The Guhl Forge

The Guhl Forge · a personal exhibition by Eric Guhl

Notes toward an instrument for information.

Most software for notes treats the page as the shape of what you know. The work shown here starts somewhere else: with the things a page is about, how they can be told apart, and the different ways the same things can be seen.

1 As written

Mon, 1 Mar Must return the atlas by Thursday the 4th. Someone at the market said the orchard is in bloom all through April; worth the trip. Booked the 8:40 ferry for 12 June. Still humming a tune from the café and can’t place it. Calling 2027 the long-walk year.

2 As kept

3 As drawn on 2027

A year from January to December. The long-walk year is a band across all of it; April is a band across April; 4 March is one day’s mark; the 8:40 ferry is a pin on 12 June. The café tune has no time and sits apart. J F M A M J J A S O N D The long-walk year The orchard in bloom Return the atlas The 8:40 ferry no time: a tune from the café
Illustration · made for this site One invented notebook entry, three ways. The words stay as they were written; the things in them are kept on their own, each time only as precise as it was given; the year draws what was kept. Point at anything to find it in the other two.

On view

Project Winchester

A continuing experiment in building an instrument for working with information, the way a music program or a drawing program is an instrument for sound or line: something to compose with, not only to file things in.

It exists as a private application in active development: a web app and its API, small iPhone and Mac apps, and a canvas drawn in Rust. Many of its forms are deliberately provisional. The exhibition shows its ideas, worked through one example at a time, and none of its contents.

Read the project overview

Three habits it questions

  1. i

    A page is a carrier.

    A page, a recording, a message: each is evidence worth keeping exactly as it came. It need not be the permanent boundary of everything it mentions.

  2. ii

    Being inside is not belonging.

    Something can matter in several collections at once without becoming a copy, or a child, of any one of them.

  3. iii

    Every view is a projection.

    A list, a table, a timeline and a map show different relations among the same kept things. None of them is the thing itself.

The works

The full catalogue
No. 01

Project Winchester

A continuing experiment in an instrument for working with information, where structure is earned through use instead of being declared up front. Ongoing 2026–
  1. No. 02 Reading is the resting state What has been written opens read-only. Writing is something you choose to do, and the page always says which of the two you are doing. Built Web app · Shared Swift core
  2. No. 03 What a paste becomes Blank lines are already a kind of structure. Pasted onto the Slate, they decide where one piece of writing ends and the next begins, and the words themselves are never touched. Built Web app · iPhone and Mac apps
  3. No. 04 Constellations on a permanent canvas A canvas where things stay where they are put. Gather a few into a named constellation, move them as one, take them off the canvas and bring them back exactly where they were. Built Web app · Canvas (Rust, WebAssembly)
  4. No. 05 A month is not its first day If all you know is “April”, a calendar should not quietly turn it into midnight on the first. Each time is kept as finely as it was given, and drawn no finer. Built Web app · iPhone app
  5. No. 06 One thing, arriving twice The same calendar event can arrive in an exported file and again through a live connection. It should be drawn once, keep both arrivals, and never be merged with a stranger that merely looks the same. Built API · Reference implementation and ledger
  6. No. 07 A word, or the thing it names “Mercury” can stay a word. It can also be made to point at a planet, an element or a god, without the sentence it sits in being rewritten. Prototype Web app · Browser-only prototype
  7. No. 08 Structure that accrues Nothing is declared a hub in advance. A thing becomes central because other things keep pointing at it, and the same picture, a core and its periphery, repeats at every scale. Direction Web app · Link bank
  8. No. 09 Opening a summary back up “A trip to the island” compresses a dozen traces into one handle. Can that compression be opened again, back to what it was made from, disagreements included? Open question A question

How to read the labels

Built
Exists in the application’s source today.
Prototype
A bounded experiment, kept apart from the rest.
Direction
Intended, argued for, not built.
Open question
A question the work is still asking.
Ongoing
A body of work with parts in each of these states.

Figures are drawn for this site: interactive illustrations of an idea, with invented contents. They behave as the application is documented to behave; they are not the application, and none is a screenshot unless it says so.