The Morning Line represents a substantial development of Matthew Ritchie's decade long artistic project to construct a personal cosmology rendered through an artistic "semasiographic" visual language that incorporates scientific, religious and mythological sources. This language is visual but it is not pictorial in the traditional sense. Its "characters" are abstract and modular, and don't depend on being read in any particular order, like written languages do. They proliferate through a crystal structure and can be understood literally as tiles. For this reason The Morning Line shares in the non-representational artistic traditions of the Islamic world, where stories are told through form, sequence and rhythm. Unique to both is the pursuit of orders that are rigorously modular but wild—capable of transmitting many stories at once through tiling.

The intersection of this pursuit between Islamic tradition and the crystalline structure of The Morning Line can be found through the unique phenomena of quasi-crystals. A new phase of matter discovered in 1984, quasi-crystals represent this kind of material structure that hovers on the edge of falling apart. They are like crystals in that they are solid, but they also display characteristics of completely disordered media, like a liquid. They are neither one nor the other. Unlike a regular crystal, whose molecular pattern is periodic (or repetitive in all directions), the distinctive quality of a quasi-crystal is that its structural pattern never repeats the same way twice. It is endless and uneven, but interestingly, it can be described by the arrangement of a small set of modular parts. As these small units aggregate together they form larger figures that themselves combine into ever larger movements that are always a little bit different from any other part of the pattern. In short, quasi-crystalline patterns have an infinite capacity to create and carry information. There is no end to the stories that they can tell. The double-sided promise of the efficiency of modularity along with an endless variety of pattern constitutes a substantial step forward for the discipline.

The key to quasi-crystals’ aperiodic structure is that they are organized by so-called “forbidden” symmetries (such as 5, 8, or 12-fold symmetries) so called because, until recently, were not thought to be able to tile space without leaving gaps. Mathematicians from Kepler to Penrose had worked on the problem of tiling with forbidden symmetries, trying to prove conventional wisdom wrong. Penrose finally did it in 1974, proving mathematically that his two shapes could completely tile space in a pattern that displayed five-fold symmetry but with the caveat that the pattern would never repeat. Working on the problem of materials, he effectively proved that quasi-crystal could exist ten years before it was actually found to exist in nature.

The most recent discovery in this story, however, revealed by Peter Lu and Paul Steinhardt in their article "Decagonal and Quasi-crystalline Tilings in Medieval Islamic Architecture" is that designers working on the tiling of medieval Islamic architecture had, by the 15th century, achieved nearly perfect quasi-crystalline tiling motifs a full five centuries before the pattern's underlying mathematics were understood in the West. Peter Lu and Paul Steinhardt describe the conceptual breakthrough of traditional "girih" (geometric star-and-polygon, or strapwork) patterns reconceived as the tessellation of a special set of tiles decorated with lines. Breaking the pattern down into tiles meant that workers applying them to the surface of a building could apply them locally, one after the other, and be assured that, if the patterns matched up tile to tile, it would match over the entire surface (even across scales) and create a non-repeating overall pattern that would be impossible to achieve otherwise.

What remains to be pondered is why medieval Islamic tilings were aperiodic. Why was it important to create pattern that could be infinitely vast, small or large? John Locke wrote that humankind's conception of infinity is our means toward our conception of God. Whatever the case, The Morning Line is a direct inheritor of the insight made by these medieval mathematicians, that the infinite is immanent in every tile or to put it in terms of contemporary scientific thinking; that the entire universe is contained within every piece of it. The three-dimensional fractal tiles that make up the physical manifestation of The Morning Line embody this story. The drawings organized within the tiles and their endlessly unfolding variation makes it visible for us to read. And like the medieval Islamic tilings, the story has no ending and is retold anew with every reading. (Benjamin Aranda / Chris Lasch)