T_368
The engine's readingA wheel of black and grey brush bands, touched with red, turning around a small hole of bare paper on a wide sheet.
Record- Date
- 2026.07.28
- Dimensions
- 97 × 180 cm
- Rating
- 5.7
- Paper
- Half-Cooked Red Star Mo She 6-Foot Bark Xuan Paper
- Ink
- Yi De Ge Yun Tou Yan, Kuretake Shogei Purple-Navy Black, Boku-Undo Gentoku Super Concentrated, colour inks
The pinprick at the centre is what a star leaves. There is an old story about a ship's astrophysicist, a Jesuit, who travels to the wreck of a supernova and finds that a people buried their whole record on the outermost planet before the end, in a vault built to last. They knew. They had only time to be remembered. He reads their poems. Then he works out the date of the explosion, and the distance, and sees whose sky that light reached, above Bethlehem, and his faith does not survive the arithmetic. I read it on a long watch. Out there the gas is still spreading, a thin red ring, and in the middle a white point no bigger than a town goes on spinning.
The reading
Written by the engine after V23's reads, from the settled findings, and checked by hand before approval. It explains V23's numbers and may not change them.
- Structure
- broken concentric arc bands around a small white hole, rectangular blocks joined at the rim
- Movement
- radial spin around the centre; straight blocks and bars cut against it at left and right
- Coverage
- ink on about nine tenths of the paper
- Tone
- two tonal steps, weighted dark
- Layering
- grey washes, black bands and red arcs; readable left and bottom, merged at right
- Edges
- crisp on black band walls, soft on grey washes, broken at dry arc ends
- Feibai
- none
- Open paper
- irregular wedge at top centre, smaller wedges and strips at left and lower right
- Colour
- red arcs at upper right and left of centre, dull red low centre and lower right
- Chance marks
- small spatter upper left and lower left; creases through right dark mass and near centre
- Frame
- ink runs off all four edges; top centre and upper right corner stay open
A small hole of bare paper sits above the middle, and the whole wide sheet turns around it. Broken bands of black and grey wheel outward in rings, then fling off blocks that run past the paper's edge. The spin registers from across a room.
Below the hole, the curved black bands are the sheet at its most convincing. They follow the brush round, their walls stay firm, and their ends drag dry across the grain. At the left, grey passes overlap in clear steps: half-sized paper keeps each wash apart, with its own soft edge. Red, laid under the black left of centre, warms the inner ring.
The right side gives all this up. Pass on pass closes into a near-uniform dark, the upper red only just survives, and creases in the paper become the main event inside the black. The slab at the right edge is filled weight, with little paper left to push against it.
So a clear, well-turned wheel, alive on its left and lower sides, clogged on its right. It is a usual sheet, neither slack nor surprising: worth a look for those lower arcs, and then you have seen it.
The rating
T_368, rated 5.7
The combined score, out of 10: V23's reading of the photograph as the read half and V24's twelve tests on the 16-bit file as the measured half, added and divided by 10. The scale is relative to this archive. How each half is made is on the Method page.
- Form
- 2.0 · built
- Tonal depth
- 1.0 · thin
- Layering
- 2.0 · legible
- Composition
- 2.0 · working
- Material and surface
- 1.8 · sound
- Mass
- 8.6 of 10
- Tone
- 7.0 of 14
- Void
- 3.2 of 8
- Flow
- 7.6 of 10
- Balance
- 6.4 of 8
How it was measured
What V24 measured.
Plain physical facts with no model involved. Across the year they track how the practice changes. On one sheet they cannot say whether a mark is any good. Millimetres read a few percent high, because the photographs are cropped just inside the paper's edge.
The width of the ink mask along its medial axis.
Optical density at the 75th percentile of the sheet.
The radius of the largest circle of open paper.
How far the marks align across the sheet. Lower means they run several ways.
Left and right asymmetry of the ink. Lower is more even.
Pixels to the millimetre in the TIFF these were measured from, with the studio light removed.
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.
2 families of tone.
Every inked pixel's brightness in 64 bins, smoothed; each circled peak holds at least 4% of the ink. Two or fewer: Tonal depth is held at the bottom rung whatever the model reads. A dense sheet of many translucent passes can count low here, so Layering is left to the reads. Life inside the black: 0.056 (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 radial sheet in the family of R3 but heavier and more crowded. Its arcs are coherent, with legible layering on the left, while the right half is dense, flat and slab-like. Ordinary on every ladder.”
Radial arc segments are coherent and follow the brush's travel; the right-edge block and the left mid blocks are heavy rectangles that are stiff and filled in.
WEAKEST bulky slab block at right edge
STRONGEST curved arc bands below centre
Only two tonal steps. Left greys show stepped density and grain, but the right dark masses read mostly flat, with crinkle texture rather than modelled tone.
WEAKEST dense right-side dark mass, near-uniform
STRONGEST graded translucent bands at left
Several passes are legible at the left and bottom, where grey arcs overlap. On the right, the passes build up into one dense dark and the order is lost.
WEAKEST right half overlaps merged into one dark
STRONGEST stacked translucent arcs, lower left
A strong radial movement circles the small white centre. With 87% coverage the sheet is crowded and the right side is heavy; the open paper at top and bottom is shaped but scant.
WEAKEST crowded right side, little breathing paper
STRONGEST radial spin around central white hole
Ink is controlled and the red passes sit cleanly. The stretched view shows paper crinkle and a hairline crease near the centre. Small spots at lower left.
WEAKEST wrinkle/crease marks in right dark mass
STRONGEST dry-brush edges on arc ends
3 distinct places, 1 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, 13 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), 8 enclosed voids at true size in their grid cells (amber), the main gesture from start to end (red). Of 16 edge segments, 75% crisp, 19% soft or bloomed, 6% broken.
V23's rules and arithmetic, and every figure under its own name, are in the Archive record.
Date
2026.07.28, day 212 of the Crucible Year, one of 11 paintings from that date. 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_368 among all 419
Every painting of the year by date; this one is outlined.
Materials
- Paper
- Half-Cooked Red Star Mo She 6-Foot Bark Xuan Paper, 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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