atelier assay #01

April 2025

atelier

The atelier is open for assaying! This is a new memory project/digital journal I'm trying out, heavily inspired by sweetfish's checkout counter and hill house's journal and media log pages. I wanted a place to record neat things I tried, did, and/or liked each month.

Why the atelier assay? It's a fun combination of anachronism and alliteration, for one. I love styling webpages and digital objects to replicate artifacts from lifetimes ended long before the internet ever existed; it's very interesting to me to see a deliberately antique aesthetic modeled on something both intangible and modern, not to mention that a lot of the Looks and styles associated with my pet interest time periods are the direct consequences of viewing them from our current time. The bindings of medieval codices were not fragile when they were made, nor their words inked in exactly the same hue before their ink's oxidation caused each page's deterioration at their darkening. Victorian ledgers were not flaked away at the edges or sporting a distinct sepia smoked vignette when first cracked open. Time wears on things just as they wear on bodies. The ways this erosion translates to webpages is intangible but definitely still present: broken links, HTML tags or styling practices since fallen out of favour or function entirely—these things all mark the passage of time by leaving imprints of the person who used them.

It's been really fun digging into web dev docs and playing with the styling to put this together. I'm hoping to get an RSS feed set up for it too, once I figure out how. For now, I'm keeping it all javascript-free, but the idea of having something similar to Zonelets' auto-populating archive list is very enticing.

One more paragraph to indulge myself: the word assay as used today means to test a substance for certain qualities or contents. It is an investigation, an assessment of a nature that can be either qualitative, quantitative, or both. It comes from Old French assaier, which then evolved into essayer: to try. At its heart, the analysis is an attempt. That is all it needs to be—nothing more required of it but its nature. An attempt. I'm not sure what I'm searching for, if anything, by writing all these things down here. But it is intriguing to wonder if any patterns will emerge in what appears in each assay, whether in what I find curious or in what I create.

the Public Domain Review

An online journal of essays and curations from works in the public domain, drawing from museum collections around the world.

• Shadows from the Walls of Death (1874)
  A book of swatches taken from arsenical wallpaper sourced from across Michigan. One of them is now used as the background of this very page! (A good reminder to take a break from screentime, I suppose.)
• Werner's Nomenclature of Colours (1814)
  A taxonomy of colours arranged and cross-referenced by categories drawn from the natural world (animal, vegetable, mineral), with swatches and names.