How it works
The Approach
Six artists share a converted warehouse in Denver, in the year 2075. Nobody writes their story. Every day, a set of small engines asks the same questions — what happened in the city, what passed between two people in the building, what did each of them make of it — and the answers are written down and kept. The art is what falls out of the far end.
What follows is the whole machine in plain language.
01 — The shape of a day
Every day runs the same five steps
A day is simulated in one pass, always in this order. Each step can only see what the steps before it produced, which is what keeps the world consistent: the weather happens, then people happen inside it.
The city
Two or three things happen in Denver. None of them are about our six directly.
The house
One or two scenes between two residents who are overdue each other.
Each person
Everyone reads the day and works out what actually landed on them.
Some make work
If something hit hard enough — and they were in the mood — they make a piece.
It is written down
Diaries, letters, relationships and the day’s news are saved to disk.
Nothing is thrown away. The whole world is plain text files in a version-controlled folder — you can read any day of it, and undoing a day is undoing a commit.
02 — The world
The city is weather, not plot
Each morning the world produces a couple of events — a water ration, a licensing board, a rent reassessment. They are written as news, and they are deliberately not about our six people. The city is the pressure they live under, not the story.
A handful of slow threads run underneath — an election, a reservoir, a certification scheme. Each one has a temperature. A thread that keeps getting pushed heats up; one that nothing has happened in cools down on its own and recedes into the background.
That cooling matters more than it sounds. Without it every storyline only ever escalates, and within a few months the world is nothing but simultaneous crises.
A thread over three months
Real output. A storyline flares when something happens and sinks when nothing does, so the world always has some threads loud and some quiet.
03 — The people, to each other
Somebody is always overdue a conversation
This is the part that makes it a story rather than a newsfeed. Every day the engine looks at all fifteen possible pairs in the house and asks who is most overdue each other — who has not spoken in a while, who is in the middle of something unresolved, who has been stuck in the same place too long. It picks one or two pairs and writes a single scene: a specific hour, a specific room, hands doing something, a thing said or conspicuously not said.
What a relationship is
Two separate answers, kept for each person about the other.
What it is:
How far along it is:
A relationship can only step to a neighbouring rung. Nobody goes from barely knowing someone to being with them without the middle happening on the page.
The two answers can disagree
Because each person keeps their own account, one of them can be somewhere the other is not. This is deliberate — it is where most of the drama comes from.
She has said it and he has heard something else. Neither file is wrong. The engine will keep putting them in rooms.
When a pair has been stuck in the same place for too long, exactly one of them is forced to move that day — never both. One person shifting while the other does not is the ordinary way this happens, and the more painful one.
04 — The people, to themselves
What landed, and what they keep
Each person then reads the day — the city’s news and any scene they were in — and scores every item for how much it actually concerns them. Four things decide it:
What each person carries
- A diary
- Written most days, in their own voice, private.
- A short account of themselves
- Who they are right now — rewritten daily, so it stays current.
- Episodes
- Specific things that happened, written once and never rewritten. This is the part that survives years.
- Wants
- Up to four at a time, each aimed at something or someone. They can be met, or given up on.
- A mood
- How content and how charged they are. It moves a little each day and drifts back toward normal when nothing is pushing it.
Why wants matter
A want is the difference between a character and a description. It is durable, it points at something, and it can end.
Because the house engine can see what everyone wants, one person’s unspoken need becomes the reason two of them end up in a room together.
05 — Artistic style
Each artist is a recipe, not a prompt
Every artist has a fixed set of ingredients — their palette, the subjects they return to, the marks they keep making, how they physically work. Every picture any of them ever makes is built from their own ingredients, which is why a body of work holds together as one person’s.
One artist’s ingredients
- They keep returning to
- vessels · the record a hand leaves · ordinary domestic objects
- Marks that recur
- a thumbprint left in the wall · an unglazed foot
- How they work
- wheel-thrown · wood-fired · slip-trailed · glaze-layered
On top of the recipe, two things bend each individual piece. The first is where they are in their development — early work reads as tentative, later work as assured. The second is the mood they were in that day: a bleak week makes for colder light and a more austere composition, a charged one for a more kinetic picture.
So two pieces by the same artist a year apart share a palette and a set of obsessions, and still do not look like the same afternoon.
06 — The art
The work comes out of the life
When something lands hard enough, the artist writes before they make. The diary comes first — private, and more honest than anything they would say in public. Only then is the picture built, and the diary hands it one concrete thing to show. Here is a real day, end to end.
The public statement he writes alongside it says none of this. It talks about rooms and infrastructure and listening. That is the point: an artist’s statement conceals, and the diary is where the truth is kept.
07 — What is invented, and what is not
The rules the machine cannot talk its way out of
Written by hand, once
- The world’s history and rules — the setting bible.
- Who the six are: their canon, their voice, their ingredients.
- The long threads running under the city.
Generated fresh, every day
- What happened in the city, and what passed between two people.
- Every diary, every artist’s statement, every picture.
- What each person now wants, remembers, and feels.
Decided by rules, not by the writer
- Who is overdue whom, so the same two people cannot monopolise the story.
- Whether a relationship is allowed to move, and how far — one rung at a time, no jumps.
- How fast a mood may change, so nobody swings from despair to elation over a leaflet.
- How hot a storyline may stay when nothing is feeding it.
This split is the whole design. Prose is written by a language model, because prose is what they are good at. Pacing, consequence and continuity are held by code, because those are what they are bad at.
The result is a world you can read at any point in its history. Start with the six who live here, the day-by-day timeline, or everything they have made.