"Mathematics and I have never been close. Recognising our growing indifference towards each other I thought it might be good to learn more about their them, what makes them tick and how we can bridge the gap. I started by reading Roger Cooke’s The History of Mathematics – A Brief Course and on page two, paragraph one, it states, “For example, it is known that there is no finite algebraic formula involving only arithmetic operations and root extractions that will yield a root of every quintic equation when the coefficients of that equation are substituted for its variables.” Fuck you, Mathematics.

The first strain in the relationship, between Math and I, started early. In grade two I was taught by a Mercy Nun, called Sister Doyle whose teaching pedagogy was based around humiliation and her only source of creative thinking was manipulating the traditional function of objects to inflict pain. Sister Doyle wouldn’t just look at a whistle as a device for calling attention, she would recognise the strap that held it around her neck as a tool for whipping legs. A ruler was not just for making straight lines, when turned on its side and slapped against the knuckles of six-year-old children it caused pain, fear and anxiety. On a particular day in May, Sister Doyle was trying to teach us how to write the number 9. Her method was to run the top of the number over the line then bring it back. Under her tutelage we had to write the number 9 many, many, times as she came around the class making sure we ‘ran it along the line’, slapping the knuckles of anyone who didn’t meet her standards with the side of a ruler. She then chose several students, including me, to get up in front of class and show how they couldn’t do it right, slapping our hands with the ruler whenever we didn’t do it properly."

"Besides using the graphic reproduction of numbers as a torture prompt Sister Doyle’s other love was telling and retelling of the apparitions at Fatima. As anybody who had a catholic education before the banning of corporal punishment would know, the story of Fatima revolves around three young Portuguese shepherds, seven consecutive months meeting on the thirteenth of each month in the same spot to speak to an angel, who then hooked them up with the Virgin Mary and seventy thousand Catholics witnessing the sun careen towards the earth, then do a dance and go back to its original spot. Sister Doyle would show us a library book that included a photograph, taken in 1917, of the three young Portuguese shepherds, Lúcia dos Santos and her cousins Francisco and Jacinta Marto. They are dressed traditionally against the stone wall of a barn with the sternest of stern expressions. As Roland Barthes writes when he sees a photograph of Napoleon’s brother Jerome, “I am looking at eyes that looked at the Emperor”, when you see the image of the three young Portuguese shepherds, “I am looking at eyes that have seen the Virgin Mary and ears that heard an angel say “What are you doing?” The photograph relegates the appearance and proclamations of the Holy Mother to an ordinary, objective and detached image of the three young Portuguese shepherds standing in front of a barn. It’s a photograph that simultaneously shows the divine and the irrelevant. It is like, if a photograph of my brother, sister, and I on a beach holiday, standing in front of a change shed, wearing last year’s togs becomes a parable to guilt young Catholics to say the rosary daily so they can have everlasting life and avoid eternal damnation in the furnaces of hell and do their math homework."

"The closest I came to witnessing an apparition was in 1997 when I was unrealistically stoned, living in Glasgow, and a friend and I played 'OK Computer' by Radiohead for the first time. We both sat there listening…motionless…silent as any concept of time dissolved around us, we saw the future and asked it pertinent questions that encompassed all of humankind. The future was generous with its time but eventually got bored of our questions and asked us to leave, I thought it was tad aggressive. You can’t relive the first time you experience something, which is both frustrating and beautiful, but like the three young Portuguese shepherds my visit from the future had a call for action. The next day I went to Java Internet Café and paid £10.00 for an email address as the bloody future didn’t tell me about Hotmail, which was free. This event essentially started my relationship with the algorithmic realm and in the two decades since I, and the community of humans I share the earth with, have fertilised the algorithm with a dizzying array of nonsense. French philosopher Bernard Stiegler represents our relationship between the human condition and technology with the Greek word, Pharmakon meaning both poison and cure. While the development of digital technologies has had undoubted utilitarian benefits to our lives through developments in medicine and the open availability of knowledge, it has also imbedded us into a system that doesn’t recognise or understand our capacity for reflection, judgement, aesthetic sensibility or as Stiegler says, ‘spirit’. As we proceed in an orderly fashion towards a future where the formation of us as individuals is algorithmically directed, Steigler and others suggest using technology to create the communities and economies that provide ethical, moral, aesthetic and artistic value. Recognising that technology is not outside of ‘spirit’ but an essential part of it."