Julie Mehretu and the Supercanvas
This text does not try to solve the hard problem of consciousness. It asks a narrower question: how can a complex system hold together as a coherent whole without being organized by a single governing center? This is a question about form and organization, not about why experience exists at all.
Looking at the paintings of Julie Mehretu, this question becomes almost unavoidable. At first there is too much to hold in view: layered architectural traces, movement lines, erasures, spatial fragments that seem to occupy different scales at once. The eye keeps trying to find a center, something that would organize the rest, but nothing stabilizes long enough to take that role.
Instead, something else happens. The painting does not resolve, but it also does not dissolve. It holds. Not as an image of something, but as a situation in which relations continuously modify one another. No mark is read in isolation; each alters the field in which the others appear. Nothing is fixed, but nothing falls apart. What remains is a kind of sustained coherence without a single point of origin.
At this stage, it is still unclear what exactly is being seen. It is not representation in the usual sense, but neither is it chaos. Its organization emerges through perception: as attention moves, relations become visible, disappear, and return in altered form. The eye stops searching for a single governing structure and begins to follow distributed dependencies instead.
The name supercanvas emerges from this difficulty of description. Not as the name of a new object, but as a way of describing a mode of organization. A supercanvas is a field in which global coherence arises from recurrent relations among locally distinct elements. No element contains the whole, and no single center governs it. Yet each element is constrained by the larger configuration it helps to sustain.
At some point, this stops being only about painting. Not because painting becomes something else, but because a related organizational problem appears in other domains whose processes cannot be fully understood in isolation. The comparison is structural, not literal. Mehretu’s paintings do not model the brain; they make a certain kind of distributed organization perceptible.
The brain is one such system. It contains specialized regions and indispensable hubs, but no single locus appears sufficient to account for conscious experience as a whole. What neuroscience describes as distributed activity, recurrent interaction, and coupling across multiple scales can be approached in this way: as an organization in which local processes retain their distinctness while being continuously shaped by the wider networks in which they participate.
Where something happens therefore still matters, but location alone is not enough. What also matters is how local events are coordinated and constrained within a changing whole.
At this descriptive level, a conscious episode can be approached as a temporally bounded organization of distributed activity: not a static state, but a configuration that maintains a degree of coherence while its contents continue to change. This does not explain why such organization is experienced. It specifies only the form the explanatory problem must take: how multiplicity can present itself as one without being reduced to a single center.
And at this point, language begins to reach its limit, because what is being described is not an object among others, nor a hidden structure governing them from behind, but a mode of organization that exists only while it is being maintained.
The supercanvas is not the surface on which this happens. It is the happening that temporarily becomes a surface.
(text by Ekkehard Ehlers)
