averaging toward dominance

The risk the same property produces. An average is weighted toward whatever was most numerous — the most photographed faces, the most represented traditions; entropy operating on a corpus, and the discretisation discretising the singular warns about performed at scale. It is also the same operation as the Gaussian that turns up whenever many independent contributions are summed with none dominating, which is why octaves and this node are describing one mechanism rather than two: the centre of a distribution and the average of a corpus are the same place. So work made from averages is not innocent of the bias critique: it is made of exactly the thing being criticised. The position that holds: averaging is a genuine problem when averaged output is presented as finished cultural content, and becomes the actual subject when used transparently as unresolved material inside a transformation that reintroduces singularity by hand, at a different scale, from a different apparatus.