The Perfect Description of an Empty Room

SIX LINES

1. NarratorIt was correct to the last nail hole, and nobody had ever lived in it.
2. NarratorThe floor did not creak.
3. NarratorThe houses became more faithful to their inhabitants than to their photographs.
4. The EdifierBoth kitchens are correct.
5. The ArchivistA more convincing reconstruction is not a more trustworthy one.
6. Emil RuskI can hear your kettle.

HOW IT IS MADE

This is the fourth of four fables of Edifiction, The House That Language Built, set in one city where every building was made from a sentence and carries that sentence on a brass plate by its door. The Bureau of Reconstruction gives the Edifier forty-one archival photographs of a demolished street and it rebuilds the street from them. The surveyors took the photographs in the week after the last families moved out, so every room in them is empty, and the reconstruction is exact and uninhabited. The people who lived there come back and correct it. A brother and sister remember one kitchen two ways, and the Edifier builds both. An archivist then has to catalogue rooms that are records and rooms that are recollections. The story follows the distinction in Watson Hartsoe's notes between what an image shows, what later research establishes, and what a reconstruction is made to do.

The photographs are drawn as halftone prints with deckled edges and archive numbers. Each print is a small luminance function sampled on a forty-five degree screen, so moving the camera closer makes the dots bigger. The street is built with the series' signature shot: the Edifier types its description, the words leave the sheet, and each one lands as a line of the house with its letters set in it like courses of brick. Red is used only for the plates' sentences and for what is wrong. At first that means the rooms: the door's swing, the board that makes no sound, the stair that is too shallow. After the corrections the red moves to tags pinned on the photographs, which now disagree with the street. The last shot is print 31, the empty kitchen, unchanged.

The sound holds what the photographs could not. The first steps on the floor are dull. The floorboard then goes through three versions: a thin squeak, a long groan, and a short wooden creak that Hanna accepts by stepping on it again. A church clock strikes four before the late sun comes in. A kettle heats in her kitchen and not in his, and he hears it through the shared wall. The narrator is Kokoro bm_lewis and the Edifier is af_nicole with a light synthetic filter, as in the other three films. The inhabitants are older Kokoro voices, slowed, with a slight tremor. All other sound is made with numpy and scipy.

The timing file er.json drives picture and sound together. It holds the start time of every spoken line and every cue, including the moment each word of a falling sentence lands, so each landing has its own knock. The picture code in er.js reads those times, and build_sound.py reads the same score.

FOR THE BENCH

Keep provenance. Write a store where every fact about a room is recorded with its source: {room: 'kitchen-7', field: 'table', value: 'under the window', source: 'memory:Hanna'}, with sources such as photo:31, memory:Hanna and memory:Emil. Then write two views. account(room, source) returns the room as one source describes it and never fills a gap from another source. If the photograph has no table, the photograph's account has no table. disagreements(room) lists every field where two sources give different values, with both values and both sources. Next, try a third view, established(room), that returns only the facts every source agrees on. Run it on the kitchen. What is left, and which fields does your code want to fill anyway?

An original fable from Watson Hartsoe's notes The House That Language Built, written in the manner of Stanisław Lem. Download the film.