The archive reading. An original interpretation of the source plate, not a reproduction of it.
ENTITY 0177
The Cloud Face
A face that exists only at viewing distance, and only in people. Step closer and it becomes weather again.
- 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.
Twelve of the fourteen people shown this plate found the face within four seconds. The two who did not were told where to look and then could not stop seeing it. The archive records twelve witnesses rather than fourteen, because a witness who has been told what to see is not a witness. This is the clearest case in the collection of an Entity that requires an observer to complete it, and it is the reason the Living Record counts witnesses at all.
The Cloud Face. Atmospheric Face of the Firmament realm, recorded with a Silver aura and a intermittent signal.
Written from
- The medium and date of the source: Gelatin silver contact print, 1919
- The historical collection it belongs to: Spirit Photographs
- 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
- Sky study, no. 4
- Artist
- Amateur photographer, unidentified
- Year
- 1919
- Medium
- Gelatin silver contact print
- Collection
- Spirit Photographs
- Rights
- No Known Restrictions on Publication
- Credit
- Comparable items held by the Library of Congress. The Library assesses rights per item and warrants nothing; the no-known-restrictions statement is a finding, not a licence.
- Associated article
- not linked
The years immediately after the First World War produced an enormous volume of amateur sky photography, much of it made by people looking for exactly this. The technology had become cheap at the same moment as the grief became universal, and the two facts are not separable.
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
- Firmament
- Form
- Atmospheric Face
- Primary phenomenon
- Recognition
- Aura
- Silver
- Signal
- Intermittent
- Material affinity
- Technology
- Material House
- House of Signal
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
Recorded as the archive reference case for pareidolia. It is not presented as evidence of anything except how reliably a person completes a pattern.
Metadata integrity
- Record hash
- 0x3ebcc8302fb78d2b883d05387a93487dc4b2f238eb2afd09d288047fe0e1351b
- Token id
- 177 → content/entities/0177.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.
