Peter YuillThe Crucible Year

The Oracle

Oracle · deep archive

Oracle Constellation

Every rated painting of the year and every pattern the Oracle found in the records, drawn from vae.db. Facts and correlations only: what the data shows, not what it means.

V23, studio photograph, five reads V23 lite, phone photo, one read. Same scale, never averaged with V23 Peter's own rating, where given

Right eye, cyan: reads the data. Measurement, structure, the engine's ratings Left eye, red: reads the room. Peter's own eye, and where it parts from the engine's

FIG 01

The year

Every rated work is one ray, in the order it was photographed, round Bangkok's three seasons from the first batch in December 2025 to the latest. The longer the ray, the higher the rating; solid rays are V23, hollow-tipped ones V23 lite; the inner tracks are the five axes and gaps split the batches. Ring by ring lays the same works out as tiles, one ring per quality, to follow one quality round the year.

FIG 02

The rising floor

Each quality V23 reads, as a channel through the year. Every work is a mark at its rung; the banks are the floor and the ceiling, where the lowest and highest tenth of the works sat at the time. A weir marks the day a quality stepped up for good, and the notes name what the Oracle found held. Read the lower bank: the weakest works improved more than the strongest.

FIG 03

Pace and surface

The pace of making, as a pulse: for every day of the year, how many works had been dated in the fortnight before it. The shaded storms are the bursts, the busiest quarter of the year. Below the line the batches answer: the Material and surface rung each was given, and how often the reads found a water stain. Batch against batch, this is the strongest pattern the Oracle has found in the practice itself.

FIG 04

Flaws

Every flaw V23's five reads named, drawn as it behaves on paper. The sheet shows where the reads placed them, every kind together; below, each kind with its own sheet and, along the year, the share of each batch's reads that named it. V23 lite names no flaws, so the early months are absent. Hover the sheet for a zone, or a batch for its share.

FIG 05

What goes with what

Every finding is a strand from a fact on the rim to the score it goes with. Cyan goes with higher, ember with lower. The bright strands held up; the haze behind them are leads, still to be tested on new work. A fact read over several windows (3, 7 and 14 days) is one point on the rim. Hover or tap the rim to follow one fact or one score.

FIG 06

Five reads

V23 reads every work five times and takes the middle. Each work here is a column of five marks per quality, one per read, in the order the works were photographed: a column that sits as one block was a clear call, a split column a close one. Above, how few changed reads would have moved the rating a full point. Below, the rungs the measurement caps took away, and the run whose batch rated furthest above Peter.

FIG 07

Two engines

V23 reads the studio photographs; V23 lite reads the older phone photos. Thirty works were read by both. On the left, each of those works as a strand from its V23 rating to its V23 lite rating. On the right, the factors the Oracle tested against both ratings that went somewhere, each a needle: up for higher, down for lower, its two halves the two engines. Where the needle runs straight the engines agree.

FIG 08

Against the pattern

From everything measured about a work, the Oracle predicts each score V23 gave it. These are the works that broke the prediction furthest: the hollow mark is where the profile said the score would be, the solid one where V23 put it. A fall is a work that measures well and was read low; a leap, the reverse. Hover or tap a work to see it.

FIG 09

Each paper, its own year

One constellation per paper, grouped by how the paper is sized. Each ray is a painting on it, at its date on the year's clock (December at the top, running clockwise) and long for a high rating: solid rays V23, hollow tips V23 lite, a red dot Peter's own rating, the base dot his early triage. Inside, the five qualities V23 read on that paper against every paper (dashed), and a ring of the inks it took. Beside each, the spread of its ratings and what the Oracle found about the paper itself. Papers were used in different months, so read these as portraits, not verdicts. Hover or tap a ray to see the painting.

FIG 10

Beliefs under test

Each lane is one belief about the work, tested against the whole archive. The dot is what the data says now, the line its uncertainty, and the faint trail behind it where the same test stood in each of the Oracle's earlier runs. Right of the band the data agrees, left it disagrees; a "no effect" belief holds while its dot stays in the band.

FIG 11

The words

How often Peter's own writing reaches for each idea, per thousand words, from the first records of the practice to the Crucible year. Each phase is a layer laid down on the last, oldest at the bottom; each idea a vein whose width is how often it was written. The marked shifts held up: a rise or fall too large for chance across the sections written in those periods.

FIG 12

The sky over the table

The year drawn against the real sky. The rim carries the twelve signs; inside it runs the band of sky the Sun crosses, with its actual stars, constellations and Milky Way, which have slipped almost a sign from the signs named after them. Every painting sits where the Sun stood on the day it was photographed, its ray long for a high rating, so the year runs from Capricorn round to Libra and the dark arc is the part still to come. Inside, the planets' paths across the same days, each drifting outward as the year goes on so that where a planet doubles back (retrograde) it draws a loop; the Moon's face on every photo day; and at the centre the Moon itself, from real imagery, as it stood that day. Hover or tap a painting to see the sky on its day; hover a planet for what the Oracle found about it.

FIG 13

The sky, and a borrowed sky

Every sky pattern the Oracle recorded, drawn as stars above the horizon, and below it, like a reflection, the same tests run on a borrowed sky: the real positions with their dates moved half the record away, so they belong to no painting. Each mark is one pattern, placed by its strength; the large stars passed as signals, and each is named. The dashed line on each side is the other side's outline, flipped across: if the planets had a hand in the work, the sky would outgrow its reflection. The two shapes almost coincide. Hover or tap a mark to find its twin.

FIG 14

The Oracle's own year

The Oracle has run several times as the archive grew. Each ring is one run, the first at the centre; each finding a thread out from the run it was first tested, lit where it held as a signal, dim as a lead, dark where it fell to noise. The outer dark is what the Oracle could not test at all.

Paper · S13

Huiyun Tianxuan Ge "Dot Ink Becomes Gold" Master Special, semi-cooked (self-sized, aged)

Anhui Jingxian Huiyun Tianxuan Ge Xuan Paper Art Products Co., Ltd. (安徽泾县徽韵天宣阁宣纸艺术品有限公司), Jing County, Anhui. 名家专用点墨成金珍藏版. 12 paintings from 2026.10.16 to 2026.10.26, 10 shown here.

The record.

From the registry, rebuilt from Peter's researched material cards. Fourteen years old, and the highest bark content of any paper in the registry. The seller's listing (2026-10-16) names it Master Special "Dot Ink Becomes Gold" Collector's Edition (名家专用点墨成金珍藏版), gives the fibre as selected 75% qingtan bark and 25% Shatian rice straw, describes it as de-fired aged paper with clear brush and curtain marks, rough but not coarse, and lists its nature as raw (生宣), suited to ink wash painting and cursive script. The pack label says half-raw (半生熟): the label and the listing disagree, and Peter's experience sides with the listing. Peter bought two packs, 100 sheets, around July 2026; a lot of it was used up learning how the paper behaves. Unsized, it behaved for him like raw paper and smelled strongly enough to drive him out of the studio ("like an old wet bog", 2026-09-17), and he set it aside for S14. From 2026-10-10 he gives each sheet his own full coat of alum glue before painting, which he describes as bringing it to about three-quarter sized, and by 2026-10-12 about ten S13 works were in progress. On 2026-10-16 he reported the sizing working very well, and the first five S13 works were registered: T_387, T_389, T_390, T_394 and T_396, all photographed that day. His words are in WhatsApp with Neon, section 3.2. Inferred, not observed: a raw paper this high in bark drinks ink fast and spreads it in layered blooms, with soft, haloed edges; long bark fibres and age make it strong wet and tolerant of ink laid over ink (积墨). Unsized, it wants thick ink and quick strokes. Sized, the high bark content is why the alum glue works: long bark fibres take alum without going brittle the way straw-heavy paper does, and the glue binds the alum to the fibre, so the paper slows the ink to a controlled bloom while keeping its tooth.

WEIGHT42.4g/m²

SIZINGHalf-rawlightly sized: holds a wash, still takes the brush

FIBRE75% qingtan bark, 25% shatian rice strawhandmade

AGE AT FIRST USE14.0 yrmade October 2012

“It also supposed to be semi cooked, but because it's been aged so long it's performing like a weird kind of raw paper, I can't get a read on it.”Peter Yuill · material card

BEHAVIOUR

Three sources, side by side.

The maker's card, what is typical for this type (a reference, labelled so), and what Peter recorded at the table. Empty means not recorded.

AFTER SIZING

The same paper, sized by Peter.

Peter coats each sheet with his own alum glue before painting. How the paper behaves after that coat: the makers state nothing, so the first column stays empty.

In use.

Its life on the table, among the other papers of the year.

WHEN

Every photo day.

Each dot a photo day, sized by the paintings made with it. Highlighted: this one.

VISUAL MAPPING

Where the ink sits on S13.

Every painting on this paper, cut into the same 72 zones and averaged: the brighter a tile, the more of each zone its paintings inked. 12 paintings. Open it in Visual Mapping.

THE ENGINE

What V23 read on it.

The mean rung on each ladder for paintings made with it, against the mean across every V23 reading. This mixes the material with the months it was used in; read it as a description only.

Bead: the mean rung on this material across 12 V23 readings. Ring: the mean across all 259. The line between them, and the number at the end, is how far this material sits above (cyan) or below (ember) the archive.

The paintings.

Every painting made with it that this site shows, by date.