T_367
The engine's readingTwo ink wheels, grey-bladed at left and black-wedged at right, each turning around a white eye, joined by a dark S with red under it.
Record- Date
- 2026.07.28
- Dimensions
- 97 × 180 cm
- Paper
- Half-Cooked Red Star Mo She 6-Foot Bark Xuan Paper, self-sized from October 2026
- Ink
- Yi De Ge Yun Tou Yan, Kuretake Shogei Purple-Navy Black, Boku-Undo Gentoku Super Concentrated, colour inks
Late in the night the right wheel is the block across the street: every window out, the whole front one black, and one round hole high up where somebody never pulled the blind. I watched that hole from the roof for most of a year. Down to the left the other building burns smaller, grey light leaking through the slats of a fire escape, a red tube still buzzing over a laundromat that closed in spring. Between them the street bends in an S, one car on it, headlights off. By morning the dark block has swallowed half its own corner again. The lit hole stays, the size of a coin, and the pigeons go in and out of it like tenants who never signed anything.
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
- two radial wheels with open centres, linked by a curving dark band
- Movement
- left to right along the S; heavy right wheel drags against it
- Coverage
- ink on about two thirds of the paper
- Tone
- five tonal steps, weighted dark
- Layering
- translucent grey passes, black passes, one red pass; readable at left and top
- Edges
- crisp wedge sides at right; soft, bristled blade ends at left
- Feibai
- none
- Open paper
- broad left margin and top band; two small round eyes
- Colour
- red bands under black, inner left ring, outer arc of right wheel
- Chance marks
- scattered dots and one round blot on left paper; few dots top right
- Frame
- dark slabs run off bottom right and right edge; top and left open
Two wheels turn across a long sheet, joined by a dark S that starts at the small white eye low on the left and climbs to the second eye high on the right. The eye rides it, and arrives somewhere heavier than where it set out.
The left wheel is the stronger of the two. Its grey blades fan outward in stepped washes, each pass laid over the last and still showing through it, because the half-sized paper holds a later grey on top of an earlier one. The arcs around the open centre keep their walls and follow the brush. A red band runs under the black there and reads cleanly, a warm pass of paint inside the turn.
The right wheel spends what the left one earns. Its black wedges are filled rather than drawn, flat inside apart from paper crinkle and some cloudiness, and they bury the passes beneath them, the red included. At bottom right the slabs crowd the corner and run off. The spatter on the open left paper stays small and far away.
The movement is real and the left half is fully alive. The right half is weight, and it holds the sheet at a good, plain level.
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: 0.041 (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 is a twin-spiral radial sheet in the R3 idiom, with good layered greys and a deliberate red accent. Its right half is overloaded with flat, slab-like blacks, which crowds the composition and deadens the tone. Ordinary overall.”
The radial and arc segments hold their walls and follow the brush travel on the left. The right-side black wedges and bottom slabs are heavy, filled-in blocks.
WEAKEST Bulky dark slabs at bottom right running off edge
STRONGEST Left spiral's concentric arc segments around open centre
The peripheral rays step through several greys (5 tonal plateaus). Dark-interior modulation is 0.041, so the big right and bottom-right blacks are flat apart from paper crinkle.
WEAKEST Flat black interiors of right fan wedges
STRONGEST Graded translucent greys in the left spiral's outer rays
The overlapping grey passes on the left and at the top centre stay readable, and the red sits legibly under the black arcs. On the right, dense black covers the sequence.
WEAKEST Right half where black passes bury earlier layers
STRONGEST Overlapping translucent rays around the left spiral
The two vortices connect in an S that carries the eye left to right, and the left paper is open. The right third is jammed and the dark slabs crowd the bottom edge.
WEAKEST Crowded, heavy right and bottom-right mass
STRONGEST Twin spiral centres linked by an S-shaped flow
The ink is mostly controlled and the red is deliberate. A mottled cloudy grey sits in the lower-centre overlap, crinkle texture shows in the right blacks, and stray dots dot the left paper.
WEAKEST Cloudy mottled grey in the lower-centre overlap
STRONGEST Dry-brush edges on the radial ray ends
5 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 5 distinct places, 11 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), 6 enclosed voids at true size in their grid cells (amber), the main gesture from start to end (red). Of 17 edge segments, 65% crisp, 24% soft or bloomed, 12% 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
2026.07.28, day 212 of the Crucible Year, one of 11 paintings from that date (10 shown). 0 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_367 among all 402
Every painting of the year by date; this one is outlined.
Materials
- Paper
- Half-Cooked Red Star Mo She 6-Foot Bark Xuan Paper, self-sized from October 2026, China Xuan Paper Co., Ltd., made 2026.04.08
- Ink MB6
- Yi De Ge Yun Tou Yan, Yi De Ge (Beijing)
- Ink MB7
- Kuretake Shogei Purple-Navy Black, Kuretake
- Ink MB8
- Boku-Undo Gentoku Super Concentrated, Boku-Undo
- Colour
- colour inks, recorded together
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