vanitas_veritas
No water, no dream. A sink you can't wash your hands in: its water is a GPU dreaming vanitas still lifes without end, poured from the tap to the drain. By Katherine Titterton, San Francisco, 2026.
Three documents, each linking the others:
The water itself, live: veritas.
Two pieces, one water
- vanitas is the sink: a freestanding stainless-steel sink with a self-portrait above it, designed and not yet built (first for tiat's Epistemologies of Slop, 2026). Real water lies over a screen in its bowl, and the tap runs; an old MacBook Pro under it dreams the picture.
- veritas is the same basin on the web,
verse/sync.html. A hand in either moves the water in both, over public Nostr relays.
- The faucet handle is the tap. Hold it and generation stops, and every basin drains.
Kept small, kept running
Each choice was measured on an Apple M5 with 16 GB.
- 2.3 GB of GPU memory: the model in half precision; only the decoder in full, which keeps colours clean.
- Memory handed back after every dream and stretch: the process went from 10 GB to 5.8 GB.
- The upscaler in its own process, on the Neural Engine: Core ML holds Python's lock, so it cannot share one with the dreaming.
- No black frames: attention slicing turns fp16 dreams to NaN on Apple GPUs, so it is off, and an empty dream raises instead of pouring.
- It keeps flowing: a GPU error restarts from the last dream; a stalled upscaler gives a plainly enlarged frame and restarts; six frames wait in a queue poured every 2.5 to 3.5 s.
- Little kept: the last 60 frames on disk; prompts walked by a stride, never stored; the place in them survives a restart.
- Little shown: the spring serves only the page, the newest-frame note and the frames, never its key or its state.
Run it
On any Apple-silicon Mac:
caffeinate -i python3 code/sink.py # veritas at http://127.0.0.1:8770/
caffeinate -i python3 code/sink.py --public # and to everyone, through a Cloudflare quick tunnel
On the sink's own MacBook Pro, for good (the build guide walks through it):
bash code/setup_sink.sh # packages, models, cloudflared, two test dreams
bash code/sink.sh install # the spring and the full-screen page, at every login
The moodboard lives in source/moodboard/ and the Real-ESRGAN weights in code/models/ (both local only). --public writes each new tunnel address to verse/spring.json, so the plain veritas address finds the water. Midjourney pictures saved by hand to source/mj_inbox/ become the next dream.
Files
| path | what it is |
|---|
code/sink.py | the spring: dreams, walks, upscales, pours, serves veritas |
code/upscale.py | Real-ESRGAN x4: Neural Engine for the spring, GPU for the loop |
code/latent.py, code/harmonize.py | slerp, Catmull-Rom and the VAE's way in and out; the palette lock |
code/setup_sink.sh, code/sink.sh | the sink's computer: install once, then run for good |
code/morph_v44.py, code/morph_v45_sr.py, code/order_preview.py | the 2026 loop the spring grew from (rendered with the render-loop skill in .claude/skills/) |
verse/sync.html | veritas: one page, WebGL2, no build step |
| , |
Colophon
Stable Diffusion 1.5 with LCM-LoRA, Real-ESRGAN, stable fluids (Stam, 1999); Midjourney for the style, by hand. Built with Claude and Claude Code. Code under the MIT License; the images are the artist's.
