An artist must give body to the inexistent, to render in the particular an instance that exists only in their mind. And that instance must speak to some higher generality, for unless it illuminates the gaze of others it may as well remain there. Now, it is only from the synoptic view of a myriad particulars that generality can be derived: that is what generality means. And such a synoptic view is the precondition of the imaginative for it maximises the boundaries within which novel ideas can be thrown without sinking into meaninglessness. Imagination is thus paradoxically preceded by distillation: one needs the essence to know the value of any instance.

Creative distillation, then, requires the privilege of a synoptic view, open to those few with the eyes for it. Obscure, shrouded in the delicate mystery of the imagination, it is opaque to direct enquiry. So here Parashkev Nachev instead arrives at a distilled generality by brute force, extracting it from many real particulars directly, in a manner closed to questions of taste, opinion, point-of-view, for it handles its subject with perfect impersonality, the impersonality of a machine. He does this by training an entity of self-organising mathematics to extract the canonical, essential, ideal form using an arbitrary numbers of instances. These canonicals are both inexistent and more real than any actual, individual instance, for they distil all of them into one.

Distilled characters on display include:

• "Il capo dei capi" : All American gangsters of note for whom images are available (2014).

• "Power" : All Roman Emperors representations of whose faces survive.

• "Sold Christ" : Paintings including the face of Christ sold at auction totalling $13.1 million.

• "Oscarred" : All winners of Best Actor (up to 2014).

• "Curiosity" : All winners of the Nobel Prize (up to 2014).

• "An American week in Vietnam" : One week of American dead in Vietnam, May 28-June 3, 1969.

• "Self self-portrait" : All of Rembrandt's self-portraits.

• "All great philosophers" : All known “en face” photographs of Wittgenstein.

• "The manifold of death" : Post-mortem masks of 187 notable men.

• "Rampling" : A career in film of actress Charlotte Rampling (from 1968 to 2014).