Measurement / imaginary instrument
The coincidence caliper
The caliper is set to two events. It reports their distance using a catalogue of intervening causes. Change the catalogue and the reading changes.
Cabinet
An optical experiment, an index of things borrowed from fiction and a cabinet of instruments nobody has quite built.
Apparatus 01 / colored shadows01 / ACTIVE
Optics / demonstration
Additive color and shadows
Block the blue lamp and the inner patch receives only red and green light.
Switch a lamp off to change the color reaching the screen. The blue beam is blocked inside the marked patch.
All lamps active. Background: white. Region missing blue: yellow.
The demonstration assumes equally bright sources and idealized additive mixing. Real shadow boundaries depend on the size and placement of the lamps.
Cabinet / collection
Things from fiction
Animated portraits, tricorders and walking castles: what their stories ask us to believe and what it would actually take to construct them.
Open the catalogue ↗NEW IN THE CABINET / 002
Future objects & future words
Not everything we can describe has a name. Not everything that is physically possible will exist. Four working essays investigate lexical gaps, future objects, the forces shaping possibilities, and the rival histories that might explain an artifact or word.
Read the four investigations ↗Five proposals
Unfinished entries
Five objects of inquiry, each with a different problem to solve.
Scientific collections / essay premise
Disused instruments
An instrument may outlive the theory that gave its scale meaning. The proposed collection would keep calibration records alongside the objections that made each device obsolete.
Interactive presence / cultural study
An inhabited image
Suppose an audiovisual portrait remembers each visitor. Its recorded conversations would change the depicted person's public identity, even if the original sitter never met those people.
Imaginary measurement / sketch
An instrument for environmental memory
A scale records which materials have been removed from a house and how much they weighed. Its maker calls the reading nostalgia. No calibration can establish that claim.
Language / collection
An atlas of unsettled languages
Two speakers disagree over whether a borrowed tense belongs to their language. The proposed atlas keeps both accounts, with dates and places of use.