T_288
The work as shown. Every value below comes from vae.db, the master database of the Crucible Year.
Recorded
- Date
- 2026.05.07, day 130
- Size
- 97 × 180 cm
- Paper
- S12, Red Star Mo She Special Effect Xieyi, half-raw
- Inks
- MB4, MB5, MB6
- Phase
- P2 The Switch
- Shown on the site
- yes (V23 rating of 5.0 or higher)
- Early storage triage
- SA: save, archive (Peter's early system, since retired)
Measured · V23 (v23.8)
- V23 rating
- 5.2
- Form
- 2
- Tonal depth
- 1.2
- Layering
- 2
- Composition
- 2.2
- Material and surface
- 1.8
- Ink cover
- 77%
- Dark share
- 59%
- Tonal steps
- 3
- Flaws named by the reads
- other 7, water stain 3, bloom 3
Older engine
- V7
- 9
How the number was made
Read by the Visual Analysis Engine, version 23.8, on 2026.10.06: measured by code, then read 5 times by Claude Opus 5.5 against three reference paintings (R1 to R3), each read independent of the others. How the engine works.
Three views of one sheet.
Left, the photograph. Centre, the tone stretch the model is shown beside it: the darkest 45% of tones spread over the whole range, so flat black, banding and stains show. Right, every pixel as the measuring code classes it: cyan black ink, deep teal translucent grey, stone the palest ink, near black bare paper.
3 families of tone.
Every inked pixel's brightness in 64 bins, smoothed; each circled peak holds at least 4% of the ink. Life inside the black: 0.038 (under 0.045 reads as flat).
Five reads, agreeing on 2 of 5 qualities.
Each quality placed on its ladder by each read, and the mean the engine keeps. Where reads differ, they differ by one rung; close calls resolve down.
READ 1, IN ITS OWN WORDS
“An ensō-like pair of arcs with a strong central void, but the black masses are flat inside and the stroke ends are blunt. It is cleaner than R1 but lacks R3's layered tonal depth. Overall ordinary.”
Two large arc strokes have coherent curved walls and follow the brush's travel, but both end in squared, slab-like terminals; the drippy splashes at the lower left are bulky.
WEAKEST Blunt rectangular ends of both dark arcs
STRONGEST Left arc's sweep following the brush's curve
Dark interior modulation 0.038 is flat. Both black arcs are nearly uniform inside, with faint streaks only. Tone steps between the grey outer passes and the black happen at the edges.
WEAKEST Interior of the right dark arc is flat
STRONGEST Grey outer bands of the left arc
There are three tonal steps: a pale grey sweep, a mid grey and a black arc. Overlaps are readable at the outer edges of both arcs, but the black mostly covers what lies beneath.
WEAKEST Black passes cover the earlier grey ones
STRONGEST Grey stepped bands at the top right outside the arc
Two facing arcs shape a strong white circular void with a gap at the bottom centre. The arrangement is symmetrical and somewhat static; the lower corners are busy and heavy.
WEAKEST Lower corners crowded with drippy splashes
STRONGEST Central open circle framed by the two arcs
The ink is controlled. Spatter drops in the central white look intentional. Small blots sit along the left edge. The tone-stretched view shows no tide lines inside the dark masses.
WEAKEST Stray drops and spatter scattered in the white void
STRONGEST Dry-brush feathered edges at the arcs' lower ends
5 distinct places, 0 major.
Each read must name every flaw and where it is, in a ninth of the sheet. Here the reads named flaws in 5 distinct places, 13 mentions in all across 5 reads; the number in each ninth is how many times a flaw was named there. Reads agreeing on a place strengthen the evidence for one flaw; they do not multiply it.
Measured from the 16-bit master.
The previous engine (V22) measured this sheet's master file: 2 principal ink masses traced (cyan), 2 enclosed voids at true size in their grid cells (amber), the main gesture from start to end (red). Of 14 edge segments, 43% crisp, 43% soft or bloomed, 14% broken.
Tonal depth held at rung 1.
3 steps: not appliedMaterial held at rung 1. Mild waves in the unmounted paper are never a flaw.
none namedThe rating cannot exceed 4.
lowest 1.2A read that breaks the reply format is discarded.
5 of 5 validV23 rating 5.2.
Engine v23.8, 5 reads. Fixed arithmetic, the same for every painting; the constants were set on 24 randomly chosen paintings so the median sheet scores 5. The scale is relative to this archive, not to painting in general, and a difference of less than half a point between two paintings is noise.