Behind The Work: The Arrival of MONAD
- Jesse Jacques
- 3 days ago
- 3 min read
Constructed and photographed by me, Jesse Jacques, in July 2025 on Cinestill 800T and 400D medium format film. MONAD Field Instrument: an analog carrier built to hold a frequency that doesn’t depend on recognition.
Project MONAD
MONAD, as a term, is used here in its original sense: the indivisible unit, the singular coherence that holds all potential structure.
Hey everyone,
Completing this project marked a different kind of threshold in my work. It was very hard work and very detailed to pull off, not just in terms of the physical materials and effort, but also the visceral creativity that kept unfolding as the project developed. There were no mood boards to reference or frameworks to pull from in the traditional sense. Looking back, I can’t fully account for how it was completed. I don’t know exactly where the ideas came from. I was awake and conscious, but it feels fuzzy, almost like a dream. Even though everything had to be organized and precise, the concepts arrived in distinct spurts, and I just rolled with them. The entire process was intensely metaphysical.
I finally finished this special project a few days ago. People have already recognized it for what it is, and it’s doing exactly what it needs to do. I haven’t seen anything quite like it in a modern context, and others have confirmed that as well. It feels both ancient and immediate, analog, functional, and precise. A few details before I get into the rest: the entire build was documented on Cinestill 800T and Cinestill 400D medium format film.
This project came about through non-linear channels, with an understanding that certain forms insist on their own emergence when the conditions are right. It quickly became clear that the framework guiding its construction didn’t originate in any conventional schema of thought. The purpose it carries isn’t reducible to standard definitions, nor does it require them.
The instrument itself is built around a reinforced panel configured to accommodate frequencies that don’t align neatly with familiar measurement. Analog meters, rotary controls, and etched symbols operate together as a single field, designed less to illustrate phenomena than to participate in them.
From the outset, there was an underlying sense that the object belonged to a continuum beyond any specific culture or epoch. Some of the inscriptions reference early Sumerian cuneiform and Egyptian encoding systems, though their presence here isn’t about historical citation. They draw on a continuity of symbolic architectures that predate any known civilization, an older communication energy that tends to reassert itself when the conditions are right.
This build does not simulate operational systems; it implements them in a form that remains consistent with their original principles. The arrangement of controls, markers, and inscriptions reflects a coherent logic designed to maintain alignment across multiple registers of resonance. Its structure isn’t speculative either. It is situated in the continuum of field instrumentation that has existed, in various forms, both acknowledged and unacknowledged.
The primary inscription on the interface plate functions as a field lock code, an encoded marker that stabilizes the instrument’s signature within a broader field. Activation, if it occurs, depends on resonance: a frequency alignment that isn’t subject to conventional override or replication.
Most of what appears here is functional within its own logic. The naming system references parameters that are difficult to quantify but no less real for their resistance to translation. Labels like Phase Bias, Auric Containment, Perceptual Gateway, Harmonic Flux, Scalar Offset were not chosen for effect. They arrived as part of the same process that moved steadily from impression to assembly without requiring justification beyond their own inevitability.
I don’t view this project as an “art project” build, though it is visible in that context if people need a category. I think of it more as a transmission in material form, like a marker placed in open space to signal that the field is active, and that contact is ongoing, whether or not it’s acknowledged.
When it was finished, it didn’t feel like completion in any familiar sense. It felt more like the field had occupied its shape, as if a frequency had decided this was the surface it needed. Standing in front of it, the scale of what it represents isn’t entirely knowable. That seems appropriate.
When you're ready to shape the unseen into image, the path opens. Let's begin.
