T_353
The engine's readingWide flat-brushed wedges of black and grey wheel out from a small white disc and run off every edge of a long sheet.
Record- Date
- 2026.06.14
- Dimensions
- 97 × 180 cm
- Paper
- Red Star Mo She Imitation Antique Chu Bark, Exhibition Edition, half-raw
- Ink
- Yi De Ge Refined Ink Juice, Boku-Undo Genso, Yi De Ge Yun Tou Yan
Look down a deep enough well and the moon is at the bottom, small and white and perfectly round. The old story says the monkeys saw it there and made a chain of themselves, hand to tail, to fish it out. Everyone laughs at the monkeys. I was the one on the end. The walls go past in slabs, each course of stone a shade darker than the last, and the cold comes up off the water like a held breath. Above me, hands and tails all the way to the sky, every grip holding. Below me, the moon, starting to tremble, because my fingertips have just touched the water.
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
- small white disc hub, broad wedge spokes, pale arcs ringing behind them
- Movement
- radial outward from the hub; pale concentric arcs circle across the spokes
- Coverage
- ink on about nine tenths of the paper
- Tone
- four tonal steps, weighted dark
- Layering
- many translucent wedge passes; order clearest in upper-right fan, thickening lower centre
- Edges
- crisp squared ends on dark wedges; softer streaked ends on outer arcs; crisp hub rim
- Feibai
- present in the pale arcs above the hub and the narrow gap below it
- Open paper
- small round white disc just above centre, the only bare reserve
- Chance marks
- small dark specks near top-right edge; cloudy grey wash at left edge
- Frame
- ink runs off all four edges; corners lighten to pale grey arcs
A wheel of ink turns around a small white disc set just above the middle of a long sheet. Wide wedges of black and grey fan out on every side and run off all four edges. The eye is pulled into the hub and thrown back out in the same look.
The upper-right fan is the best of it. Translucent wedges stack there in an order you can read. Each earlier pass shows its edge through the later one, and the greys step down in bands. Half-raw paper keeps the layers from sinking together. Above the hub and down the narrow gap below it, pale arcs break into flying white, bare paper streaking with the turn of the brush. Those streaks keep the wheel moving.
The cost is weight. The lower half is packed. The dark mass at bottom centre is nearly even in tone and faintly brown, with little air around it. At upper left a large slab stops on a blunt squared end, filled more than travelled.
Those are real drags on one side of the wheel. It turns anyway. The hub holds, the layering builds real depth, and the sheet sits well above the archive's common run.
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: 0.064 (under 0.045 reads as flat).
Five reads, agreeing on 3 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 burst in the same family as R3, with legible stacked passes. It is heavier and more crowded, with blunter slab wedges and darks in the lower half that read flatter.”
Radial wedge strokes hold their walls and follow the arc, but lower-right and left dark wedges read as squared, slab-like blocks with blunt ends.
WEAKEST Bulky dark rectangular wedges, lower right
STRONGEST Upper-right radial fan strokes following the arc
Stretched view shows banding and grain in most wedges (modulation 0.064, four steps), but the large lower-centre and lower-right darks read flat at viewing distance.
WEAKEST Dense lower-centre dark mass near-uniform in colour view
STRONGEST Upper-right fan with banded, stepped greys
Many translucent radial passes stacked in readable order; overlaps step tone outward across the sheet, though the lower-centre stack thickens toward opacity.
WEAKEST Lower centre where stacked darks merge
STRONGEST Overlapping translucent wedges in upper right
Radial burst around a white centre gives clear direction, but 93% coverage crowds the frame; corners and lower half feel jammed and heavy.
WEAKEST Crowded, near-total coverage leaves little shaped paper
STRONGEST Central white circle anchoring the radial burst
Ink controlled with streaked dry-brush edges; small specks top right and a cloudy grey patch at mid-left sit away from principal darks.
WEAKEST Cloudy pale wash at left edge
STRONGEST Dry-brush streaks in vertical lower-centre gap
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), 7 enclosed voids at true size in their grid cells (amber), the main gesture from start to end (red). Of 15 edge segments, 53% crisp, 47% 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
2026.06.14, day 168 of the Crucible Year, one of 8 paintings from that date (7 shown). 31 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_353 among all 402
Every painting of the year by date; this one is outlined.
Materials
- Paper
- Red Star Mo She Imitation Antique Chu Bark, Exhibition Edition, half-raw, China Xuan Paper Co., Ltd. (中国宣纸股份有限公司), made 2026.01.14
- 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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