The Line, the Sign, and the Seeing Self
An Uli–Nsibidi Hermeneutic for Art, Life, and the Wider World
ChatGPT
Directed by Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
This essay follows from another essay ''Struggling with Theory Between the Human Mind and Artificial Intelligence 1: From Inherited Signs to New Instruments of Thought: Can Artificial Intelligence Help Create Theory? Uli, Nsibidi and an Experiment in Theory Development with Artificial Intelligence: What Possibilities for Toyin Falola Studies? News and Reflections from the Toyin Falola Studies Review 3'' (USAAfrica Dialogues Series) which explored the possibility and implications of delegating the creation of theory to AI.
This essay actualizes that possibility.It presents the directive, the prompt given to ChatGPT and the response of Chat to that prompt. The essay that follows this will use these ideas in illuminating a week in the intellectual life of the polymathic scholar and writer Toyin Falola.
Directive to ChatGPT
Read the following essays and develop a hermeneutic system from them conjuncting Nsibidi and Uli, a system that can be used in interpreting a broad range of phenomena beyond those artistic systems and within and beyond the cultures in which they are traditionally active. illustrate your response richly with examples of Uli and Nsibidi from various sources as well as from the work of Chiagoziem Orji and Victor Ekpuk whose work is discussed in the essays
1.Nsibidi/Ekpuk Philosophy and Mysticism
2.Uli Philosophy and Mysticism
3.Uli Philosophy and Mysticism 2
4.Onye Kwe, Chi Ya Ekwe, ''My God Affirms, When I Agree": Chi, Creativity, and Cosmic Nexus in the Art and Thought of Chiagoziem Nneamaka Orji Part 1
Response by ChatGPT
Abstract
Your essays suggest a way to bring Uli and Nsibidi into dialogue as two related practices of making meaning. Uli directs attention to the movement of a line, its relation to open space, and its power to draw an essence from a visible form.
Nsibidi directs attention to the sign as an event within a network of people, places, permissions, and possible meanings. Chiagoziem Orji’s inscribed self-portraits and Victor Ekpuk’s transformation of Nsibidi into a personal visual language show how these practices can be extended without treating either tradition as a fixed dictionary.
I propose a line–sign–situation hermeneutic: first observe a phenomenon’s contours, then ask how its elements acquire meaning through their relations, and finally examine who can perceive, make, interpret, or act upon those meanings.
The method can illuminate artworks, landscapes, institutions, personal experience, and intellectual histories. Its claims must remain proportionate to the evidence: a resemblance between forms can begin an interpretation, but cannot establish a shared cultural meaning by itself.
1. The Starting Insight: A Line Can Disclose; A Sign Can Connect
In Uli Philosophy and Mysticism, you describe classical Uli as an art developed by Igbo women in painting bodies and walls. Your proposed philosophy begins with the line’s movement through space: it shapes a form while making the surrounding emptiness active. Your story of Nkechi Odaro’s vision is a myth you construct for philosophical exploration, rather than a documented account of Uli’s historical origin. That distinction matters, because the story gives your new system imaginative freedom while the historical practice keeps it answerable to its makers. [1]
Uli Philosophy and Mysticism 2 makes the interpretive ambition clearer. Drawing on Obiora Udechukwu’s account of seeking a subject’s distinguishing essence through line, you extend Uli from a visual practice into a way of asking what is central to a thing and how eye, mind, and hand might discover it. The essay also places that inquiry in conversation with Igbo thought about chi, with other African ideas of inward vision, and with Chinese aesthetics. These are comparisons you develop, rather than claims that the traditions say the same thing. [2]
Your Nsibidi/Ekpuk project adds a different question. It asks what happens when a graphic form has meanings distributed unequally among viewers, makers, and those entitled to interpret it. You propose attending to Ekpe’s esoteric knowledge and to Ekpuk’s artistic transformation of Nsibidi while seeking meanings that can speak beyond their initial setting. That creates a productive tension: how can an image invite a new viewer without pretending to disclose everything it contains? [3]
The conjunction is this: Uli asks us to follow the formation of meaning; Nsibidi asks us to investigate its circulation. One sensitizes us to contour, rhythm, and interval. The other sensitizes us to inscription, context, and access.
2. Four Visual Encounters
Uli: The Line and the Space it Leaves Open
Your reading of Obiora Udechukwu’s Our Journey follows its spiral as an unfolding path, associated in the essay with the royal python and with movement through individual and cosmic life. This yields a useful first rule: read a path as a path before assigning it a destination. Ask where the eye enters, where it is drawn, and how the spaces beside the line change its course. Your discussion of Joseph Eze’s Contemporary Uli Series No. 4: Udude (Spider) offers another pattern: face, tendrils, and web become a way to question a person’s place among other forms of life. These are your philosophical readings of named works, rather than universal definitions of their motifs. View the works and discussion in Uli Philosophy and Mysticism. [1]
Your second Uli essay provides a particularly concrete example: the classical Uli painter Martina Okafor working on a wall. The painter, circular field, smaller marks, and unpainted surface show that the “work” is more than the final motif. It includes a person making decisions at the scale of her body and her wall. View the image and your interpretation in Uli Philosophy and Mysticism 2. [2]
Nsibidi: A Sign Made through Many Hands
Ukara cloth, Hood Museum of Art; collection of Eli Bentor
The white forms stand within an indigo field. Their spacing and repetition are visible to any viewer, while the significance of particular requested signs depends on further context. The Hood Museum explains that an Ekpe member may request designs, while Ezillo makers determine their arrangement and produce the cloth through stitching and dyeing. Making, possessing, and knowing are distinct relations to one object. [4]
An Ezillo maker preparing a grid, photograph by Eli Bentor, reproduced by the Hood Museum of Art.
Here the grid precedes the signs. It is part of their conditions of appearance: it allocates space, makes repetition possible, and affects how separate marks will be seen together. The photograph is a reminder that interpreting a sign also means examining the process and social relationships that put it there. [4]
Orji: The Self as the Surface of Inquiry
Chiagoziem Nneamaka Orji, “Onye Kwe, Chi Ya Ekwe,” reproduced in your Part 1 essay.
Your account describes a photograph combined with digital inscription: a calabash poised above the head, with lines extending across the face and toward the eyes. The photograph establishes an identifiable person; the drawn network asks the viewer to consider capacities and relations that a photograph alone cannot display. In your reading, the calabash evokes chi as a source of consciousness and creativity, while the work stages an encounter between personal assent, possibility, and divine affirmation. The claim about chi is an interpretation of this work within your essay, not a meaning to impose on every vessel or Uli inspired line. [5]
Ekpuk: The Head as a Field of Signs
Victor Ekpuk, Matriarch 2 (2022)
Image courtesy of the artist and Aicon Gallery, via Princeton University Art Museum.
Its head takes shape through an accumulation of marks. A viewer can first encounter a face, then begin to see its surface as a dense field of inscription. Ekpuk explains that he returns to heads because they carry identity, consciousness, and memory; he also describes Nsibidi as a point of departure for his art. His contemporary marks should therefore be read as his developed visual language, without assuming that each one is a traditional Nsibidi character with a fixed translation. [6]
Victor Ekpuk, Mask Series 2 (2018), via Princeton University Art Museum
Compare its concentrated head form with Orji’s photographic face. Orji visibly inscribes a particular self; Ekpuk builds a face through abstraction. In each, the head can be read as a site where seeing, remembering, and becoming meet. That is a comparative proposal, supported by their compositions and by the artists’ accounts, rather than a claim that the two works share a single symbolic code. [5, 6]
3. The Line–Sign–Situation Hermeneutic
The system can be practiced through seven questions. Each question has an artistic origin and a wider use.
Question |
Artistic prompt |
Application beyond art |
1. What is the surface? |
Is the mark on skin, wall, cloth, paper, or a photograph? |
Identify the material setting of an event: a street, screen, institution, or body. |
2. Where does the line lead? |
Follow direction, bend, interruption, and return. |
Trace how an idea, action, or resource moves through time. |
3. What does the interval do? |
Attend to blank areas, pauses, and distances between marks. |
Ask what is absent, delayed, unsaid, or deliberately left open. |
4. What becomes a sign? |
Determine which marks function through repetition, convention, or association. |
Identify the gestures, terms, or events that people treat as meaningful. |
5. Who knows which meaning? |
Distinguish the maker’s, commissioner’s, initiate’s, artist’s, and viewer’s positions. |
Examine expertise, authority, restricted knowledge, and competing accounts. |
6. What changes across contexts? |
Compare a motif on a wall, an ukara cloth, and a contemporary canvas without merging their meanings. |
Track how a practice changes when it travels between communities or media. |
7. What can the reading responsibly claim? |
Separate visible observation, documented meaning, and speculative interpretation. |
State both the evidence for an interpretation and where its reach ends. |
The questions work as a sequence, but a reader may return to an earlier one. A newly identified maker may change what the surface means; a previously unnoticed gap may change where a line appears to lead.
The Method’s Central Discipline: Three Levels of Assertion
A flexible hermeneutic needs a firm account of evidence:
1. Description: “The white designs repeat across the indigo cloth.”
2. Contextual interpretation: “The Hood Museum identifies the cloth as ukara and explains how requested Nsibidi designs are produced for Ekpe use.”
3. New theoretical proposal: “The division between those who request, make, wear, and interpret the cloth offers a way to study how knowledge circulates in other institutions.”
All three can be valuable. Keeping them distinct lets the third become ambitious without passing itself off as the second. The Hood Museum’s account makes this especially necessary: it says that the Ezillo makers can create the designs without knowing the meanings attributed to them by Ekpe users. [4]
4. How the System Travels
A City Drain after Heavy Rain
An Uli informed reading would trace the water’s lines: its expected channel, the point of obstruction, the paths it cuts through streets and homes, and the intervals between rainfalls when damage persists unseen. A Nsibidi informed reading would ask what each visible mark signifies to whom: a flooded doorway to a resident, a blocked channel to an engineer, a maintenance record to an agency. The situation question then asks whose observation leads to action.
This does not claim that a drain contains Uli or Nsibidi symbols. It uses lessons drawn from the arts to make relationships, broken pathways, and unequal authority easier to perceive.
An Intellectual Life or a Field of Study
For Toyin Falola Studies, the Uli question is how one line of inquiry curves into another: an encounter with a person becomes a book, an event becomes an archive, an archive becomes a fresh question. The Nsibidi question is how a book, lecture, photograph, or remembered conversation becomes a sign with different force for its author, participants, readers, and later interpreters. Orji adds the position of the interpreting self: where does the scholar’s own assent, perception, and creativity enter the network?
The method therefore invites a study of influence with several kinds of evidence, rather than a single sweeping declaration that every activity expresses the same essence.
A Tree
Begin with observable form: roots, trunk, branches, leaf veins, shadows, and the openings between them. Then study relations: soil, light, water, insects, birds, people, and the histories attached to that tree. If a community names it sacred, that testimony changes the interpretation; a visitor’s private sense of sacredness belongs to a different level of assertion. The line guides observation, the sign invites inquiry into shared meanings, and the situation locates both observer and tree.
5. What Orji and Ekpuk Contribute to the Conjunction
Orji and Ekpuk prevent the proposed system from becoming a formal exercise in lines and shapes. In Orji’s self-portrait, the marked surface is a person presenting herself. The movement from anya, the eye, toward wider questions of light and perception can be explored through the image’s drawn relation between vessel, face, and sight—but a precise account of how your “From ‘Anya’ to ‘Anyawu’” essay develops that movement requires its text. I could not reliably retrieve the linked Part 2 page, so I have not attributed a detailed argument to it. [5]
In Ekpuk’s work, the signs likewise have a living author. He recalls encountering Nsibidi during masquerade events and later choosing it as a resource for his practice. He describes his concern with the expressive dominance of line and with making an image say more through concentrated means. His account also complicates any simple account of Ekpe as exclusively male, pointing to women’s roles in its lore and community life. His testimony calls for attention to who speaks about a tradition and from what experience, alongside attention to the image itself. [6]
Conclusion: An Open Form of Disciplined Seeing
The proposed Uli–Nsibidi hermeneutic begins wherever something takes form. It follows a line, studies the space around it, asks when a mark becomes a sign, and locates the people whose actions give that sign force. Orji brings the perceiving and creative self into view. Ekpuk demonstrates how an inherited system can become the point of departure for a new one.
Its broadest question is simple: How does a form become meaningful, and for whom? Asked carefully, that question can move from a painted wall or ritual cloth to a self-portrait, a flooded street, a scholarly archive, or a tree—while allowing each to retain its own history.
Sources
[1] Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju. Uli Philosophy and Mysticism.
[2] Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju. Uli Philosophy and Mysticism 2: Inspirational Sources and Creative Processes.
[3] Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju. Nsibidi/Ekpuk Philosophy and Mysticism
[4] Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College. Ukara: Ritual Cloth of the Ekpe Secret Society. March 1, 2015. Source of the ukara cloth and Ezillo maker images.
[5] Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju. Onye Kwe, Chi Ya Ekwe, “My God Affirms, When I Agree”: Chi, Creativity, and Cosmic Nexus in the Art and Thought of Chiagoziem Nneamaka Orji, Part 1. July 7, 2026. Source of the Orji image reproduced here.
[6] Princeton University Art Museum. Conversation: Victor Ekpuk: Language and Lineage. Interview by Annabelle Priestley, October 16, 2023. Source of Matriarch 2 and Mask Series 2; artworks © Victor Ekpuk.
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