T_344
The engine's readingInk bands wheel around a bare white hub at lower right, rising from a lone dark strip at the left to stepped grey blocks and dark spokes.
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
The far left band has come away from the rest by a hair of white paper. I log it as a hull section. The ring behind it is spun up, the spokes hold the hub open for whatever arrives from below, and that one panel is already a little outside the gravity. Out there the slow pieces go. A section drifts loose, keeps its curve for a thousand years, and becomes the colony's favourite story: the bit of home visible from the observation deck, still bent to a wheel it left. I would fit it with a beacon. Small, amber, mounted on the outer edge, blinking once for every turn of the ring it can no longer feel.
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
- concentric arc bands and radial spokes fanned around a white hub, lower right
- Movement
- sweeps from lower left, over the top, down into right spokes
- Coverage
- ink on about four fifths of the paper
- Tone
- five tonal steps, weighted dark
- Layering
- many translucent passes; order readable along stepped upper rim, closing in the centre
- Edges
- crisp band walls; dry-brush ends on right spokes and top rim; feathered at hub
- Feibai
- none
- Open paper
- broad upper-left field; rounded hub opening onto the bottom edge, right
- Chance marks
- small drip blots in centre-left darks; drip streaks low in inner bands
- Frame
- ink runs off bottom, reaches top and right; left edge stays open
A great wheel rises out of the bottom edge. Its hub is a bite of bare paper at lower right, and around it the ink fans out: a lone dark strip at the far left, stepped grey blocks climbing over the top, dark spokes coming down the right. The empty upper left gives the turn somewhere to go.
The finest passage is at upper right. In the tall dark wedge and the narrow spoke beside it, the brush has left its grain as banded streaks, and the ends break dry against the paper. Along the upper rim the grey passes lie one over another in plain order, each still see-through. The half-sized xuan holds every pass where it lands, so walls stay clean and the layers keep apart.
The cost sits at centre left. There the passes stack until the black seals over and goes flat, and a stiff filled rectangle sits inside the second band like a stamped block. A few small drip blots mark that dark.
Those weigh on one side of the wheel without stopping it. The rim and the right spokes are painted with real command, and the whole sheet turns with full, sure force.
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: 0.046 (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
“This radial fan has the same idea as R3, with legible translucent layering. It is heavier and more crowded, though: the darks are nearly flat inside, several blocks are stiff and slab-like, and there are minor blots in the centre.”
The arc bands follow the fan's sweep, and their walls hold. Several inner blocks, especially the left-centre slab, are stiff filled rectangles rather than fluent strokes.
WEAKEST Blunt rectangular slab at left-centre, x≈190-300
STRONGEST Tapering radial wedge, upper right, following brush travel
Dark interior modulation is 0.046, only just above flat. Brush banding shows in the upper-right wedge and in the outer arcs, but the dense centre-left darks read as flat.
WEAKEST Heavy central dark mass, nearly uniform inside
STRONGEST Banded brush-grain in the large upper-right dark wedge
There are five tonal steps. Translucent grey arcs overlap the darker bands, and the order of passes reads clearly across the fan, from the pale top rim to the dark core.
WEAKEST Dense centre where the overlaps darken toward uniformity
STRONGEST Translucent outer grey arcs overlapping the darker inner bands
The fan sweeps from lower left to upper right around a white hub, so the arrangement has direction. The ink covers 80% of the sheet, the centre is crowded, and the empty upper left is only partly shaped.
WEAKEST Crowded, heavy dark centre-left of the fan
STRONGEST Radial sweep around the paper hub at lower right
The ink is controlled and the arcs are evenly laid. Small drop-blots in the centre-left dark bands are faint in the colour view and clear only in the stretched view. There are slight streaks at the bottom.
WEAKEST Small blots inside the centre-left dark band
STRONGEST Dry-brush grain at the edges of the right wedges
3 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 3 distinct places, 10 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), 3 enclosed voids at true size in their grid cells (amber), the main gesture from start to end (red). Of 16 edge segments, 56% crisp, 38% soft or bloomed, 6% 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_344 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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