The workswhat are the public works?
The public works are what happens when the camera is pointed by everyone: photographs computed supertile by supertile on donated GPUs, verified by the donors themselves, folded into one master, and published as they deepen. A donation project where the progress bar is the photograph itself.
The works now open
Several run at once, at different scales, so there is always one that fits the card you have. Each has its own deep-zoom view and its own credit roll. A donor who states no preference carries the largest — the big works are bigger than any group that could split off to chase them, so concentration happens without anybody organising it.
How it works
A worker claims one supertile, renders it to the work's pinned depth, and delivers the raw accumulator with a signed manifest. Before its first claim is ever served, the machine sits an entrance exam: one quick render of a pinned region, matched against the bench's own fingerprint, so a broken driver is turned away at the door instead of polluting the pool. Delivered work is then verified by the other donors - the fleet assigns each verifier a region somebody else rendered, never their own choice and never their own work, and a supertile only folds into the master once its verdicts arrive. Even after approval it keeps being offered for verification, up to a lifetime cap, so an approved lie keeps meeting fresh chances to be caught.
Rendering is deterministic: the same claim always produces the same photograph - not within a tolerance but bit for bit, which is what makes all of this checkable by somebody who was not there. Verification is a hash comparison rather than a judgement call, and how much of the registry currently returns one hash on every card is printed on the census page, which reads it off the instrument. The first trial, back when a tolerance was still the best that could be said, had three GPUs on two continents agreeing with a single-machine exposure on 100.0000% of 453 million samples.
Donations are anonymous by default. A donor may set a mark; only its SHA-256 ever leaves their machine, and the ledger credits the hash. Naming a hash on the public roll is a separate, reviewed step.
The tiers
| work | scale | one flagship card |
|---|---|---|
| The Rapid Cycle | 1 GP | minutes |
| First Light | 10 GP | an evening |
| The Gallery | 100 GP a plate | a weekend each |
| The Commons | 1 TP | a season |
| The Wall Build | 4 TP | a year |
| The Pilgrimage | a petapixel of width | designed never to finish |
Prices are measured, not guessed: every subject's cost per gigapixel comes from a published census of real hardware. The frames are measured too — each tier's actual pixel count is the nearest whole number of supertiles to the scale above, and the works themselves are authored from this same table rather than from a number typed twice.
One tier is not like the others. The Rapid Cycle is there for the watching: a gigapixel finishes fast enough that the grid fills while you look at it, so it is meant to rotate through the registry and not keep its pictures — each work retired as the next opens. Everything from First Light upward is kept, and a finished work stays open to the atlas and the deep viewer long after its run has ended. Whether any tier has a work open right now is a question only the cards above can answer.
Join
The worker is a folder of plain Python: no installer, one
command, and three packages you almost certainly have —
numpy, moderngl, zstandard,
plus a GPU driver. (This said "no dependencies" until
2026-08-20, while the kit's own README listed those three on its
first page. A donor who took the sentence at its word met the
first import error instead.) It ships one plate's kernel and
nothing the camera cannot afford to lose. First run asks four
questions; a machine with no keyboard runs it headless with a
settings file.
download the worker then request an invitation token: logan@improperaperture.com
The trial is small on purpose. Tokens are issued by hand while the pool earns its sea legs.
Watching
The living render repaints as the work lands. Systems is the fleet's own instrument panel - donors, collectors, verifiers and the ledger, read out live with history. The runs is the register of every work this commons has carried: a run's pixels are retired when it ends, and the record of who carried it is not. The credit counts the other way round, by contributor rather than by work, and sorts by whichever measure of generosity you think counts.