The Plate Room
1728 plates from the author's master archive — deduplicated, hosted here, none of them behind anything
This is the whole picture archive, not a curated selection. A here is a single image that holds a piece of the system — a , a , a letter wheel, a diagram, sometimes just a painting made while thinking about one. They were rescued off a backup drive, so they arrive in every state: some carefully titled and written up, most simply present. The page tells you which is which rather than dressing them all alike.
What is actually in this room
These five numbers are counted from the catalogue every time the page builds, so they cannot drift away from the truth.
Find a plate
One box and two rows of filters. Everything narrows together.
By subject
By how it got its name
the whole room, in the state it is in
1,728 plates match · page 1 of 29 · click any plate to open it full size
Where did these plates come from, and why are so many unnamed?
They were recovered. The original room held 262 rescued plates whose curated titles had come unstuck from the images, so they were showing filename stubs like “253”; those titles were re-married to their pictures, and 30 exact duplicate copies were hidden — the files stay on disk, they simply stopped appearing twice. Then 1466 more came in off the author's master library backup drive, deduplicated by content against everything already here and converted into fast web-sized copies.
That is why the naming is uneven. 660 plates were looked at and titled. The remaining 1,068 arrived as files off a drive, and a file off a drive is called whatever the program that made it called it — media-1778925220372.png.webp, or a raw UUID, or nothing at all. This page tidies those names (it strips the extensions and the “(1)” copy markers) but it will not pretend one is a title: every such plate is stamped filename, and every plate whose file said nothing usable is stamped untitled and left blank.
The same honesty applies to the subject pills. Four of them — Angels, Cosmology & Symbols, Gates & Letters, Numbers & Geometry — are real subjects somebody assigned. The fifth, Unsorted arrivals, is not a subject at all: it is the 1,068 plates nobody has filed yet. They are shown because they are part of the archive, not because they have been read.
What are the three readings, when a plate has them?
430 plates carry a written account at three depths. Beginner describes the picture in plain words, assuming nothing. Intermediate connects it to the rest of the system, assuming you have met the vocabulary. Master gives the full technical reading. They are three tellings of one image, not three levels you must pass.
They load only when you open a plate — the room would otherwise hand every visitor half a megabyte of text they had not asked for, which is exactly what it used to do.
Why keep a room of pictures at all?
Because the traditions this draws on all did. A mandala is a painted palace holding a whole teaching, built to be contemplated ring by ring; a yantra condenses a doctrine into pure geometry; the Renaissance emblem books paired a picture with a motto and expected the reader to sit with both until they clicked. The wager is always the same one: an image can hold many relationships at once, where a sentence has to flatten them into a line.
A working archive looks like this — mostly unfinished. The Plate Gallery shows the signature plates, the ones chosen and written up. This room shows everything, in the state it is in. Both are true; they answer different questions.