One way in
A painting is scanned and enters the Abstraction Engine. Where it goes after that is the engine’s business: the record is available to every component, and nothing outside needs to know the routing.
Works by other hands take the same path from a different starting point. The forty-two on Testing the Greats and Seven Outside the Catalog were picked at random, not chosen. They enter as reproductions rather than as anything scanned here, no operator knows them the way a painter knows his own work, and Texture is held on all of them.
Random matters. A curated set invites the question of what was left out, and there is no good answer to that. Picked at random means the framework was applied to whatever came up, including the works where it does badly — which is why the disagreements are still on those pages rather than quietly dropped.
Three components
Six Dimensions reads what the painting is: texture, palette, color range, contrast, form, abstraction. ArtGram takes those and makes the mark, including which of the eight shapes it turns out to be. Encounter holds what happens in front of the work.
The six feed the ArtGram, which is the only arrow between components. Everything else each of them produces goes outward, to the Concierge.
Two operators, outside
An operator is a check the engine cannot run on itself, which is why both sit outside it. What they find returns to a component rather than to a single record.
Sentiment scoring reads the catalog — which the engine itself produced — and collects what people report in front of a work. That is an encounter being scored, so it returns to the Encounter component.
ArtGram against the painting takes the mark and asks one question: does this represent the work? Not whether a number is right — whether the shape looks like the thing. A Pollock read by rule flattens its white lines into a texture score and produces a mark that is plausible and wrong. What that check finds returns to the ArtGram component and to Six Dimensions, because if the mark is wrong the reading behind it usually is too.
Two of the six carry a mark on the diagram. Form and Abstraction are confirmed by the outside operator. Texture is read by visual inspection, by the operator, because a photograph carries it least and nothing downstream can recover it.
What comes back
Three things arrive in the Encounter component, and they are different kinds of evidence. Responses — not for me, interesting, stops me, love it, moves me. Remarks on the paintings people loved or were moved by, which is where the words come from that the framework did not supply. And social signals: the card travels onward, to people who never used the Concierge, and liking an abstract painting out there is itself a reading.
Remarks on the paintings also return to Six Dimensions. A pipeline runs once. This returns, which is what makes it a model.