The catalogue · 9 works
Work
Each work is labelled the way a museum labels an object: what it is, what it is made of, and how far it has come. Some are built and running; some are prototypes kept apart; some are questions still being asked.
Project Winchester
A continuing experiment in an instrument for working with information, where structure is earned through use instead of being declared up front.- No. 02 Reading is the resting state What has been written opens read-only. Writing is something you choose to do, and the page always says which of the two you are doing.
- No. 03 What a paste becomes Blank lines are already a kind of structure. Pasted onto the Slate, they decide where one piece of writing ends and the next begins, and the words themselves are never touched.
- No. 04 Constellations on a permanent canvas A canvas where things stay where they are put. Gather a few into a named constellation, move them as one, take them off the canvas and bring them back exactly where they were.
- No. 05 A month is not its first day If all you know is “April”, a calendar should not quietly turn it into midnight on the first. Each time is kept as finely as it was given, and drawn no finer.
- No. 06 One thing, arriving twice The same calendar event can arrive in an exported file and again through a live connection. It should be drawn once, keep both arrivals, and never be merged with a stranger that merely looks the same.
- No. 07 A word, or the thing it names “Mercury” can stay a word. It can also be made to point at a planet, an element or a god, without the sentence it sits in being rewritten.
- No. 08 Structure that accrues Nothing is declared a hub in advance. A thing becomes central because other things keep pointing at it, and the same picture, a core and its periphery, repeats at every scale.
- No. 09 Opening a summary back up “A trip to the island” compresses a dozen traces into one handle. Can that compression be opened again, back to what it was made from, disagreements included?
How to read the labels
- Built
- Exists in the application’s source today.
- Prototype
- A bounded experiment, kept apart from the rest.
- Direction
- Intended, argued for, not built.
- Open question
- A question the work is still asking.
- Ongoing
- A body of work with parts in each of these states.
Figures are drawn for this site: interactive illustrations of an idea, with invented contents. They behave as the application is documented to behave; they are not the application, and none is a screenshot unless it says so.