Room 19 · Behind the glass

How this room wears

A leather briefcase, drawn. The handle, the flap, the lock, the straps and the corners are each worn by the hands that pass over them, for everyone; read as patina, the leather burnishes and the brass brightens where it is most held.

Each sentence is a separate surface. It is worn by a pointer passing over it, by a finger touching it, by being selected, by resting in the middle of the screen while someone reads, and a little by simply being on screen at all. Nothing below where a reader stops scrolling is ever worn, so the shape of the wear is also a map of how far people get, and that shape differs between a phone, which shows a few sentences at a time, and a wide screen, which shows many.

Being on screen only counts while someone is evidently there: a scroll, a movement of the pointer, a key, a touch within the last fifteen seconds. A tab left open in another room earns nothing.

Wear accumulates as weight. Weight becomes softness along the curve 1 − e^−w/r, where r is 400 for the shared page and 20 for a personal one. The first touches show quickly; the last never quite finish.

The same history can be shown two ways. Erosion takes weight and presence away, like a step. Patina adds ink and warmth, like leather. Switch between them on the page. The wear is the same; only the reading of it changes.

Shared wear in this room is kept for good. It has never been reset. This room may become unreadable, and this page keeps a legible copy so that the loss is a choice rather than an accident.

One visitor may add only so much per day, so no one can wear the page out for everyone else. Crawlers and other machines are counted separately and do not wear the shared page. Their weight so far: 0.

Wearing since: 23 October 2026, 05:16 in Kyoto, 4 days ago
Total weight: 17
Reading now: 0
Most worn: This is the briefcase the whole gallery began with: a thing that wears in rather than wears out.
Least worn: the handle

The briefcase

The drawing is a few dozen lines of SVG in the page, and each part of it is a mark worn like a sentence. Nothing is redrawn: a part's wear value is a number on its group, and the stylesheet reads it to pale the leather and thin the ink (erosion) or darken the leather and brighten the brass (patina). How far each part has gone, as a share of fully worn:

The handle: 0%
The flap: 1%
The lock: 0%
The left strap: 0%
The right strap: 0%
The front: 0%
The left corner: 0%
The right corner: 0%
The feet: 0%

As it was, week by week

A picture of the shared wear is kept each Monday after dawn. Nothing is wiped by it.

26 Oct 2026 weight 17

The text, unworn

For each sentence: total weight, of which merely seen, then how far down the page people get (its exposure as a share of the first sentence's), then the weight that came from narrow, medium and wide screens.

the handle

1 · seen 1 · reach 100% · narrow 0 · medium 0 · wide 1
the flap

2 · seen 1 · reach 100% · narrow 0 · medium 0 · wide 2
the lock

1 · seen 1 · reach 100% · narrow 0 · medium 0 · wide 1
the left strap

1 · seen 1 · reach 100% · narrow 0 · medium 0 · wide 1
the right strap

1 · seen 1 · reach 100% · narrow 0 · medium 0 · wide 1
the front

1 · seen 1 · reach 100% · narrow 0 · medium 0 · wide 1
the left corner

1 · seen 1 · reach 100% · narrow 0 · medium 0 · wide 1
the right corner

1 · seen 1 · reach 100% · narrow 0 · medium 0 · wide 1
the feet

1 · seen 1 · reach 100% · narrow 0 · medium 0 · wide 1
This is the briefcase the whole gallery began with: a thing that wears in rather than wears out.

3 · seen 1 · reach 100% · narrow 0 · medium 0 · wide 3
Every part of it is worn by the hands that pass over it. The handle goes first, because the handle is where the hand goes.

3 · seen 1 · reach 100% · narrow 0 · medium 0 · wide 3
Read one way, the ink thins and the leather pales where it is rubbed. Read the other, it burnishes: darker, brighter at the brass, closer to whoever carried it.

1 · seen 1 · reach 100% · narrow 0 · medium 0 · wide 1