Somnambulating The Singularity

Every function which is not a mere constant must have at least one singularity, either accidental or essential. For it must have an infinite value: if this be a determinate infinity, the point is an accidental singularity; if it be an infinity among a set of values at the point, the point is an essential singularity.

—Andrew Russel Forsyth, Theory of Functions of a Complex Variable, 1893¹

We will soon create intelligences greater than our own. When this happens, human history will have reached a kind of singularity, an intellectual transition as impenetrable as the knotted space-time at the center of a black hole, and the world will pass far beyond our understanding. This singularity, I believe, already haunts a number of science fiction writers.

—Vernor Vinge’s essay, “First Word” in Omni, Jan. 1983²

At this time, the Big Bang, all the matter in the universe, would have been on top of itself. The density would have been infinite. It would have been what is called, a singularity. At a singularity, all the laws of physics would have broken down. This means that the state of the universe, after the Big Bang, will not depend on anything that may have happened before, because the deterministic laws that govern the universe will break down in the Big Bang. The universe will evolve from the Big Bang, completely independently of what it was like before. Even the amount of matter in the universe, can be different to what it was before the Big Bang, as the Law of Conservation of Matter, will break down at the Big Bang.

—Stephen Hawking’s lecture, “The Beginning of Time,” Stephen Hawking Estate, 1996³

Much has been said about the relationship between the detonation of the first atomic bomb and whatever the hell this thing is we call “Post-Modernity.” The Trinity Test’s 25-kiloton explosion and resulting mushroom cloud is regarded as the singularity demarcating the existential condition of Post-Enlightenment 20th century, in much the same way as the capacity for consciousness in generative machine learning is speculated as being the singularity determining the conundrum of the Digital 21st century. Whatever portal opened up under the aegis of the Manhattan Project in Jornada del Muerte, New Mexico, on July 16th, 1945, we’ve been thrashing about on the other side of that irrevocable trespass ever since.

A similar narrative is to invoke the detonation of the atomic bomb as the radiated dawn of the digital age—as the moment circuits revealed themselves as vulnerable to disruption by dint of their centralizing tendencies. Within that radical singularity and its transient electromagnetic disturbance event, computers went from mechanisms for calculating to machines for communicating. And we’ve been digitizing the world away from closed circuits and toward the switching and distribution of routers ever since.

Singularities are useful. They are tools for defining limits. But it would be a mistake to consider their invocation neutral. Whether ‘the singularity’ be summoned as a function, an imaginal, or a model of reality, it acts as a banishing force: it allows a reality to stand without worrying too much about the messiness of its assemblages. It cauterizes untidy loose ends and performs an exorcism of the autochthonic past by dint of a wholly alien future.

In this capacity, singularities are misleading. As super-compressed, infinitely dense clown cars go, ‘The Singularity’ runs on the mysticism of the impenetrable and the promise of the cryptic. It trucks in both looming abstraction and slogan simplicity; its allure comes from being the esoteric verging on the accessible.

Etymologically, The Singularity assumes presence of the Latin singulus: solitary, lone, individual, not divisible. But if we tease the term and its passengers out into the light, we find ghosts of mathematical, sci-fi, and scientific ilk. There are many prophets of The Singularity, but I’ll focus on the three that open this essay: Andrew Russel Forsyth, a 19th- and 20th-century mathematician; Vernor Vinge, a 20th- and 21st-century science fiction writer and professor of mathematics; and Stephen Hawking, a 20th- and 21st-century theoretical physicist. The reason? If we are going to track into the event ghosts of our current age of digitalis, we need to address the contours of the singularity as tool. And by tool, I mean conjuration, in the most hauntological and Derridian sense: the invocation of smooth, geometrical curvatures and vanishing points in order to stabilize, contain, and abolish the untetherings, multiplicities, and superpositioned assemblages that are the ghosts haunting our current somnambulant terminology of ‘AI.’

Infinity-Shaped Ghosts

Forsyth’s Theory of Functions of a Complex Variable clocks in at 658 pages with an additional 24 dedicated to an index. It is a dense and highly complex work of mathematical theory, the complete understanding of which I cannot claim to have. But I do get that on page 64, Forsyth invokes the term ‘singularity’ to refer to mathematical points that take on exceptionally singular positions. These points are exceptional because that is where you’ll find a function that takes on an “infinite value.” This is the polite, mathematical way of saying the singularity is the point at which an equation “blows up or becomes degenerate”⁴—when some function becomes unintelligible to the model attempting explanation. And why does a function start smoking cigarettes and hanging out with the wrong crowd? Because it takes on hyperbolic growth. For Forsyth, the ausserwesentlich singulàre Stelle and its unwieldy exponentials can be rehabilitated, but only in certain, determinate “accidental” cases, like when it’s a result of deliberately excluding a variable from the equation. That said, the essential cases are unmanageable, period. And the person behind the equation has no idea why.

In Forsyth’s mathematical singularity we see something very familiar to our 21st-century retrograde capitalist situation: the abstraction of runaway growth. And whereas sometimes this runaway growth is a ‘known unknown’ kind of technical problem (or capitalist objective), at other times this infinite value lurks as an ‘unknown unknown’—the military term for unanticipated and untheorized risk (made absurd by US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in 2002). Those are situations where we cannot fathom or recognize why such a singular thing exists or is growing at an uncontrolled rate. For military forces, those singularities are threats to be pursued with uncurbed and extreme prejudice. For capitalist forces, those singularities are the abstraction of infinite profit, to be pursued and fomented through the magic of the markets. Boogieman or boon, the singularity is unchecked and uncheckable, unmitigated and unexplainable—real even if unknown.

Another rhyme with Forsyth’s mathematical singularity is the ever-present and infinitely quoted Moore’s Law, first presented in 1965 by Gordon Moore, then an engineer in the semi-conductor R&D sector. In that paper, Moore documents how both the manufacture and component parts of microchip technology has doubled every two years since the introduction of the microchip in 1959.⁵ Fast forward to the 1980s and 1990s, Moore’s observation has become law and this law morphs; it becomes microprocessing and computer power that is doubling every two years.⁶ This slippage from quantity to capacity is not incidental. Neither is the slipstream way that singularities are incessantly haunted by a future-focus on rapid, unchecked expansion, without a need for explication or even a recognition of historical circumstances and events that created such assemblage bloat. Moore himself gave a nod to the clown-car nature of techno-logomancies; the title of his 1965 paper is “Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits.”

With Forsyth, ‘the singularity’ surfaces in the 19th century as a mathematical tool for modeling equation points that exhibit infinite growth; it then becomes an economic tool for modeling the growth curves of technological development. Dovetailing with the morphed formulation of Moore’s Law of the 1980s and 1990s, The Singularity then slips fully into title case as a narrative tool for modeling the imaginal, as evidenced in Vernor Vinge’s writing. Vinge’s original 1983 publication is a one-page essay for Omni Magazine that states, “we are in a point of accelerating the evolution of intelligence itself.”⁷ Vinge’s singularity (still lowercase in the Omni article) is that of super-charged progress unencumbered by economics, materials, or techne; it is evolutionary, without the inconvenience of waiting around in epochal time. Infinite value is merged completely with exponential growth and all accidents are banished for an essential, alien future, not just unknown, but unknowable to us here on this side of the divide, no matter how far jammed into the funneled point of progress we happen to be.

To be fair to Vinge, he is more of a boomer than a doomer; he sees the singularity as a frightening, if necessary, pupa stage to get to cosmic butterfly form. But his vision of the singularity is that of profound limit, positioning us as becoming model-less at the dawning of a new reality, which he sees as a problem and impasse for human creativity:

This singularity, I believe, already haunts a number of science-fiction writers. It makes realistic extrapolations to an interstellar future impossible. To write a story set more than a century hence, one needs a nuclear war in between—to retard progress enough so that the world remains intelligible.⁸

This dilemma will not remain relegated to the nagging problem of writer’s block. For Vinge, it will encompass all human pursuits. Vinge’s position undergoes a distinct transformation between the 1983 Omni article and his 1993 NASA lecture: The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era. In the former, the singularity is an intellectual transition presented as an evolutionary development; in the latter, The Singularity is no longer an imaginal limit, but a dogmatic horizon and vanishing point, worthy of title case, that “contradicts some of our most deeply held notions of being.” He ends his presentation, which details the possibilities of ‘superhumanity’ and foreshadows current ideations of the post- and trans-human, by quoting Freeman Dyson:

I think Freeman Dyson has it right when he says: “God is what mind becomes when it has passed beyond the scale of our comprehension.”⁹

From mathematical enigmas to economic mappings to imaginal limits imposed by hyper-rapid evolutionary growth to trans-human origin story and mythos, the singularity becomes The Singularity—that impasse where our reality grants no affordances of what’s to come.

For Stephen Hawking, the singularity is more than an impasse—it is where the laws of the very universe “break down.” According to Hawking, the rules of physics are the rules of the universe, and any malfunction of the rules is a limit on reality. This favorite phrase, that “the laws of physics and the universe break down,” harks back to Forsyth’s invocation of singularity as “exceptionally singular positions that take on infinite values.” Both are demure ways of saying that the application of our models to certain further quadrants solves less and less, so that at some point, the elsewhere surrounding those diminishing returns overwhelms workable equations. The Singularity becomes the point punctuating the conical representation of black holes, where all workable coordinates of Relativity’s space-time converge and collapse in on themselves. The Singularity marks the endpoint of our model of reality.

Again, this is useful, especially since, as the adage goes, mathematics is the language of physics. Singularities get imagined as the inverted apexes of black holes—those great cosmic unknowns—and sweeping geometric arcs that plot unknowable infinities in “points of no return.” And certainly, Hawking’s use of the term is legitimate, given his bailiwick of theoretical physics. His work is built on, and exists as mathematical proofs of, previous work by Sir Roger Penrose in 1967, J. Robert Oppenheimer and Hartland Snyder in 1939 (yes, that Oppenheimer), Karl Schwarzschild in 1916, and Albert Einstein in 1905, all of which predicted areas so dense, not even light can escape. As scientific output, Hawking’s work has a right to say—our model is reality. The caveat is, of course, that this is true up to a nice, tidy point that, paradoxically, contains infinity.

The Prophet’s Oxymorons

Given such expansive use over the past 130-odd years, and its recent re-emergence around generative machine learning, not only are singularities hard to kill,¹⁰ they proliferate across time and disciplinary boundaries with an oozing mobility, sometimes as point, sometimes as horizon, always as terminus. Native to this territory are the strange oxymorons that truck the prophets of the singularity around, cutting deep grooves along the lines of The Singularity’s etymological slippages. It’s easy to sleepwalk the singularity in those clown-car grooves. And if you do, you willfully ignore some curious absurdities: infinite points, infinity doubling, things pursuable but unidentifiable, unconstrained evolution. There are also catabolic contradictions, metabolizing usefulness into catastrophic—and almost transcendent—unknowables. Manageable accidentals belie interminable essentials; expansion gravitates to and from infinite points; the alien call of the trans-human coming from inside the hominid house; reality not fitting with the math. If you don’t banish the oxymorons, it reveals that contingency isn’t something “out there” past any singular point, but the very guts and sinew of whatever reality we think we’ve figured out. 

What’s even more contradictory given the frequency of The Singularity’s end-times invocation is the staying power of venturing past it. Mathematicians, sci-fi writers, and physicists have not stopped doing the work of making sound equations, imagining worlds that exist elsewhere, and inventing models of reality. Mathematicians still calculate, sci-fi writers still speculate, and theoretical physicists still search for a set of rules that won’t “break down.” Cixin Liu’s The Three Body Problem, serialized in 2006, published as a book in 2008, and lauded as an extraordinary work of science fiction, deliciously turns the singularity on its head. Alien Trisolarians embed supercomputers in protons that act as scramblers, arresting Terran science until they can arrive and colonize. The result: instead of the laws of physics breaking down, physicists themselves start breaking down. No Vingean impasse of creativity there. And physicists have not stopped trying to figure out how to make quantum mechanics get along with Einsteinian space-time, in the same way that the theories of Relativity took us beyond Newtonian physics. String theory, quantum gravity, entropic gravity—all are positing different models of the real. And, as for mathematicians—they still pursue with zeal the challenges of unsolved math problems and conjectures.

So let’s not summon The Singularity somnambulisticly. Just like the terms “consciousness” and “AI,” singularities, whether invoked in lowercase or title case, tend to embrace the riddle as fundamental and intrinsic, eradicating the ability to act. We damn the future even though we are making its past in the present. The tell-tale oxymorons that haunt the singularity get smoothed out in the abstraction of math. Speculation strikes as naive or worse—indulgent. Any invention seems a null one—or an unnecessary one. We forget that The Singularity is never singular, always a composite, and a badly analyzed one at that, to use Henri Bergson’s definition of multiplicity. And it is these unnecessary, multiple, and messy oddities that clatter and haunt us in the present, as the inheritance of the past. These ghosts challenge us to ask: Are we consigned to mathematical models of reality as limit? Can we track our technological and mediatic assemblages without smoothing out the uncanniness and paradoxes that seem to prop up our universe?

Hyperobjects, Worlding, Weird History

Timothy Morton tries with hyperobjects,¹¹ those realities that cannot be seen directly but are certainly thinkable, computable, and feelable, like radical climate shifts, star-death, and capitalism. Unlike the sharp, bounded infinities, hyperobjects are oozy, elsewhere things (“Gaussian, disturbingly squishy and mollusk-like”); although they are disorienting in their massively-distributed scale they are “weird physical objects” rather than abstractions of thought; they are cthulhu-like in that through an uncanny phasing we find their tentacled shadows everywhere, but have difficulty locating their dimensional existence; they are as sticky and interstitial as our own physicalities.¹² By saying that there is here even though we can’t grok it using Enlightenment reason, Morton offers something beyond the bogeyman or boon: no inexplicable other, just ourselves.

Federico Campagna takes a different tact. Rather than object-orienting the elsewhere, he makes the metaphysical enactable and the subject a performing node of the metaphysical—what he calls worlding.¹³ Once the metaphysical as storytelling is locatable in our very sinew, worldings, like all physical systems, die and they do so before new ones are born. This happens, not in clean-cut transitions, but by way of messy adolescent stages where “the old metaphysics no longer applies and there is no new narration as yet in place.” These entropic junctures are weird times of transmission, where something of the past’s “metronomes of worlding” survive, even if warped into something not themselves, insinuated into the membranes of what is not yet cohesive.¹⁴ We scavenge, precariously, as post-apocalyptic, post-worlded subjects, lording over the flies and eating the carrion of a decomposing world. This is the grotto, the grotesque of transmutation, through which we pass with help from a ‘tetrapharmacon’ of figures: the metaphysician, the mystic, the shaman, and most importantly for Campagna, the prophet. Instead of points of total breakdown, Campagna offers temporal, if sprawled, entanglement and the imaginal faculty as the living force of the real.

Another mode that avoids somnambulating The Singularity: talking to ghosts. History tends to be positioned as that which is over and no longer exists. Imaginally, history is surveyed as if it was a land of total darkness, like William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land, peered at from the safe heights of the present’s Last Redoubt.¹⁵ Narratively, we like our history monumental, progressive, or secret. But just like Hodgson’s Night Land, if you trek into in, you’ll have no problem finding ghosts, uncanny valleys, reversals and a surprising contingency of the now, as viscous and phased as Morton’s hyperobjects and accretive as Campagna’s imaginal worldings. 

Unlike hyperobjects which tug and loom in the present with their gravitational future, and unlike worldings at their peak, which offer a particular story of the future, our ghosts of weird history squirm with slime-mold motility as an inheritance in the present. This is the inheritance of the versions of time and space we take for granted, the forgotten events which built those versions of time and space, the modes of engagement that we execute with a parasympathetic automation that bolster these versions of time and space. Our ghosts tell us that we don’t so much occupy a reality (as if it was Euclidian space) but ooze as, of, and in reality. Such oozy reality is a cthulhuscape: the eldritch, plasmodial multiplicity animating us, capable of both tentacular flux and chitinous durability in every task at hand.

The writhings of reality are never singular but multiple, contingent, and superpositioned, with some close to the surface, creating tidal force, while others swarm down in the deep, opening up without witness like hydrothermal vents. Weird history is where we can track the ghosts of reality as invented time, space, light and energy, as elder singularities, hyperobjects, and worldings. It is the non-existent real. From this primordial soup we sprout as cilia, accidental but repeated, living off of, and moving along with, the very ooze, never as termini but as portals between the transcendent mythos of the outside and the bio-archetypal inside, the memory of the past in our inherited present that generates futures. To track the ghosts of weird history is to track how reality’s superpositions shift, fracture, surface, collide, and breach known pathways with new motilities. Ghosts can tell us how and why we live under broke-down realities.

Our current age of 1s and 0s, of fingers and screens, of both the atomic bomb and AI, is a digital one. But it is also contorting away from even that imaginal. More apt would be to say we live in the age of digitalis. Digitalis (often referred to as Foxglove) is a poisonous plant that also has a very narrow therapeutic index—in small doses, its toxic cardiac glycosides boost heart muscle contractions, changing pulse rates and heart blood output. Encapsulated in the modern drug digoxin, digitalis can treat arterial fibrillation and congestive heart failure.¹⁶ But encounter it in the wild and in abundance, its beauty is a deadly one. The digital age is an abundant one, but it’s also an imminent, twisted plane for forgetting the ghosts of singularities past. It’s no wonder the age of digitalis feels psychotic. Scrolling and dissolution is our manner of engagement. We scroll for the novelty and within microseconds it dissolves into the screen. Algorithmic time gives way to Allorhythmia and folded space is a crushing quantization. We are worried about AI, but we already say “my phone won’t let me…”  We are specters of screens. Is that singularity? Or ghost-riddled habit?

The Kafkaesque Knots of Psyche-Physics

The real in the age of digitalis and AI wrestles not so much with the problem of technology, consciousness, or The Singularity but with the problem of time, space, and light—of a kind of psyche-physics. During the mid-to-late-20th century, presentational electricity surfaced with television and our time became relay-instantaneous and our space scannable. This is not a distinct era but flows in superposition with dominance in the late 1800s and early 1900s of representational electricity—morse code, wireless, and radio. In between these two eras of electricity, around 1901 and Max Planck’s paper on black-body radiation¹⁷ and Einstein’s invention of Relativity,¹⁸ light shifted from circuiting electricity to quantum energy. Energy was invented as finite, and capable of great untetherings. Then, in superposition with the televisual age, predating it, fomenting with it, and, though taking over a century to become necessary, the digital and the digitalis subsumed the time and space of television with the demands of quanta and its dispersals: packet-switching, folded, holographic space, and algorithmic time. And here we are again, with time, space, light, and reality shifting with generative machine learning and its ability to mutate our favorite evolutionary virus: language. We are learning to speak to the machines and they talk back to us with the language of the past.

To come to terms with the atomic bomb, the age of digitalis, or AI, we need not invoke singularities, but to remember that our technologies are always rife with ghosts—time, space, light, and reality as repetitions, created and recreated. All our techno-mediatic assemblages are hauntological, to use Jacques Derrida’s term. Hauntology is what you get when you track the imaginals of the past as both no-longer existing but nonetheless real. This is a counterpart approach to Mark Fisher’s use of hauntology to parse the futures that never were. Hauntology reminds us that the ghosts in our machines don’t go away just because a singularity is on the horizon. They are properties of the real.

We might need to give up futurists—those prophets and scholars of what is to come. Prophecy gets people beheaded, and to be a scholar you need a school. And instead of ‘ists’ we might need to become ‘ers’—trackers. That is what weird history requires: tracking. We tend to apply ‘ist’ to things we consider conscious—birds are not ‘flightists’ they are flyers. This is a bias toward being that makes us fall in love with singularities and forget the very ghostly ground we walk on, somnambulating the singularity, riding around in its clown cars (which, admittedly is fun), and forgetting the very oddities that make up our versions of time, space, and light. To recognize the history of our psyche-physics we must not look at the future as alien, but to the past as alien oracle. To do so, you become a weird historian, capable of tapping into the mesh of contingencies and generative power of our cthulhuscape reality.

The Gordian Knot, though infamously dispatched in a moment of sword-wielding by Alexander, was woven somehow, whether by Midas or some nameless peasant. Rope laid out, experimentation with bending and looping configurations happening again and again, until what was linear and directional becomes an interpolated multiple, dense with superpositions. These are the tectonic tendrils of the singularity that we want to track and the paths we want to trek. And this path is not an infinite curvature, soaring beyond our limits. Rather, the path through weird history is similar to the one Franz Kafka speaks of in his first aphorism:¹⁹ like a rope stretched, not high in the air, but barely above the ground. It (and its knots) seems designed more for stumbling than for walking along it.

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Notes

1. Forsyth, Andrew Russel. Theory of Functions of a Complex Variable. Cambridge, 1893, p. 64 https://books.google.com/books?id=BgyqsRDEVhAC&q=64#v=snippet&q=64&f=false. ↩︎
2. Vinge, Vernor. “First Word.” Omni, Jan. 1983, p. 10, https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?59833. ↩︎
3. Hawking, Stephen. “The Beginning of Time.” Stephen Hawking Estate, 1996, https://www.hawking.org.uk/in-words/lectures/the-beginning-of-time. Accessed 4 July 2025. ↩︎
4. Weisstein, Eric W. “Singularity.” From MathWorld—A Wolfram Resource. https://mathworld.wolfram.com/Singularity.html. Accessed 4 July 2025. ↩︎
5. Moore, Gordon. “Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits.” Electronics, vol. 38, no. 8, Apr. 1965, https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102770822/. ↩︎
6. Tuomi, Ilkka. “The Lives and Death of Moore’s Law.” First Monday, vol. 7, no. 11, Nov. 2002, https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v7i11.1000.
   https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/1000/921
   “Whereas Moore’s observation was originally about the number of components on a lowest–cost chip, it was, however, quickly extended outside this well–defined area. There have been three main extensions, which all transform Moore’s Law qualitatively. First, Moore’s Law has been defined as the “doubling of processing power on a chip every 18 months” (e.g., Gates, 1997). Second, it has been defined as “doubling of computing power every 18 months” (e.g., Gore, 1999). Third, it has been defined as “price of computing power falling by half every 18 months” (e.g., Gordon, 2000).” ↩︎
7. Vinge, Vernor. “First Word.” Omni, Jan. 1983, p. 10, https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?59833. ↩︎
8. Ibid. ↩︎
9. Vinge, Vernor. The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era. Originally Presented at VISION-21 Symposium Sponsored by NASA Lewis Research Center and the Ohio Aerospace Institute, March 30-31, 1993. 1993, https://users.manchester.edu/Facstaff/SSNaragon/Online/100-FYS-F15/Readings/Vinge,%20The%20Coming%20Technological%20Singularity.pdf. Accessed 8 July 2025. ↩︎
10. Wood, Charlie. “Singularities in Space-Time Prove Hard to Kill.” Quanta Magazine, 27 May 2025, https://www.quantamagazine.org/singularities-in-space-time-prove-hard-to-kill-20250527/. ↩︎
11. Morton, Timothy. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. U of Minnesota Press, 2013. ↩︎
12. Ibid., pp. 3, 64, 50. ↩︎
13. Campagna, Federico. Prophetic Culture: Recreation For Adolescents. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021. ↩︎
14. Ibid., p. 19 ↩︎
15. Hodgson, William Hope. The Night Land. Eveleigh Nash, 1912. ↩︎
16. “FOXGLOVE: Overview, Uses, Side Effects, Precautions, Interactions, Dosing and Reviews.” WebMD.Com, https://www.webmd.com/vitamins/ai/ingredientmono-287/foxglove. Accessed 1 Aug. 2025. ↩︎
17. Planck, Max. On the Law of Distribution of Energy in the Normal Spectrum. Annalen der Physik, Vol. 4, p. 553. https://strangepaths.com/files/planck1901.pdf ↩︎
18. Einstein, Albert. On a Heuristic Point of View about the Creation and Conversion of Light. Annalen der Physik 17, 1905, p. 132-148, p. 1. Einstein_Light_Quantum_WikiSource.pdf ↩︎
19. Kafa, Franz. The Aphorisms of Franz Kafka. Edited by Reiner Stach, Translated by Shelley Frisch, Princeton University Press, 2023, p. 2. ↩︎

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Image Sources

Figure 1. The Sleepwalker by Elfriede Lohse Wächtler, 1919

https://collections.lacma.org/node/178230

Figure 2. The Works of Mars by Romeyn de Hooghe, 1671

https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/arbeid-van-mars

Figure 3. The Fool’s Cap Map of the World, c. 1585

https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/fools-cap-map-of-the-world

Figure 4. Illustration from The Motor Car Dumpy Book by TWH Crosland, 1904

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_motor_car_Dumpy_book_(IA_motorcardumpyboo00crosiala).pdf#Licensing

Figure 5. Plate from The Human Soul: Its Movements, Its Lights, and the Iconography of the Fluidic Invisible by Dr. Hippolyte Baraduc, (1896)

https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/baraduc-soul

Figure 6. Illustration from Chromolithographs of Cephalopods by Jean Baptiste Vérany, (1851)

https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/verany-cephalopods

Figure 7. The Fourth Knot, woodcut by Albrecht Durer, c. 1507

https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/durer-knots