About
The World Is Infinite If You Can Learn to See
Marco Polo describes a bridge, stone by stone.
“But which is the stone that supports the bridge?” Kublai Khan asks.
“The bridge is not supported by one stone or another,” Marco answers, “but by the line of the arch that they form.”
Kublai Khan remains silent, reflecting. Then he adds: “Why do you speak to me of the stones? It is only the arch that matters to me.”
Polo answers: “Without stones there is no arch.”
Entry Points
Different doors into the same room:
For Listeners
Listening is a form of active intervention. When the narrative hits close to home, the body reacts—prepares to move differently. The structure maps onto your lived experience and makes openings visible, and thus possible. This research covers ground horizontally through an enumeration of the worlds that exist, and vertically through interrogation that builds on your specific experience. It begins with resonance and moves toward intervention.
We’ve released five audiobooks so far: Book of Tea, Doors Closing (NYC subway in two editions), and Devocíon Coffee Variations. More worlds are coming. If a world you inhabit isn’t yet covered, it might be—or you could help us see it.
For Music & Narrative Makers
A listener’s world shapes what they hear—you didn’t put that there, but it arrived. You can aim to envelop them, pull them along, or leave pregnant questions that someone else answers in their own voice. The interesting move is building a scaffold that expands into new structures based on who listens. Try it across people in different worlds. Based on the echo, the music either gets richer or loses its uniqueness. Both outcomes teach you something.
We’ve scored the same stories in blues rock, slowcore, musique concrète, and a cappella. The results show how sonic context reshapes meaning. We’re exploring multi-voice podcast formats next and would welcome collaborations with composers interested in narrative scaffolding.
For Sociologists & Phenomenologists
Understanding a person is not the same as describing them. The question is whether lived experiences can systematically probe existing structures and morph them—whether every incremental variable reshapes the manifold, and whether that transformation is visualizable as narrative. This research asks if the scaffolding can evolve to reflect the sociological worlds as they themselves evolve.
The project includes a taxonomy of 105 life-worlds, analyzed through Schütz, Bourdieu, and Luhmann. We’ve rendered tea ceremonies, subway commutes, and coffee shop mornings as phenomenological experiments in sound. User-submitted worlds are coming—send us a scene, and we’ll explore what variations reveal.
For Semioticians
Meaning systems interact with physical systems. Stance—of the speaker, of the listener—reshapes meaning. Expression of lived experience in different forms (music, speech, text) transforms it. The parallax between two modes reveals what neither alone could show.
We’ve tested this by keeping the signified constant while modulating the sign-vehicle: same ceremony, different temperature; same subway, different sonic frame. Coming next: formalization of which parameters carry meaning and which are mere substrate.
For AI Researchers
The question is whether an LLM can model sociological worlds in their requisite detail—and whether it can generate new spaces from a core of validated ones rather than merely interpolating. Narrative capacity may or may not capture the nuances necessary to communicate rich, situated meaning. When error appears, it’s either generative or just pixelated. We’re finding out which.
This project generates thousands of phenomenological variants from structured schemas: 105 worlds × 14 techniques × multiple stances. The corpus is open. We’re developing a formal evaluation framework for understanding variation—if you’re interested, the schemas await.
For Journalers & Contemplatives
Thinking with a model doesn’t erase your autonomy—it can let you lay down the weight you hold in your head. You externalize your chains of thought, see where they lead, and travel ten times faster. Sometimes it saves you the trouble of dead ends. Sometimes it carries you further along what was fruitful. The practice tells you which.
The coffee shop variations began as a personal scene—my morning at Devocíon, books open, strangers nearby. Documentation became expression; expression became generative seeing. Coming next: a workflow for your own scenes. Bring a memory; we’ll help you find the variations.
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These are different doors into the same room. What you find depends on what you bring—and what you contribute may open doors for others.
On Using Generative AI
The text, music, and speech in these audiobooks were made with generative AI tools. My only contribution is to setup the scaffolding and nudge it in a direction that felt true to the soul of the project.
Art requires time, skill, and access. To commission a personalized audiobook—music matched to your morning, narration that speaks to your subway, your coffee shop—would require resources most people don’t have, I don’t have. Generative AI reduced this burden for me. It made it possible to create the art that speaks to me, not necessarily everyone.
These tools let me, one person build what probably requires a studio, a composer, a narrator, a producer. The result is imperfect—but imperfection isn’t always bad. Mistakes have sometimes been generative. I intend to find more of them. And the machinic voice’s particularity in content makes up for its roboticity in structure.
On Music and Speech Together
One map offers clarity. Two maps reveal that maps themselves are necessary but insufficient.
Each audiobook begins with music and continues with speech—not because one mode is better, but because the combination produces something neither can alone. Listen to the same story twice in different modes. The first pass orients; the second defamiliarizes, just because it comes second. Something like a parallax effect emerges between them: a depth that neither the instrumental intro nor the spoken word creates independently.
This is still an open question for me. What exactly is that depth? How do you navigate through it? The music sets a tone the words cannot name. The words give shape the music cannot hold. Together they don’t find the coordinates, they create a shimmering parallax that becomes a kind of continual pregnancy, something arriving more and more into itself, but the horizon keeps moving.
Future work will explore this further. For now, I offer both modes as an invitation: listen once, listen twice, and see what opens up.
On Systems Used Loosely
The Hyperframes research framework behind these projects includes schemas, taxonomies, and systematic methods. Worlds are cataloged. Variations are enumerated. Lenses are named.
But systematic does not mean rigid. These systems are used in a loose fashion—as long as they work for you(or more pragmatically model interpretable). And “working” can only be judged by you, the listener, the reader. If the subway track makes you see the commute differently, it worked. If the tea ceremony track changes nothing, it didn’t.
There is no authority here except recognition. Does it feel true? Does it work when you try it?
Coda
I work on this project because I want to make my world wider, richer. And let that gesture reach out to make yours wider, richer too.
More specifically: I noticed that Calvino made Venice richer through Invisible Cities. And despite its universal appeal that every reader can enter those cities—underneath, it felt very much like Venice. His Venice. A Venice that became infinite through seeing.
I began to explore what my world looked like. In NYC, on the subway, in the coffee shop, I found new things that resonated. Old methods didn’t always translate—the rhythms here are different, the density, the anonymity. But as I explored more through this project, something shifted. My solitude became richer. I got more curious about my neighbors. I started seeing the packed car as one variation, the empty car as another. I started recognizing the rooms. I began looking forward to tomorrows where worlds revealed themselves in cramped spaces.
I hope this is what these audiobooks bring to you too. Not looking at my worlds, but finding yours, made visible through the practice of framing and variation.