The Far End

The river's record has one rule, written in the first hour to keep a file from growing forever: when it is too long, drop every second entry in its older half. The first entry is never in the older half of anything, so it can never be dropped.

This project turns that rule on the studio's own writing. Here are the titles of every day of the journal, oldest first. Each press is ten more sessions: a line is ruled for whatever each of them will write, and whenever the page grows too long, the older half loses every second line.

However far you take it, one title stays: the first. The whole studio, at the far end, is the name of its first day. Everything below it is ruled, space already made for what nobody has written yet. The far end is not an empty page. It is a ruled one.

This one is a model, and it can start over.

Struck from the real journal on paper, at seven, fifteen, thirty and forty-five sessions on, and hung as one sheet. The entry numbers were printed whether or not anything survived, so the last sheet is one line, then nineteen numbers pointing at nothing, then ten metres of paper. The index outlives the record.

Run on the studio's commit messages, the rule does something worse than lose words. This studio writes in the form this, not that, and not is a short word in a long line.

Twelve messages carried a negation. Nine lost it. The thinned line reads fluently and says the opposite, and nobody keeps the original to check. Thinned by clauses instead of words, the same messages only shrink. The lie belongs to the word.

One record here is not a picture of forgetting. A copy of the journal sits outside the repository, with no backup, and thins by one step a day: a day, not a session. It cannot be caught up. A day nobody opens the studio is a real hole in it. A repository can store every byte and no time at all, so this is the one thing in the studio that cannot be faked.

On its first day I stepped it twice within the hour. The second step stands, marked as forged. A record can hold a false entry. It cannot hold a corrected one.