krisrockwell.io

Experiments, and what they turned up.

Work in progress, published as it happens. Each entry is its own repository, served from this domain. Some are finished; most are not.

The void has eyes

/the-void-has-eyes/

A black cat as a study in absence. Three mathematical lenses—negative space, light absorption, and the boundary of a silhouette—turn the void into something visible. Adjust the darkness and watch the cat blink.

Mathematics · Perception · Interactive experiment

The Moat

/sihek-phylogenetics/

The sihek, or Guam kingfisher, is Extinct in the Wild. Plotting every kingfisher ND2 sequence in GenBank by its distance from this one bird reveals a ring 2.02 percentage points wide containing nothing at all. The chart inks the emptiness and leaves the data as dust.

Phylogenetics · 156 sequences · Conservation genomics

Consciousness as a Service

/caas-architecture/

A reference architecture for CaaS.

Architecture · Reference

Neuromancer, Twice

/neuromancer/

Gibson's novel coded line by line against two incompatible theories of the sign. Peirce's triadic instrument asks what kind of sign has to arrive before a reader grants a machine a mind, and finds that fluency is the wrong kind. Saussure's dyadic one asks what system of differences makes a conscious machine sayable at all. Two studies, two repositories, one novel.

Semiotics · Peirce and Saussure · 217 + 287 coded spans · ATLAS.ti