negotiation that gives the work its origin.

• Painting & Drawing: Each stroke records a staggered response. To paint or draw all the way to the edges just to complete a “picture” often suffocates the scintillation. In drawing the landscape, I map the friction of my own nervous system, not the yard.

Innovation and the Right to Opacity

Innovation cannot occur where outcomes must be legible in advance. It requires opacity—a protected interval where the work is not yet synchronized with institutional time. I defend that interval. Engagement with the institution may follow, but it must follow sovereignty, not precede it.

Art does not emerge from the clock. It emerges from the perceptual structure between eye and hand. When the needle enters the Perspex, I am not following a manual—I am tracing delay and asserting jurisdiction over time itself. In that interval—between perception and action—the artist must remain free.

Peter Davidson - Study of delay, eyetracking and aging

pencil coloured pencil felt tip pen and pastel on paper

20 cm x 12 cm

Why Nothing Reacts Instantly

        A (age)

          ↓

t0 → [D] → [δ] → Reaction

      ↑      ↑

     α       F

 (attention) (fatigue)

          ↓

          T

 (training ↓ δ)

No system reacts instantly.

Not a person.
Not a robot.
Not a computer.
Not an AI.

Whenever something responds to something else, time has passed. That delay isn’t random. It follows a simple structure.

You can write it like this:

t_reaction = t0 + D + δ

That looks technical, but it isn’t complicated.

It just means:

The time something reacts
equals
the time the input happened
plus the time spent waiting
plus the time spent thinking.

That’s it.

---

Step 1: Something Happens (t0)

This is the starting point.

A light turns on.
A sound is heard.
A message arrives.
A ball is thrown toward you.

That moment is t0 — the beginning.

---

Step 2: The System Waits (D)

Before reacting, the system has to gather the information properly.

Your eyes need a fraction of a second to register light.
A microphone collects sound in tiny chunks.
A network collects packets before passing them along.

This waiting or collecting time is D.

It’s not “thinking” yet.
It’s stabilizing the input.

If you try to react before this stage finishes, you’re reacting to incomplete information.

---

Step 3: The System Thinks (δ)

After the input is gathered, the system has to decide what to do.

Your brain chooses whether to move.
A robot calculates motor output.
A program runs an algorithm.
An AI runs its model.

That thinking time is δ.

---

Step 4: The Reaction

Only after both steps happen do you get the response.

So the full story becomes:

t_reaction = t0 + D + δ

No reaction can happen before the waiting is done.
No reaction can happen before the thinking is done.

Every response is built from those two pieces of delay.

---

Why This Matters

When something feels slow, people usually say, “The system is slow.”

But this model lets you ask a better question:

Is it waiting too long?
Or is it thinking too long?

If the waiting time (D) is large, maybe the buffer is too big.
If the thinking time (δ) is large, maybe the processing is inefficient.

Instead of blaming “slowness,” you can locate the cause.

 

Peter Davidson -pomegranate delay and scintillation

pencil, coloured pencil felt tip pen and pastel on paper

16 cm h x 10 cm w

The Sovereign Zone: Art Finished Through Delay and Scintillation

I’m building a language for artists — not for art historians, critics, academics, or bureaucrats. They’ve made their own languages, but those dialects fail to capture the actual delay between the optical and the spatial.

That delay manifests as a scintillation of influence — a vibration that only stops when the artist decides the work has reached its apogee. This is why an artist refuses to paint or draw all the way to the edges. To do so would be to finish a "graveyard image," dead and static.

The nature of that delay is where true influence happens. It’s the gap where every viewer sees the work differently. That isn’t a mistake; it is the fundamental nature of how we perceive space, light, and material.

Art Is Space

Sometimes people think of art as a line — something moving from past to future, from influence to mastery, from one artist to the next. But art does not unfold like that. Art is a space. It emerges through the marks we make in the studio, through the delay between seeing and making, between energy and matter.

In that interval, the studio becomes a field where perception negotiates with material. Each mark produces tension, vibration, and space. It scintillates. And the work only truly finishes when the artist knows to stop — before technique collapses the field.

Delay as Structure

The space of art does not pre-exist the work. It emerges through making. Between perception and execution, intention and materialization, there exists a thickness — an interval I call the praxis of delay.

This is not hesitation or indecision. It is structural. The line trembles, the brush hesitates, the pencil wavers — and in that trembling, scintillation appears. It is the visible proof of energy negotiating resistance.

Marks do not merely occupy space; they generate it. Each mark adds to a field that is alive, charged with tension. Influence is not linear; it presses spatially, overlapping temporalities, and resonances in the present moment.

The Edge of Life

Vitality in art depends on restraint, not endless addition. A painting or drawing does not die because it is unfinished. It dies when technique dominates resistance. When the hand obeys expectation, when form is confirmed rather than discovered, the field collapses.

The edges — the boundaries of the spatial field — are the most sensitive. Stopping before these edges die is not failure; it is completion through delay.

Historical examples show this clearly. Michelangelo’s Rondanini Pietà hovers between emergence and dissolution. Rough marble remains; forms are partially revealed; the material resists the artist’s hand. Leonardo’s unfinished drawings leave areas of searching lines beside intensely worked zones. Cézanne’s late landscapes leave patches of canvas exposed. In all cases, the works are finished at the precise moment when delay generates scintillation and the space remains alive.

Stopping Through Delay

Completion must be redefined. Conventional completion seeks polish, closure, and demonstration of skill. Completion through delay preserves tension, sustains resistance, and allows space to breathe. Scintillation is not a stage on the way to finish — it is the condition of true finish.

A work is complete when the vibration between perception and material stabilizes: when the field is fully charged but not collapsed, when the edges still pulse with possibility. Contemporary practice reflects this principle. Drawings and paintings that allow hesitation, tremor, and instability — rather than perfect alignment of hand and eye — produce a field that lives beyond execution. The studio praxis of delay creates the Sovereign Zone: a spatial interval in which energy, perception, and material continue to interact even after the mark is made. Mastery lies not in control, but in knowing when to stop.

The Sovereign Field

Art’s sovereignty comes not from authority, but from its structural independence: from the irreducible interval of delay, from the thickness of space produced by marks, and from the visible presence of scintillation. The artist’s role is not merely to depict or communicate, but to enact a field of tensions and resistances, to generate space through mark-making, and to recognize the moment when the work is fully realized — finished precisely through delay.

Art does not exist as a line along which influence travels. It exists as a spatial field of overlapping pressures. Studio praxis produces marks; those marks generate space; that space produces scintillation. The work stops just before technique can kill the field. In this suspension, the work is sovereign: alive, present, and complete.

Completion, in this sense, is not closure. It is vigilance, restraint, and awareness. A living field cannot be forced to perfection without killing its vitality. The Sovereign Zone exists wherever mark, delay, and space coincide. This is where art breathes, where it resonates, and where it endures.

I am not writing this to dismiss the efforts of the past. Michelangelo, Leonardo, Cézanne, and countless others have shown what is possible in the field of art. Rather, this is an effort to create a language for artists themselves — a vocabulary born from studio praxis, from delay, from marks that live in space and scintillate with energy. This language describes how art is made, how space is generated, and how influence moves, so artists can speak to the realities of making without relying on chronology, authority, or external validation.

The Physics of Resistance: Toward a Theory of Jelly

 

Peter Davidson - Eye Tracking Pomegranate

Pencil coloured pencil felt tip pen, pastel on paper 

18 cm h x 12 cm w

Drawing has always been described from the outside—through technique, history, or the rhetoric of accuracy—but rarely from within the lived friction of making. This essay begins from that interior ground. It proposes a new vocabulary for the felt physics of drawing, one built not from academic theory but from the stubborn, resistant, scintillating encounter between perception and material. By naming the substance of this encounter—what I call Jelly—I aim to give drawing a language equal to its own experience.

The Physics of Resistance: Toward a Theory of Jelly

I. The Myth of the Temporal Delay

In traditional studies of drawing, the space between the eye’s perception and the hand’s marking is often described as a temporal delay—a pause or a lag. This is a misunderstanding. The eye does not wait, and the hand does not hesitate. What occurs is a structural encounter: a field of resistance that arises the moment perceptual energy meets material form. This field is not empty; it is a substance. I call this substance Jelly.

---

II. The Sovereign Zone and Scintillation

Between the motif and the mark exists the Sovereign Zone. This is a “thickness” of the present—a dense, non-linear space where perception, the body, the stubbornness of the material, and the emerging mark coexist without hierarchy. In this zone, the eye does not command the hand; they negotiate.

The evidence of this negotiation is visible in the mark itself. When a line appears unstable, fragmented, or flickering, it is not a failure of technique. It is Scintillation: the spark generated by the friction of making. Scintillation is proof of the Sovereign Zone in action.

---

III. The Structural Constant: From Donatello to Whiteout

Jelly is a phenomenon that transcends epoch, style, and medium. It is a structural constant of praxis.

• Donatello encountered Jelly in the resistance of marble, where the stone pushed back against his physiological intent.

• Cézanne navigated it through planes of color, where the optical depth of the mountain collided with the flat reality of the canvas.

• William Coldstream sought to measure it in the deliberate discrepancies between the eye’s coordinates and the surface’s reality.

Whether the tool is a chisel, a brush, a texta, or whiteout, the resistance remains the same. The difficulty of drawing is not a hurdle to overcome; it is the realization of resistance. It is the physics of making:

J = I_optical ⊕ M_mark

In this equation, J (Jelly) is the result of optical energy (I_optical) negotiating with material form (M_mark). The ⊕ symbol represents the resistance and interaction that occurs in the Sovereign Zone.

---

IV. Spatial Negotiation vs. Temporal Record

Adopting the framework of Jelly shifts the conversation from time to space. The artwork is no longer a record of a moment captured in time. It is a resolution of tension. The surface of a drawing does not store time; it stores distance made visible.

---

V. Conclusion: A New Vernacular for Praxis

Defining the Sovereign Zone and the Jelly within it provides a precise lens for artists, curators, and historians. By moving beyond discussions of lineage or influence, we can understand art as a universal negotiation with material resistance. To understand Jelly is to understand that the mark is not merely a response to the world—it is a dialogue with it.

 

Peter Davidson - Pomegranate of rock hook

Pencil coloured, pencil, pastel on coloured pastel paper - F4

The Sovereign Zone: Spatial Non-Coincidence in the Act of Drawing

The common understanding of drawing follows a linear sequence: the artist sees, time passes, and the hand responds. In this model, the discrepancy between object and mark is treated as delay — a problem of the clock.

Sustained practice suggests otherwise.

If chronology is removed, what remains is not duration but resistance. What we call “time” in drawing is more accurately a spatial condition: a field of tension between the eye and the surface. The present is not a point moving forward — it is a thickness through which energy must pass.

---

The Physics of Influence

In this spatial model, drawing is not a record of minutes but a negotiation of force.

Light enters the eye as perceptual charge. Pigment meets paper as material resistance. The difficulty of drawing is not slowness — it is conversion.

Let:

Iₒₚₜᵢcₐₗ = Optical Intensity (perceptual energy entering the eye)
Mₘₐᵣₖ = Material Inscription (the resistance of surface and medium)

What is misread as delay is more precisely described as Spatial Non-Coincidence (Δs) — the irreducible offset between perception and inscription.

This relationship can be expressed as:

  Δs = Iₒₚₜᵢcₐₗ / Mₘₐᵣₖ

This occurs within what I call Jelly — the mediating field in which observer, motif, and surface coexist.

The equation does not measure skill. It describes strain.

• When perceptual intensity exceeds material resistance, Δs increases: lines tremble, corrections multiply, scintillation appears.

• When material resistance dominates, Δs compresses: marks become inert, over-determined.

Drawing does not eliminate Δs. It renders it visible.

---

The Sovereign Zone

Jelly is the Sovereign Zone of drawing.

It is not time extended, but space thickened. Within this zone, the artist does not advance along a timeline; they navigate a field.

Hesitation is not lateness.
Correction is not delay.
Both are movements within thickness.

A drawing does not store time.
It stores distance made visible.

---

The Davidson Hypothesis

Through practice and reflection — later clarified symbolically — the following expression emerged:

  t₀ → t₀ + D

This does not describe chronological succession. It describes structural displacement.

D is not elapsed time.
It is the thickness of influence between perception and inscription — the displacement required for energy to crystallize into matter.

Perception and mark are not sequential events. They are offset positions within the same spatial field.

The hypothesis is named in honor of my mother and father.

---

The De-Chronologized Mark

If drawing is spatial rather than temporal, the artwork is not a historical record but a preserved field of resistance.

Museums frame works through dates, encouraging distance: this happened then. Yet a mark does not transmit the past — it transmits optical resistance in the present.

When an observer looks at a drawing made centuries ago, reflected light enters the eye now. The negotiation of Δs resumes. The original artist and the current viewer become co-occupants of the same Sovereign Zone.

A drawing does not transmit time.
It transmits tension.

---

The Auditor of the Yard

Value is not measured chronologically but biologically.

Consider the independent dog in the yard — a metaphor for the honest observer. A dog does not respond to dates. It responds to presence.

It senses scintillation — the visible flicker produced when perceptual intensity meets material resistance.

In spatial terms:

  Scintillation ∝ Δs

Scintillation is the visible effect of non-coincidence — the vibration of a mark under strain.

To the dog, this flicker is not historical. It is immediate. Learning occurs through sensing resolved and unresolved tension within the field.

---

Conclusion

A 21 cm × 29.7 cm drawing is not a souvenir of duration. It is a bounded perimeter of negotiated influence.

Within that perimeter, eye, hand, and surface occupy offset positions in a shared field. The present does not pass — it thickens.

A drawing is a spatial map of negotiated resistance, existing in a permanent present for any observer willing to enter the yard.

Hypothesis: Jelly Ontology: Spatial Non-Coincidence and the Evolutionary Resolution of Artistic Creation

Eye tracking grapes
Pencil coloured pencil texta and whiteout on paper
18 cm h x 12 cm w

Hypothesis: Jelly Ontology: Spatial Non-Coincidence and the Evolutionary Resolution of Artistic Creation

This work does not offer a scientific account of vision, physics, or cognition. It advances a hypothesis drawn from practice: that seeing involves energy, and drawing is the point at which that energy is compelled into material form.

The language of physics—its equations, its treatment of delay, displacement, and resistance—is used here as metaphor rather than measurement. These structures provide a way to articulate what drawing repeatedly reveals: a persistent gap between optical perception and the spatial mark. This gap is not experienced as time passing but as resistance. It is a productive non-coincidence that shapes how form evolves on the surface.

---

The Temporal Illusion

Within the traditional humanist model of artistic creation, the process unfolds as a linear sequence: the artist sees, the mind interprets, the hand responds. Any deviation between motif and mark is framed as latency—a problem of speed, hesitation, or timing.

Sustained studio practice at the Akashi Research Centre suggests a different structure. The mark never coincides with what is seen, not because the artist is too slow, but because the two never occupy the same spatial condition. What is typically called “time” appears instead as a structural non-coincidence between perception and inscription.

This irreducible gap—the field of influence between optics and the surface—is defined here as Jelly.

---

Note on Derivation

This essay proceeds from a working hypothesis formed through drawing itself. It does not claim to describe optics or matter scientifically. Instead, it uses Einstein’s idea of mass–energy equivalence as a conceptual scaffold: if light can be treated as energy, and pigment as mass, then the so-called “delay” in drawing can be understood as the point where perceptual energy struggles to become material.

---

The Material–Energetic Grounding (Hypothesis)

To move beyond the idea of delay as time, this work suspends the separation between perception and matter.

Einstein’s formulation is used here only as a structural guide:

Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared

(E = m × c²)

Within this hypothesis, light entering the eye is treated as Optical Intensity (I_optical), or energy (E). Pigment deposited on the surface is treated as Material Inscription (M_mark), or mass (m). The claim is not that physics explains drawing, but that this equivalence offers a useful way of describing what happens in practice.

From this perspective, the difficulty of drawing is not a failure of coordination. It is the resistance encountered as perceptual energy is negotiated into material form. The artist experiences this as tension rather than time.

---

Jelly Ontology and the Sovereign Zone

Once time is no longer required as an explanatory device, drawing takes place within what I call the Sovereign Zone (D). This is not a pause or a moment, but a thickness of the present in which influences coexist.

Within this zone, Jelly operates as a continuous field of sensorial influence. It does not flow or transmit information. It presses, bends, and resists across space. The eye, body, and surface are present at once, but never coincident.

Creation is therefore re-described through Spatial Non-Coincidence (Delta_s) rather than temporal delay:

Total spatial discrepancy

Delta_s_total = Delta_s_O + Delta_s_B + Delta_s_M + Delta_s_J

Where:

• Delta_s_O = optical spacing

• Delta_s_B = bodily reach and orientation

• Delta_s_M = material resistance

• Delta_s_J = Jelly influence

These are not stages. They exist simultaneously.

---

Jelly Influence

The Jelly Influence is the irreducible gap between what is seen and what can be marked:

Delta_s_J = I_optical minus M_mark

This gap cannot be trained away. It is not solved by intention or accuracy. It is a spatial condition encountered every time a mark is made.

Its visible evidence is Scintillation—the flicker, instability, or fragmentation in the drawing. This is not a stylistic choice or a failure of technique. It is the record of energy meeting resistance as it collapses into material form.

---

The Evolutionary Resolution

The conceptual clarity of the Jelly Ontology resonates with the posthuman framework articulated by Robert Pepperell. His account rejects the notion of a bounded subject acting upon an external world, instead describing perception and action as emerging from an extended field of relations.

This alignment clarifies that Jelly is not a private sensation but a shared spatial condition. The “offset realities” observed in the yard at Akashi—between eye, ground, hand, dogs, and canopy—are not perceptual errors. They are the visible traces of an organism negotiating a spatial constant rather than a human clock.

---

Conclusion

The artwork is not a record of time passing. It is a spatial map of negotiated influence. Drawing does not capture a moment; it resolves a tension. By bringing together a practice-based hypothesis, the Jelly Ontology, and posthuman thinking, this work shifts art away from representation and toward manifestation.

The surface does not store time. It stores distance made visible.

---

Glossary of Terms

Jelly

A continuous field of sensorial influence between optics and inscription.

Sovereign Zone (D)

The thickness of the present where influences coexist without linear time.

Scintillation

The visible flicker in a mark produced by energy meeting material resistance.

Spatial Non-Coincidence (Delta_s)

The structural gap between seeing and marking.

I_optical

The energy intensity of light as it is perceived.

M_mark

The material mass of pigment deposited on the surface.

---

Acknowledgements

This inquiry was sharpened through engagement with Robert Pepperell’s The Posthuman Condition, whose early arguments provided the conceptual resonance needed to understand these studio observations as part of a shared spatial reality.

The Rocket and the Silo: Reimagining Art Education

 

Peter Davidson - Self Portrait 2026

Pencil felt tip pen white out on paper

13 cm h x 11 cm w

The Rocket and the Silo: Reimagining Art Education

The integration of AI into the art school system is at times treated with scepticism and framed as a modern invasion, yet we have been ceding human functions to machines for decades. Just as the spellcheckers on early Macintosh computers replaced the manual diligence once required by the typewriter, AI has quietly evolved in the background of the creative process. We have transitioned from the “Wright Brothers” era of basic automation to a “rocket-level” sophistication in generative technology. This evolution isn’t a future threat; it is a present reality already woven into the fabric of artistic education.

The urgent question is no longer whether AI belongs in the academy, but how students of painting, printmaking, ceramics, and sculpture—alongside art history and curatorial majors—will adapt. As the tools accelerate, students and professors alike must find a way to maintain their creative sovereignty in an age of automated craft. However, the most glaring obstacle to surviving this acceleration is the current siloed methodology of art education. Today, these areas of study are strictly departmentalized, creating a fragmented experience that stifles the very synthesis required by the modern world.

This wasn’t always the case. Decades ago during my postgraduate research, I witnessed a different model: a singular, expansive space where undergraduate and postgraduate students practiced performance, video, drawing, photography, installation, painting, and printmaking side-by-side. This environment was more than just a shared room; it was a site of constant, organic peer-to-peer learning. One could walk in at any time and gain insight from a master of a completely different medium. As one professor noted, it was a period of unprecedented creative vitality—a “best-of” era that unfortunately ended when the retirement of key faculty allowed the silos to return.

Years later, I asked that professor where the inspiration for that communal model had originated. He traced the idea back to a lecturer in the United Kingdom who had pioneered the concept to immense success. The striking irony is that this “big space” philosophy mirrors the architecture of Artificial Intelligence itself. AI is not siloed; it is neither linear nor chronological. It functions by pulling unique seams of knowledge from across its entire algorithmic landscape, connecting disparate ideas instantaneously. By clinging to rigid hierarchies, art schools are operating in direct opposition to the way information—and creativity—now moves.

A recent example of how this unsiloed thinking can succeed was evident at the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto (MoMAK). In the Collection Gallery’s exhibition, the curator bypassed traditional periodization to exhibit artists’ “pulses” in juxtaposition. This experience validates the Axiom of Delay: the understanding that artistic praxis exists in the non-temporal interval between seeing and doing, t₀ → t₀ + D. At MoMAK, the 1965 Informel-era work of IWATA Shigeyoshi sat in conversation with the 1895 silk compositions of FUKADA Chokujo. Despite being separated by seventy years, both works emerge from the same “sovereign space.” When we remove the “when” of a piece, its agency is restored as a living force.

This framework even allows a radical re-reading of Leonardo da Vinci. His unfinished works are often framed as failures of persistence, but through the Axiom of Delay, they become perfectly complete. For Leonardo, a work was finished the moment the scintillating energy of the concept reached its limit. To push further would be to slip into technical virtuosity—the habitual execution of craft—rather than the living presence of the Delay.

Ultimately, AI I think will help art students experience fine art as a pulse, not a clock. As the MoMAK exhibition revealed, the future of museum experiences—and by extension, studio praxis—lies in the scintillation of the artist’s work as it happens, rather than where it is located on a historical timeline. This is the pivotal difference. To compete with the rocket-level speed of AI, the academy must dismantle its walls. By fostering a big space that mirrors the interconnectedness of AI while protecting the uniquely human interval of the mark, we allow students to work not by the clock of the institution, but by the pulse of the creator.