Exemplum

short readings of objects and scenes

A way of looking at a thing carefully enough that the system starts to show.

Each entry takes something holding space in the world — a shoe, a chair, a room at a certain hour — and reads it. What made this? What vocabulary did it inherit? What system could generate something like it and what would it strip out?

The exemplum™ process is a shape for processing those readings. I take the photo and the method reacts. Claude writes the drafts, I direct and edit.

A 3D rendering of an emergent trace floating above a soft cyclorama backdrop. A horizontal trail along the ground branches upward into a dome of overlapping arm-circle loops; thin attention beams shoot down and outward where the head was facing at sampled moments.

...by his red right hand

Sensorecording fifty-six seconds. An unseen arm drew, a silent head looked down, walk, draw, spin, what? A body recorded itself for fifty-six seconds via Field — twenty channels at sixty hertz — and the form arrived without the body that made it.

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A matcap-rendered 3D model: an animal in a bowed pose, head lowered, neck stretched, weight on the front legs, over a small mound on the ground. Gray monochrome shader, no textures, lumps and unsmoothed planar facets visible.

what the oracle confused

A matcap render lets meaning stay open. The textured asset arrives and closes three of four readings on contact. The same form, in two readings, with the second one rotatable in your browser.

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A long pale-wood shelf hung with carved chair-leg samples in unfinished hardwood — cabriole legs with various carved feet, turned spindles, square-tapered legs with reeded shafts, each block tagged with a hand-written SKU number.

kelp and bead

Two scans from one afternoon — a manufacturer's sample shelf of carved chair-leg samples and a small painted side chair already in its long second life. Both 3D-scanned, both rotatable in your browser.

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A textured 3D render of potted succulents on a wooden deck — pink, dark blue, and cobalt pots in afternoon shade, polygon facets visible across the leaves.

three and one planters

A 3D scan of potted succulents on a patio, rendered three ways from the same camera — textured, matte, wireframe. Then a Mac reconstruction of the same data, a flat texture atlas, and six dead voices reading the mesh.

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A small white Apple USB-C power adapter wrapped from the lower two-thirds by a sky-blue 3D-printed sleeve, with the word slēv embossed into its side and horizontal FDM layer lines visible across the surface.

what’s named remains

A 3D-printed sleeve for an Apple charger, embossed with its own phonetic spelling — desktop printing and after-market logic meeting in one palm-sized object.

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A three-quarter view rendered from a photogrammetry scan: a chair made from bent and riveted reclaimed street-sign aluminum, with vertical WATER lettering on the back panel.

chair become sign

A 3D scan of a chair made from reclaimed street signs — and the path from “I have no idea what this is” to knowing what it is.

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The interior of a biaxial rotational-molding oven seen through its open door — galvanized sheet above, carbonized black deposit below, a spoked spider frame visible in the factory beyond.

the oven from inside

A photograph of a making-system rather than a made thing — the interior of a biaxial rotational-molding oven, chamber cold, the arm swung out.

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A damaged red tactile curb-ramp tile with its domed surface torn away, exposing embedded aggregate concrete and rusted fastener bosses.

three kinds of imperfect

Three photographs of industrially patterned surfaces — a failed tactile tile, a tiled wall, a ribbed seal — considered together for what they share and what separates them.

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A close-up of a red sandstone building wall with rusticated rock-faced ashlar on the left and a carved vertical band of stylized leaves on the right.

cut, fold, grout, stand

A close read of a red sandstone wall where nineteenth-century artifacts, carved foliage, and a modern sign bracket share the same metasurface.

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A snow-covered driveway curving toward a low house with glowing porch lights, seen through white pine branches at dusk.

at the edge of blue

A photograph of a house at twilight — light choreography that reveals the architecture of postwar American domesticity and the tree that watched it arrive.

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the shape of an exemplum

  • what is here
  • the family it belongs to
  • how it was made
  • the system underneath
  • what is lost in the abstraction
  • what it reveals