About the Archive
ENTITY is an archive of 1,111 invisible persons, recovered from the printed record of the long nineteenth century. 24 records have been written so far. The rest are catalogued and not yet recovered, which is stated everywhere it matters rather than hidden behind a countdown.
How a record is made
One canonical JSON file per Entity, validated against a shared schema at build time. That file is the only place an Entity’s name, lore, provenance or classification is written down. The website, the ERC-721 metadata, search, the filters, the marketplace cards, the holder dashboard and the provenance export all read the same file, and the build fails rather than let two copies of a name drift apart.
Token id maps to record by arithmetic, not by a lookup table: token 7 is content/entities/0007.json and always will be. A record whose filename disagrees with its token id stops the build.
About the plates
The images currently served are original procedural stand-ins, not reproductions. No historical image is bundled with this project and none is downloaded by its build. Every plate is derived deterministically from a token id so that a rebuild is byte-identical and the checksum manifest stays stable.
They have the right physical properties: plate proportion, paper grain, halftone screen, overexposed figure, cobalt separation, edge foxing. That is what lets the veil shader, the archive grid and the preview cards can all be built and tested against real pixels of the right character. When a verified reproduction is licensed, it replaces the plate at the same path and nothing else in the pipeline changes.
The three sections
Every record is printed in three parts and the separation is structural rather than tonal. Provenance is historical and answerable by somebody who does not trust us. Classification is original fiction and is labelled as such on the page. The Living Record is onchain state, and when it cannot be read the archive says so in words, “not read” or “not deployed”, rather than printing the publication value.
The field note on this explains why it is done in the file format rather than left to a reader’s good sense.
What the archive will not do
- Present a Classification value as a historical finding.
- Publish a floor price, a volume figure or a valuation it cannot prove.
- Substitute a plausible value for a failed chain read.
- Describe a Material House reward as a dividend, a yield or a return.
- Mint a record whose rights position has not been verified by a person.
- Route a purchase through an address it has not checked.
Accessibility
Every WebGL surface has a static equivalent that carries the whole composition, not a blurred hint of it. Reduced motion is a real mode rather than a slower animation: the veil holds a single settled fold and the pointer does nothing. Nothing essential is available only on hover, every control is a real button or link, and the archive is fully readable with JavaScript disabled.