FTHo

The 'RIO' of the title is the 'Reflective Intuitive Organism' and the works describe the evolution of human knowledge and culture, beginning with a blank, white panel and ending with a complex book relief.

"In Story of the RIO (reflective intuitive organism) a sequence of 18 panels depicts the development of a complex universe containing RIOs from a proto universe. John used transparent glass, his third important medium/material, to signify an atemporal score or informing component of events. A transparent glass panel followed by a plain white panel represents the proto universe consisting of a state 0 followed by a state 1, or Least Event. And the remainng panels in the sequence represent highlihgted evenometric steps. The final panel is a book relief in which a reflective intuitive organism appears as one book cluster along with other clusters representing a merely reflective organism and a nonreflective organism." 
Noa Latham, 'Quantum of Mark and Least Event: The interaction of John Latham's art and ideas', in Time-Base and the Universe, John Hansard Gallery, 2006.

Story of the RIO refers back to a series of works Latham made between 1959-60 called the Observer Reliefs. In these works, the three elements stand in for three states of human existence. Latham used the three protagonists of the Dostoyevsky novel 'The Brothers Karamazov' (1880) to explain these states. Mitya is the instinctive being, whose behaviour is genetically determined and non-reflective. The Ivan state is more ordered and represents the rational being, at once empowered and limited by their intellectual state and learnt knowledge. The most enlightened, Alyosha state, is the reflective/intuitive being who can encompass the characteristics of the other two but also has the ability to observe things as a whole and is capable of original thought - this person sees things from the perspective of a longer 'time-base'.