T_410
The engine's readingA fan of translucent grey and violet blocks arches above two black masses, closing on a pale gap of paper spattered with dark drops.
Record- Date
- 2026.11.03
- Dimensions
- 97 × 180 cm
- Rating
- 5.8
- Paper
- Half-Cooked Red Star Mo She 6-Foot Bark Xuan Paper, self-sized
- Ink
- Yi De Ge Yun Tou Yan, Boku-Undo Gentoku Super Concentrated, Yi De Ge Pine Soot Ink, Shisan Yue Calligraphy and Painting Ink, colour inks
Two black hills stand either side of the white road, and the villagers will tell you they are one dragon, asleep, with the road running through the place it was cut in half. The butchers of that country sell a drop of its blood for a fever, and you can see where they have been: dark beads on the snow, about where a knife would rest. I bought one. It did nothing for the fever. Up on the ridges violet fans keep opening and closing, which the priests call breath and the shepherds call heather. I slept in the pass one night with my back to the eastern half. Near dawn it moved, about the width of a thumbnail, toward the other.
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
- overlapping rectangular blocks in a radial fan, black masses at the base, pale arc above
- Movement
- blades converge downward on the central gap; top arcs sweep across them
- Coverage
- ink on about nine tenths of the paper
- Tone
- six tonal steps, weighted dark
- Layering
- violet, dry arcs, translucent greys, blacks; readable across the upper fan, buried below
- Edges
- crisp on upper block ends; soft along the black masses; broken in central streaks
- Feibai
- present in the central streaks above the gap and along the upper arc
- Open paper
- tapering pale wedge at bottom centre, with a thin band along the top
- Colour
- violet bands at upper left, upper centre, centre and right edge
- Chance marks
- spatter in the central gap and upper right; small rings upper left and upper right
- Frame
- ink runs off left, right and most of bottom; top and bottom centre stay open
A great fan of brushed blocks swings around a pale gap at the bottom centre, its blades rising to a thin arc under the top edge. The eye slides down them into the gap, where dark spatter lands on bare paper. The shape reads at once.
The painting happens in the upper fan. Violet bands lie under translucent greys at upper left and centre, and the half-sized paper slows each pass enough for the next to settle on it without drowning it. The greys descend in real steps. Through the middle, dry streaks break over the paper and let its grain into the violet.
The bottom corners undo much of this. A black mass sits in each, filled rather than travelled, and together they bury the sequence so legible above. The left one has a lumpy stepped shoulder and almost no life inside beyond the crinkle of the paper. The right one carries a long crack and a pale scrape, both plain against the black. A cloudy green patch muddies the upper left.
Upper fan and lower weight never become one painting. It is a middling sheet with a clear shape and some real passages, worth a look for the violet under the grey.
The rating
T_410, rated 5.8
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
- 2.0 · modelled
- Layering
- 2.4 · legible
- Composition
- 2.0 · working
- Material and surface
- 1.0 · flawed
- Mass
- 4.8 of 10
- Tone
- 10.6 of 14
- Void
- 4.8 of 8
- Flow
- 2.8 of 10
- Balance
- 8.0 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 23.13, on 2026.11.03: 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: 0.063 (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
“Layered radial fan around a pale central void, with legible violet and grey passes above; bulky, flat-leaning black masses dominate below, and a crack and scrape damage the right mass.”
Radial blocks and arcs hold coherent walls, but both lower black masses are heavy slabs, filled rather than travelled, with a clumsy step at the left mass's top edge.
WEAKEST Bulky lower-left black mass with a clumsy stepped shoulder
STRONGEST Upper-left arc band following the fan's sweep
Upper blocks and dry-brush give a real grey range; right black mass shows mottling, but the lower-left black reads flat in colour, its stretched texture mostly paper relief.
WEAKEST Lower-left black mass, near-flat apart from paper crinkle
STRONGEST Stepped greys of the central and upper fan blocks
Violet, grey blocks and dry-brush stay legible across the upper fan, but the two black masses bury the sequence below and a murky greenish overlap clouds the upper left.
WEAKEST Lower black masses simply cover the earlier passes
STRONGEST Violet bands under translucent grey blocks, upper left and centre
The arch and shaped central void direct the eye downward through the sheet, but near-symmetrical black masses sit static and bottom-heavy, crowding the lower corners.
WEAKEST Two heavy black masses weigh down the bottom corners
STRONGEST Fan converging on the pale central opening with spatter
A dark vertical crease and a white-flecked scrape sit in the right black mass, visible in colour; a cloudy greenish patch muddies the upper-left block. Centre dry-brush is controlled.
WEAKEST Crack and abrasion inside the right black mass
STRONGEST Dry-brush streaks breaking over paper in the centre
5 distinct places, 2 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, 22 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.
V23's rules and arithmetic, and every figure under its own name, are in the Archive record.
Date
2026.11.03, day 310 of the Crucible Year, one of 11 paintings from that date. 13 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_410 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, self-sized, China Xuan Paper Co., Ltd., made 2026.04.08
- 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)
- Colour
- colour inks, recorded together
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