The archive reading. An original interpretation of the source plate, not a reproduction of it.
ENTITY 0001
The First Witness
The record the archive was built around: a figure that appears to be watching the plate rather than occupying it.
- Held by
- not deployed
- On the floor
- not deployed
- Material House
- not deployed
- Chain
- Anvil (local) · not live
Entity Record: original fiction
Written for this project in response to the historical record below. It is not a historical claim and is never presented as one.
Record 0001 is the reason there is a Record 0002. The plate was acquired as an example of magnetic-fluid illustration and filed without comment. It was only when the sheet was laid beside three others from the same run that the difference became obvious: in the other three the ruling stops at the face, because a face is what a lithographer draws last. Here it does not stop. The figure is uninterrupted from crown to heel, and the effect on anyone holding the sheet is a specific and unpleasant one: the sense of being the only person in the room who is not being described.
The First Witness. Attending Figure of the Threshold realm, recorded with a Cobalt aura and a steady signal.
Written from
- The medium and date of the source: Lithograph on wove paper, later hand-tinted, 1843
- The historical collection it belongs to: Fluidic Anatomies
- What the plate depicts, as described in the record's alt text
Historical Record
UnverifiedVerifiable information derived from the source. Everything here describes a real object and can be checked against the page it came from. Nothing in it is invented, and nothing in it was inferred from what the picture looks like.
- Source page
- not yet sourced
- Original title
- Plate I. The Fluidic Double
- Artist
- Unattributed engraver
- Year
- 1843
- Medium
- Lithograph on wove paper, later hand-tinted
- Collection
- Fluidic Anatomies
- Held by
- Wellcome Collection
- Rights
- Public Domain Mark 1.0
- Credit
- Source plate held by Wellcome Collection. Item-level identifier and reproduction rights pending verification.
- Associated article
- not linked
Magnetic-fluid illustration belongs to the decades in which mesmerism was still argued about in medical journals rather than in parlours. Plates of this kind were teaching material: they showed a second body, drawn over the first, through which an operator was said to work. They were printed by the same trade, on the same presses, as the anatomical atlases they imitated, which is exactly why they were persuasive.
This record has not passed verification. Nobody has yet opened the source page, confirmed that the image, artist, year, collection and institution match it, or confirmed that the digital reproduction, not merely the underlying work, is free of restriction. Its crop has also not been reviewed by a person. It is blocked from mint metadata until that happens. See provenance and rights.
Classification: an ENTITY interpretation
Original fiction. An interpretive vocabulary the archive applies to a historical object. No value below is a finding about the world.
- Realm
- Threshold
- Form
- Attending Figure
- Primary phenomenon
- Observation
- Anatomical manifestation
- Ruled Interior
- Aura
- Cobalt
- Signal
- Steady
- Material affinity
- Finance
- Material House
- House of Exchange
Living Record
Onchain state. It changes; the sections above do not.
Dormant
Filed, and nothing more. The record exists; nobody has been to it.
Contacted
Somebody has been to the source and come back with something.
Named
A true name has been established and attested. It is not necessarily the one on the plate.
Remembered
The record has been corroborated a second time, independently.
Manifested
The Entity has a material life: placed in a House and drawing against it.
The archive is not yet on chain, so the current status cannot be shown. Every record still reads in full.
Published at Contacted. That is the genesis value, not the current one.
Curatorial note
Held as the archive index record. It is not the earliest source in the collection and has never been claimed as such.
Metadata integrity
- Record hash
- 0xa8dc6563ef32129cb45e37aef896e65891c173ce6e92bbebb2c7a3898c9c1e40
- Token id
- 1 → content/entities/0001.json
- Plate checksums
- Published for every plate
The record hash is the sha256 of the canonical JSON as published. The Progression contract stores the same hash on every advance, so a holder can prove the text they were shown is the text the chain acknowledged.
