Trace Forms

A companion archive to We Were Here Briefly, which supplies the sentences. The upstream pipeline scrapes the day's internet residue, condenses it through one of five constrained personas, and writes it to a shared database. trace-forms reads those sentences and treats each one as a museum object. Title. Catalog code. Evidence photograph. Emoji map. Mode of display. A run becomes a page. Ten typographic modes are possible — eight rendered to HTML canvas in Arial Black 900, two as Three.js scenes. Voxelized glyphs orbiting through fog. Inscribed blocks with words wrapping across edges. A scientific-dissection poster that color-codes parts of speech. A 5×4 grid of cutouts pulled from Wikimedia and stripped of their backgrounds by an ONNX model. The mode is assigned, not chosen — a Fisher-Yates shuffle over a 10-card deck, one deck per ten runs, with anti-repeat at the boundary. Same run, same mode. Always. The archive grows on its own. A nightly cron generates the day's title, evidence object, emoji map, and collage cutouts, commits the new files, and pushes. Vercel redeploys. The catalog format reads like FOIA: Residue of Seventeen Perforations in Prayer Salt — TF-002-24.