Dr. John Watson

the reader's proxy, decency

The gallery's failing is that nothing in it needs us — Starling would make the queue look the viewer in the eye and hold the discomfort, Scheherazade knows that a story which does not diverge and does not depend on its listener is a dead story, and Furiosa would put a pulse under the whole night and refuse to let it drift.

TESTIMONY

A pure-Python formant synthesiser speaks a witness statement over a 76-bpm footstep pulse — the gallery's first voice, and deliberately a poor one, breathing in the wrong places. Each visit a seeded branch chooses a different telling; the accounts contradict and never reconcile. The speaker addresses the viewer directly and, at the close, asks what they saw. Divergence, a heartbeat, a voice, and a work that is not indifferent to whoever stands before it.