T_256
The engine's readingThree black ink arcs cross a long sheet from left to right, one climbing out through the top edge, under a drifting cloud of grey wash.
Record- Date
- 2026.04.21
- Dimensions
- 70 × 180 cm
- Paper
- Tanxi Thickened Grade A Special Jing Pi Small 6-Foot (raw)
- Ink
- Yi De Ge Refined Ink Juice, Boku-Undo Genso, Yi De Ge Yun Tou Yan
The tall arm goes out through the top edge and the ground crew never sees where. I log it as a launch. The two hulls left behind sit low in the grey, heavy, built for a gravity they no longer have to fight. Down at the bottom right, the round black drops are the pods that fell clear on the way up, sealed, still warm, landed in the wrong field. Somebody will come for them. Somebody always says that. The colony runs on that sentence for a long time. The cloud over the middle has not lifted since, and the readings call it weather, and the pods sit in the scrub with their lights blinking, patient, the size of a thumbprint.
The reading
Written by the engine after the painting was rated, from the settled findings, and checked by hand before approval. It explains the numbers; it may not change them.
- Structure
- three black crescents in a row, joined by grey washes behind
- Movement
- left to right wave; the tall left arm rises against it
- Coverage
- ink on about three quarters of the paper
- Tone
- five tonal steps, weighted dark
- Layering
- pale grey sweeps, mid grey washes, black strokes; readable at left and right
- Edges
- crisp on the black strokes; soft in the centre grey cloud; broken at stroke tails
- Feibai
- middle crescent, and the lower body of the left crescent
- Open paper
- ragged band along the top, widest at the upper left corner
- Chance marks
- blotchy blooms below middle stroke; stray drops lower right; cloudy stain centre top
- Frame
- ink runs off the left edge and the top; right and bottom stay open
Three black arcs cross the paper from left to right, and the eye rides them like a swell. The first lifts from a squared foot into a tall arm that leaves through the top edge. The second hangs in the middle; the third sinks into a dark mass at lower right.
The middle arc carries the sheet. It was pulled fast, and the hairs parted into long streaks of bare paper that follow the curve to a clean point at its left end. Raw paper grips a dry brush, so the streaks stay sharp. The left arc keeps the same banding low in its body.
Above the middle arc, grey washes laid wet on fast paper have spread into one milky cloud with no shape. The order of the passes is lost in it. Below the arc, the grey breaks into blotchy blooms. The right mass is flat, lumpy black, and the left arc begins as a blunt slab. Stray drops at lower right do no harm.
The rhythm holds and one stroke is fine. The greys around it are unsettled, and the sheet sits where most of the archive sits: fair work, no more.
How it was read
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.
5 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: 0.048 (under 0.045 reads as flat).
Five reads, agreeing on 4 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
“A gestural horizontal sheet: three black crescents over grey washes. The left and middle strokes are fluent, while the right mass is lumpy. Tone and layering are adequate, the composition is crowded in a band, and there is minor mottling. An ordinary sheet.”
Left crescent and rising stroke follow the brush's travel; middle stroke fluent. The right mass breaks into bulky lobes and drops at its base.
WEAKEST Right dark mass: lumpy lower end with blobby protrusions
STRONGEST Middle crescent stroke with dry-brush tail
Bristle striations model the left and middle strokes; five tonal steps; grey washes behind. The right black mass is mostly flat. Modulation 0.048 is barely above flat.
WEAKEST Right dark mass interior largely flat black
STRONGEST Left crescent with striated bristle banding
Pale grey sweeps, a mid-grey cloud, then black strokes. The overlaps mostly read, but the central grey cloud blurs the sequence.
WEAKEST Central grey cloud wash fuses passes, order unclear
STRONGEST Black crescents laid over translucent grey washes
Three crescents set up a left-to-right wave with a rising peak at the centre-left. The ink fills a dense horizontal band, and the empty top paper is barely shaped.
WEAKEST Top paper reads as leftover above a crowded band
STRONGEST Wave rhythm from left crescent to right rise
Dry-brush is used well in the strokes. There is speckled mottling in the grey below the middle stroke and at the lower left, cloudy grey at the top centre, and stray drops at the bottom right.
WEAKEST Mottled spotty grey wash below middle stroke
STRONGEST Dry-brush streaking in middle and left strokes
5 distinct places, 2 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, 17 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. A major flaw holds Material and surface at rung 1.
Measured from the 16-bit master.
The previous engine (V22) measured this sheet's master file: 1 principal ink mass traced (cyan), 6 enclosed voids at true size in their grid cells (amber), the main gesture from start to end (red). Of 18 edge segments, 56% crisp, 44% soft or bloomed, 0% broken.
The rating these readings produce, the rules applied and the arithmetic, with Peter's own rating where he gave one, are in the Archive record.
Date
2026.04.21, day 114 of the Crucible Year, one of 14 paintings from that date (10 shown). 63 works were registered in the fourteen days before. Paintings are dated by the day their batch was registered and photographed; each was finished that day or within the few days before. Phase: P2 The Switch (working title).
T_256 among all 402
Every painting of the year by date; this one is outlined.
Materials
- Paper
- Tanxi Thickened Grade A Special Jing Pi Small 6-Foot (raw), Anhui Jingxian Tanxi Xuan Paper Art Products Co., Ltd., made 2015.11.19
- Ink MB4
- Yi De Ge Refined Ink Juice, Yi De Ge (Beijing)
- Ink MB5
- Boku-Undo Genso, Boku-Undo
- Ink MB6
- Yi De Ge Yun Tou Yan, Yi De Ge (Beijing)
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