experiment 06 · assignment by cosmos
Lookup: a date becomes a color
lineage: mansion-finder (28 lunar mansions locator, Sacred Tree)
A lookup is the oldest interface in East Asian cosmology: your birthdate,
passed through a fixed rule, lands you somewhere in a system that existed
before you. Here a simplified rule maps any date to one of the five phases
(obangsaek), and each phase can point to a different work in your config.
The visitor is not choosing; they are being found. That reversal is
the design material.
experiments to try
- Replace day-of-year mod 5 with a rule of your own invention: the vowels
in a name, the last digit of a phone number. What data feels intimate
enough to deserve a cosmology?
- Two people with birthdays one day apart get different phases. Is the
boundary arbitrary or is arbitrariness what makes it work? Compare
with any horoscope column.
- Curate the mapping: assign each classmate's work to a phase and defend
the assignments as a curatorial statement.