T_398
The engine's readingA black fan and its grey arcs turn on a small ring, while tilted grey rectangles pile into a dark block at the bottom right corner.
Record- Date
- 2026.10.25
- Dimensions
- 97 × 180 cm
- Paper
- Huiyun Tianxuan Ge "Dot Ink Becomes Gold" Master Special, semi-cooked (self-sized, aged)
- Ink
- Yi De Ge Yun Tou Yan, Boku-Undo Gentoku Super Concentrated, Yi De Ge Pine Soot Ink, Shisan Yue Calligraphy and Painting Ink
The line at the top right is a hair. I have decided this. A long one, too long to be mine, lying across the white of the sink the way they always do the morning after someone stays. You do not pick it up straight away. You brush your teeth around it. You let it be proof that the flat was briefly for two, that a second toothbrush leaned in the glass and a heavier body pressed the mattress down on the right until the whole bed sloped toward it. By Thursday it is still there. I run the tap and it does not move. I switch off the light and leave it, one dark thread on porcelain, catching the window.
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
- dark fan sector on a small hub, radiating arcs, stacked tilted rectangles at right
- Movement
- rotation around the hub; the right-hand stack leans against it
- Coverage
- ink on about four fifths of the paper
- Tone
- six tonal steps, weighted dark
- Layering
- many translucent passes, readable in the left arcs and upper right bands
- Edges
- crisp on arcs and band walls; ragged dry tops on some upright rectangles
- Feibai
- none
- Open paper
- broad wedge at lower left, smaller pale field at upper right
- Chance marks
- thin stray line at top right; cloudy pale wash below the hub
- Frame
- ink runs off top and bottom right; lower left and upper right corners stay open
A wheel turns on a small ring just left of centre. A dark fan swings up from it, grey arcs spill round its rim toward the left edge, and broken bands curl beneath, so the eye runs the circuit before it rests anywhere. On the right, tilted rectangles crowd toward a black block that sits hard on the bottom corner.
The arcs at upper left are where the sheet lives. Pass lies over pass, each grey keeps its own clean edge, and the order they went down can be read like a stack of glass. The paper, sized by hand to sit between raw and sealed, lets each wash dry on top of the last instead of sinking into it. The bare paper at lower left takes its shape from that swing and gives it room.
The cost is the bottom right. The rectangles darken there into one heavy slab that jams the corner and outweighs the wheel. Its black, like the fan's interior, is nearly uniform, and the faint creases across it are the only event inside.
Where that leaves it is solid ground. The wheel turns, the greys stay clear, and the sheet stands well, held back from more by the weight it piles in one corner.
How it was read
Read by the Visual Analysis Engine, version 23.11, on 2026.10.26: 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.
6 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: 0.038 (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
“This sheet works in the same radial, layered arc style as R3. The passes are well ordered and legible, but the dark masses are flat inside and the heavy lower-right slab crowds the composition. The material is sound apart from minor marks.”
Fan and arc segments hold clean walls following a radial swing; the large lower-right block is a heavy filled slab with stiff, stacked rectangular edges.
WEAKEST Bulky dark rectangular slab filling bottom right
STRONGEST Curved arc bands around the fan's hub
Dark interior modulation 0.038 measures flat; fan and right block are uniform inside, with tone changing mainly at overlapping pass edges. Grey arcs give some range.
WEAKEST Flat black interior of the large upper fan
STRONGEST Translucent grey arc bands at left
Many translucent passes overlap in a readable order across arcs and right-hand rectangles; overlaps stay legible and build depth, though the darkest areas close up.
WEAKEST Right block passes merge toward dark uniformity
STRONGEST Stacked translucent arcs fanning at upper left
Strong radial rotation around the central hub, with shaped empty paper lower left; the right half is weighted and crowded, so the balance tips heavily.
WEAKEST Crowded heavy mass in bottom right
STRONGEST Radial swing around the hub at centre
The ink is controlled with crisp pass edges. There is a stray thin line in the top-right paper, faint crease marks in the right block and a cloudy pale wash below the hub.
WEAKEST Crease-like marks across the right dark block
STRONGEST Clean translucent edges of grey arc passes
6 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 6 distinct places, 15 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.
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
2026.10.25, day 301 of the Crucible Year, one of 2 paintings from that date. 12 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: P4 S14 (working title).
T_398 among all 402
Every painting of the year by date; this one is outlined.
Materials
- Paper
- Huiyun Tianxuan Ge "Dot Ink Becomes Gold" Master Special, semi-cooked (self-sized, aged), Anhui Jingxian Huiyun Tianxuan Ge Xuan Paper Art Products Co., Ltd. (安徽泾县徽韵天宣阁宣纸艺术品有限公司), made 2012.10
- Ink MB6
- Yi De Ge Yun Tou Yan, Yi De Ge (Beijing)
- Ink MB8
- Boku-Undo Gentoku Super Concentrated, Boku-Undo
- Ink MB9
- Yi De Ge Pine Soot Ink, Yi De Ge (Beijing)
- Ink MB10
- Shisan Yue Calligraphy and Painting Ink, Shisan Yue (Thirteenth Month)
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