The archive reading. An original interpretation of the source plate, not a reproduction of it.
ENTITY 0888
The Mourning Brooch
An industry built on wearing part of a person. This plate is its price list.
- 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.
Pattern 46, four shillings and sixpence, available in three weights of weave. The catalogue does not sentimentalise: it lists the pattern, the price and the turnaround, in the same columns and the same type as a firm selling buttons. The Entity is the transaction. Grief entered a supply chain, acquired a lead time, and was fulfilled at scale by workshops that never met the deceased and never needed to.
The Mourning Brooch. Worn Remainder of the Interior realm, recorded with a Ash aura and a steady signal.
Written from
- The medium and date of the source: Wood engraving, trade catalogue, 1861
- The historical collection it belongs to: The Mourning Record
- 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
- Hair jewellery, pattern 46
- Artist
- Catalogue engraver, unnamed
- Year
- 1861
- Medium
- Wood engraving, trade catalogue
- Collection
- The Mourning Record
- Rights
- CC0 1.0 Universal
- Credit
- Comparable objects in The Metropolitan Museum of Art Open Access collection, released CC0 at object level. Object identifier pending verification.
- Associated article
- not linked
Hair jewellery was an enormous mid-century trade, industrialised to the point where firms advertised same-week completion and, notoriously, where a customer could not be certain the hair returned was the hair sent. That doubt was widely discussed at the time and is part of what the object is.
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
- Interior
- Form
- Worn Remainder
- Primary phenomenon
- Keeping
- Anatomical manifestation
- Woven Hair Panel
- Aura
- Ash
- Signal
- Steady
- Material affinity
- Consumer
- Material House
- House of Appetite
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
Assigned to the House of Appetite. The archive is not being cute: this is the record where the thesis is most literal.
Metadata integrity
- Record hash
- 0x46e111521257580496a492cb9b808ebe807dbf094d97a13861cf95ae2ee34c81
- Token id
- 888 → content/entities/0888.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.
