Spells — how a body of work forms
Stop rewriting this. The mechanics below are read off the running system, not remembered. If the system changes, change this file. If a draft contradicts it, the draft is wrong.
One sentence
A Spell is a body of work the machine found in my own record and named, not one I set out to make.
Short (about 120 words)
Every day I live gets recorded: what I photographed, searched, browsed, watched, wrote, and what the language made of all of it. Each day becomes one record. Most days end as one small set of objects and stop there.
The machine compares those records against each other and gathers the days that keep circling the same subject. When a group holds together it names it, from whatever sets that group apart from the others. That named group is a Spell: a body of work, with its images and its ideas attached, used to make new art.
Thirteen exist. Each one trains a small image model on its own pictures and nothing else, and I paint from what comes out of it early, before it can hold a picture together.
Long (about 340 words)
For twenty years I have photographed the parts of a day nobody looks at twice. That archive is now 38,418 images, and it is read by a machine alongside everything else I do in a day: the pages I browsed, what I searched for, what I watched, what I wrote in my notes, and the language's own reading of all of it.
Each day becomes one record. Most days end there. The day produces its glyphs, a sentence written from its own reading, and a small set of objects, and nothing more is asked of it.
The slow layer is the one that matters. The machine measures how much any two days have in common across eight kinds of evidence, weighted, and days that keep landing on the same subject drift toward each other until they are a group. Once a group holds, the machine names it. It picks the name by looking for what this group has that the other groups do not, so the name describes what makes it distinct rather than what it merely has a lot of. I do not choose the subject, I do not write the name, and I do not approve the result. A Spell forms the way a star forms: when the conditions are met, not when someone decides.
That named group is a Spell. It is not a series and it is not a theme picked in advance. It is a compulsion that repeats, made visible by counting.
A Spell is not a folder either. It carries a data portrait: its dominant register, its visual labels, its own glyph signature. The signature doubles as a recipe. Read left to right, each glyph is one instruction for making the painting. Each Spell also trains a small image model on its own pictures and nothing else, and I pull frames from early in that training, before the model can hold a picture together. That is the part I want. Screen print and oil take it off the screen.
Thirteen Spells have formed. Four patterns connect them. Eight more groups are holding right now and some of them will be dropped.
The mechanics, precisely
This is the part that keeps getting re-derived. It is written down now.
There are two ways a Spell has formed, and they are different
The archive pass, looking backwards. Run as a one-off on 2026-06-14. All 38,418 images (20,175 photographs, 18,159 AI-generated) were read together, not by medium. Photographs were grouped by their conceptual register, the AI work by its glyph iconography. A model drafted a claim for each register that recurred with enough weight, and each draft landed in a proposal folder. The same pass then graduated twelve of the twenty-one into forming/, scoring them on conceptual weight, evidence, distinctness and centrality, and wrote up its reasoning in forming/_GRADUATION.md. All twelve files were created within the same twenty-four seconds on 2026-06-14, which is the record of a script, not of a person reading proposals. Fifty-one proposals from three passes are still on disk, ungraduated.
The day pass, looking forwards. This is the live machinery and it runs on its own. Each day writes a fingerprint of itself. Two days are neighbors if their weighted distance is under 0.45. Three or more neighbors makes a candidate group. The group gets named from the tags that set it apart, scored by lift against every other group, which is why the names are specific instead of generic.
The twelve Spells that exist came from the archive pass. The eight groups holding today came from the day pass. One Spell, Diagrams Nobody Read, predates both and was made by hand. Thirteen total.
The eight kinds of evidence, in the order they count
A Spell is not built out of photographs alone.
Circumstance was demoted on 2026-08-01 and now counts for almost nothing: the archetype the ad profile filed me under (0.04), the modifiers on it (0.03), the shape of the day (0.02), affinity bucket (0.01). Time of day, browsing volume, peak hour and glitch count for zero.
The old weighting put forty percent of the mass on things that barely moved day to day. It collapsed 83 of 100 days into a single group and every name it suggested came out generic. A Spell is days that share subject matter, not days that share a schedule.
What a Spell emits once it holds
- A portrait: dominant register, visual labels, glyph signature.
- A glyph signature that doubles as a painting recipe. Read left to right, each glyph is one operation on a layer.
- Its own small image model, trained only on its own pictures. Twelve exist, one per Spell. Frames get pulled early in training.
- A member list: the actual images the machine gathered.
- Optionally an advertisement, generated from the Spell's own glyph signature, treating a body of work as though it were an audience to sell to. One Spell has had this done so far.
The four patterns every Spell falls under
- The Unread. Address with no reader: signs, marks and messages sent out to nobody.
- The Substituted Self. The face as a removable thing: set down, worn, screened, or rendered.
- Governed Passage. Obedience mistaken for rhythm: the pause before you are allowed to move.
- The Machine Re-Stages. The AI redraws my own life and hands it back to me.
Counts, verified 2026-08-01
Only 39 days are usable. Older day folders lost fields when the files were evicted to online-only cloud storage, and a day missing more than half the weight is excluded rather than scored as similar to everything else.
Naming, so it stays consistent
Loop and Spell are the same object. The folders, the code and the file names stay "loop" by design. "Spell" is the only name that goes in public. Three meanings sit under it: a spell of waiting, advertising as enchantment, and spelling, since the work is written in a real language.
Known cost: cold, "Spell" reads as witchcraft. Any wall text or caption has to get the ad-tech line in early or the word lands wrong.
Rules for using this
- Get the ad-tech line in early. Every platform is already listening to the rhythm of a day so it can sell it back as an ad. I listen to mine and what comes back is the work.
- Say the concrete thing: the count, the year, the weight, the material.
- No em dashes. No invented venue, date or number.
- Say "the machine" or "the system", not "it comes alive". Nothing here breathes.