T_343
The engine's readingA half wheel of broad curved ink strokes rises from the bottom edge, stepping from pale grey at the rim to near black around a white hub.
Record- Date
- 2026.06.06
- Dimensions
- 70 × 140 cm
- Paper
- Qing Yi Half-Raw Xuan
- Ink
- Yi De Ge Refined Ink Juice, Boku-Undo Genso, Yi De Ge Yun Tou Yan
From the water tower on Keller Street the ring estate looks like this at three in the morning: blocks of flats shouldered around a plaza, every roof cut square, the tall ones darkest because their windows gave up first. The plaza stays lit. The council never switches it off, so it hums down there, pale, a cupped palm of sodium light the towers lean toward like men around a brazier. Some nights the west blocks go so black they forget they have floors, and the rain leaves dark coins on them. I climb up with a thermos all the same and sit on the cold tank while the light at the hub holds the whole district in its lap.
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
- half wheel of radial arc bands around a pale hub at bottom centre
- Movement
- rotation over the arch around the hub; nothing runs against it
- Coverage
- ink on about four fifths of the paper
- Tone
- four tonal steps, weighted dark
- Layering
- translucent passes from pale outer arcs to dark inner tiers; readable top and right
- Edges
- squared, grainy stroke ends at the rim; crisp inner curves around the hub
- Feibai
- none
- Open paper
- half-round hub at bottom centre; upper corners; narrow wedge at upper left
- Chance marks
- dark drops in lower-left wedge; blot at left edge; crease lines top centre; smudge bottom right
- Frame
- ink runs off the bottom edge; top and both sides stay open
A half wheel rises from the bottom edge, its hub a pale opening cut off by the paper, its spokes built from broad curved strokes laid in tiers. The eye enters at the white centre and is swung over the arch, through bands that step from pale grey at the rim to near black within.
The top-centre fan is where the sheet is strongest. The wide brush has left its grain in the dark there, so the black is ribbed rather than poured, and each stroke stops square and dry at the rim. On the right the translucent arcs stack in a legible order: the half-sized paper holds each pass at its edge, so one tier sits clearly over the last.
The weakness is the lower-left wedge. Its inside is one even grey-black, a filled slab, and dark drops sit on that flat surface exactly where the eye rests. At the far right the densest overlaps begin to sink toward a single dark.
These faults are real, and they stay local. The wheel turns, the tiers read, the stroke ends stay alive, and the painting holds its wall with the authority of something fully built.
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.
4 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: 0.029 (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
“A radial fan of translucent arcs like R3, with fluent, legible layering, but the dark interiors measure flat, the right side is crowded, and small blots mark the left dark sector.”
Arc bands follow the brush's radial sweep around the hub with clean dry-brush ends; the left dark sector is broad and slab-like but still follows the arc.
WEAKEST Broad left dark slab, filled more than travelled
STRONGEST Radial arc bands of top-centre fan
Dark interior modulation 0.029 is flat by measure; tone mostly changes at the overlaps between passes, with some grain in the centre fan only.
WEAKEST Left dark sector interior, uniform grey-black
STRONGEST Brush-grain banding in central dark fan
Pale outer arcs, mid-grey sectors and dark inner sectors overlap translucently in a readable order around the whole fan.
WEAKEST Dense right overlaps, where passes are harder to separate
STRONGEST Stacked translucent arcs in the upper rim
A radial fan around a white hub at the bottom centre gives clear movement; the ink covers 78% of the sheet, the right side crowds, and the top corners are leftover.
WEAKEST Heavy, crowded right half of the fan
STRONGEST Empty hub and radial sweep
Dark drop spots sit inside the left dark mass, visible in the colour view; there is a spatter blot at the bottom right, crease lines in the centre fan, and a drip in the hub.
WEAKEST Blot drops inside left dark sector
STRONGEST Dry-brush grain at the arc ends
6 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 6 distinct places, 23 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: 1 principal ink mass traced (cyan), 3 enclosed voids at true size in their grid cells (amber), the main gesture from start to end (red). Of 16 edge segments, 81% crisp, 19% 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
2026.06.06, day 160 of the Crucible Year, one of 11 paintings from that date. 30 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: P3 The Floor Rises (working title).
T_343 among all 402
Every painting of the year by date; this one is outlined.
Materials
- Paper
- Qing Yi Half-Raw Xuan, Jingxian Sichijian Xuan Paper Arts & Crafts Co., Ltd., made unknown
- 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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