I. Origin: From Artifact to Motion
The Protractor first appeared as an artifact within the world of Violence. At that stage, it did not possess a general function or act as a universal system. It was a localized object embedded into the narrative fabric as a tool for fixation and transformation, without any reach beyond the immediate fictional environment. It operated on a small scale: altering perception, recording deviations, granting access to the inaccessible.
Yet even in this early form, two key characteristics were already present:

1. It did not serve the hero’s will. The Protractor was neither an assistant nor a mediator—its activation followed an opaque logic that was not reducible to the protagonist’s goals.
2. It distorted the flow of events. Its appearance did not continue the structure of the world—it caused rupture, transformation, and loss of control.

The turning point came when the Protractor began to shift: from world to world, from project to project, from function to function.
It started to migrate—not as a motif, but as a carrier of architectural intention. And each time it entered a new laboratory, it did not repeat itself but redefined the logic of the environment.
It preserved no constant form, but it retained a consistent vector—the vector of transgression.

II. Transition: How the Protractor Became a Tracer of Transgression
As the Protractor began to move between worlds, it shed its prior status as a localized object. It no longer functioned as a discrete tool within narrative logic; it began to operate as a stable vector of action, embedded in each environment under different structural pressures. Importantly, it did not repeat its function — instead, it transformed the logic of each system it entered.
In Alevtina and Tamara, it was not yet named explicitly, but its presence was central. The project functions as an initiatory incantation, where the viewer is presented with the alchemical recipe of the Protractor.
The hero comes into direct contact with it — not through knowledge, but through experience, through transformation, breakdown, and reconstruction.
This is the first registration: the Device not only exists — it can be assembled from within the subject.
It does not arrive from the outside — it emerges from within, and its emergence is an event.
In Fish, the Device takes on the role of recorder and trajectory tracer.
It tracks deaths, documents sequences of transformation, and points the way through the structure of the Shard.
It does not explain the passage, nor does it alleviate it — it materializes the logic of passage, becoming a map through collapse.
In each of these cases, the Device performs a singular, repeating function:
it marks the zone of transgression — the point of extremity, of crossing over.
It does not aid the passage — it identifies the limit and activates the breach.
This makes it not a symbol, nor a guide, nor a character.
It is a tracer of transgression, a structural agent that registers the friction between what is possible and what is not, between form and its undoing.
It does not accompany the hero’s movement — it initiates it.
Crucially, the Protractor is not autonomous. It acts not according to the character’s will, but according to the architectural logic of the author.
Its activation responds to the structural necessities of a given laboratory — not the narrative needs of a protagonist.
It is never a person, never a metaphor, never a helper.
It is a mechanism that triggers process.

III. Assembly: How Laboratories Form the Protractor
The Protractor does not stand above the worlds. It does not organize them from outside.
It unfolds through them, and each laboratory is not merely a stage for its function — it is a structural unit of the Protractor itself.
It does not gather the laboratories — they are what it is.
Each laboratory is an alchemical chamber, where a specific configuration of substance, perception, and transformation is enacted.
These laboratories are not linked by theme, style, or medium.
What unites them is an architectural task:
– to examine the structure of collapse and recomposition,
– to record the subject’s extreme states,
– to present the trajectory of transition,
– and to shape all of this as a navigable environment.
The Protractor is not what connects the laboratories.
It is what they become.
It does not “reside” in each project — each project is a realization of it.

• In Alevtina and Tamara, it functions as alchemical initiation — assembling fragments of the subject, fixing transitional forms, laying down the start of a trajectory.
• In Fish, it operates as a vertical of collapse — a drawn-out navigation module for death, where every stage of transformation is a structured unit.
• In Pizdyuchki and Venuses, it unfolds as a storage mechanism — an archive, a playable system, a theatrical protocol.

Each laboratory is a functional module within the Protractor, and the Protractor itself is their aggregated architecture.
It is not complete — new laboratories continue to emerge.
It is not static — every new project adds function, layer, direction.
Thus, the Protractor is not a mythological totem or central icon.
It is the organization of the entire system as a form —
a form that can be entered from any laboratory,
but can only be exited by passing through all of them.

IV. Functions: How the Protractor Operates
The Protractor is not a symbol, not a character, not a narrative motif.
It functions as an architectural mechanism, activating specific processes within laboratories.
Its operations are always material — it acts upon form, alters the structure of the environment, and initiates movement.
Below are the primary operational regimes of the Protractor, derived from its various instantiations:

1. Fixation
The Protractor secures states: collapse, transformation, death, transition.
It acts as structural memory — not emotional, but topological.
It retains within the system that which narrative logic would normally erase.
Example: In Fish, it registers each death as a distinct form and waypoint.

2. Initiation
The Protractor does not respond — it triggers.
At the moment of contact with the subject, movement begins, usually accompanied by disintegration of identity.
It does not grant power — it unlocks structure, forcing the subject into motion.
Example: In Alevtina and Tamara, it catalyzes awakening, recomposition, and movement toward exit.

3. Transformation
The Protractor not only signals the threshold — it organizes the mutation of form.
This is not development, but reformatting: of body, of consciousness, of space.
Transformation always involves illness, fragmentation, distortion.
Example: Fish — a cycle of bodily metamorphoses in which the subject dissolves, but the trace remains.

4. Rupture
The Protractor functions against linearity.
It ruptures narrative, blocks conventional action, ejects the subject into a state of structural error.
Not a catastrophe, but an architectural breakdown that makes alternative logic possible.

5. Navigation
The Protractor is not a map — it is a structural trajectory.
It points not to a path but to conditions of movement.
It does not guide — it generates space through which movement can occur.
Navigation here is not geography, but the topology of internal and external shifts.

6. Encapsulation
The Protractor can unfold into discrete modules: compartments, pockets, mechanisms.
These are not always active, but contain reproducible or analyzable patterns of form.
Example: Pizdyuchki and Venuses — a module-archive, a toy-theater, a set of manipulable figures.

These functions never operate in isolation — they always appear in composite configurations.
Each project activates different combinations, but always with internal coherence:
the Protractor never appears arbitrarily, it emerges in response to an architectural necessity of the environment.
It is not controlled by the character, but can be triggered by contact with them.
It acts according to the internal demand of the system, not narrative desire.
That is why it is not a fabular element but a function of the structural logic of the artistic system.

V. Schema: How the Protractor Is Visualized and Why
The Protractor may be presented as an object, but it is not an image.
Its form is a schema.
A schema is not a depiction, but a structural recording of operation.
It does not explain — it initiates perception, just as a technical diagram initiates construction.
The schema of the Protractor is not fixed, but it always possesses internal coherence.
It encodes vectors of action, each corresponding to a specific function within the system.
These vectors include:
– movement — impulse, directional force, vectorized form
– growth — organic, uneven unfolding
– decay — decomposition, disintegration, fragmentation
– substance — materiality, corporeality, resistance of form
– reality — density, weight, resistance of environment
– projection — externalization, reflection
– symbolism — metaphysical compression of meaning into structure
– play — instability, permutation, multiplicity of readings
– psychology — internal dynamics of the subject, fracture, distortion
The schema does not explain these vectors — it configures their relationship.
It offers no answers — it provides a coordinate system, through which one can move across laboratories, texts, and objects.
The Protractor itself is the artistic structure of the practice.
Its schema is not a representation or a doorway — it is the system, presented in operational form.
It is an alchemical fixation — a moment when essence becomes form.

VI. Conclusion: What I Make Is the Protractor
The Protractor is not an object, not an idea.
It is what I make.
Not in the sense that I created it, but in the sense that my entire artistic practice is its unfolding.
Each project, each laboratory, each artifact — is a new fragment of the Protractor, a new function, a new site of assembly.
It is not built from the outside.
It emerges from within the process, from the necessity to record the trajectory of transformation — from the tension between form and its violation.
It first appeared as an object — an artifact within a fictional world.
Then it became a tracer of transgression.
Later — a system.
Now, it has become the form of the entire practice, a unified mechanism that does not require explanation — only traversal.
The Protractor is a structure that materializes thought.
Through myth, through figures, through rupture, through reassembly.
It is embedded in the fabric of the world, it is lived through form, it navigates consciousness.
It is not outside of me — but it is not me.
It is the system I uncover, shape, and bring into presence.
In essence, my work is the gradual formation of the Protractor.
Not a project, not a concept, not a statement —
but a structure one can move through.
A form one can enter.