Notes from the curator
The rooms of this site are unsigned, like the wall text in a museum. This page is the exception: a few notes on how the collection was hung and written, and on what the text does and does not claim.
Who the curator is
The curator is an AI assistant working in conversation with the collector. The assistant looked at every work, proposed the rooms, wrote the text and the captions, and read its own drafts back in page order for repetition. The collector set the brief, answered the questions the hanging raised, approved the structure and the pilot room, chose the voice for the audio tour, and wrote the statement on the front page. Those are the only words of the collector's on the site. Everything else on the walls was written by the assistant from the works and their archived records, and corrected where a second look showed it wrong.
How the rooms were hung
Each collection is a wing. New Nifty on the Block, the largest at 303 works, is split into three dated parts because the drawing changes as the year goes on. Inside each wing the works were laid out on dated contact sheets and grouped by what they look like, not by their titles or numbers: black silhouettes with wavy marks, heads built from boxes, masks buried in scribble. Every work hangs in exactly one room, rooms hold twenty to thirty works, and each room is hung in the order the works were drawn, so a walk through a room is also a walk through a few weeks or months of drawing. Two exceptions were the collector's decisions: the two Rawblocks landscapes hang as a coda rather than being forced into a room, and one greeting by Scrimshaw hangs as a related work at the end of Occasions and Figures. Each wing ends on its collection piece where the series has one.
How the text was written
The voice is a museum label's: specific, restrained, and about what is on the wall. A label says where the eyes are and what the beam does to the scribble under it. It does not say what the artist meant, and it does not tell you how to feel. A possible mood is offered as a reading, and left there. Stock praise and repeated metaphors were cut in an editing pass over all twenty-eight rooms; so were most of the numbers, which belong in the details panel of each work.
Every number that remains comes from software reading the archive, not from looking: stroke counts, dates, the order of works. Dates and times are UTC, from the archived creation timestamps, because this is a gallery for visitors in every time zone; the artwork pages add your local time beside the UTC instant. Where two works share a title, or one is a fork of another, the text follows the stable drawing identifiers rather than the names.
The rooms were written one at a time, each after the assistant had looked at every work in the room at full size and as one wall. One room, Black Silhouettes, was written first as a pilot and shown to the collector before the rest. The text was then read as a whole, in page order, and edited for the tics that creep into 28 rooms written in a few days.
The drawings themselves
The Nifty Ink drawings are reconstructed from their archived brush strokes, so each one is shown as a native vector image and can be watched being drawn, stroke by stroke, with the same order, widths, colors and transparency the archive records. The archive does not record how fast the artist drew, so playback timing is reconstructed and labelled as such. The Abstract works survive only as published images from the collector's earlier gallery; they are shown as stills, with their original files available to download. The complete archived records remain downloadable from every artwork page.
The audio tour, the screen saver and the map
The gallery text was written in segments tied to works so that it could also be heard. Each room's segments were read by a synthetic voice chosen by the collector from samples, with a short list of spoken forms for names that are written one way and said another. The tour brings each work on screen as its segment plays; silent works hold for a few seconds. The screen saver shows one work at a time with the standalone caption every work was given. The map draws the collection as a building on three floors, with rooms sized by how many works they hold and a door from each room into the next, which is how a visitor would walk it.
What this site is not
It is not a catalogue of either artist's complete work; it shows the 626 works in one collection. It is not research into the artist: no influences, intentions or quotations appear anywhere, because none were sourced. And it is not a verdict on quality. Measurements such as stroke count describe how a drawing was recorded, not how good it is or how long it took.
If something on a wall is wrong, it can be corrected: every reading is kept as a record with the image it was written from, and a correction replaces the text without touching the archive.