chase is pouring
One room, one glass, one record, lit by the sky that is actually over you right now.
The sun is where the sun is. Its position comes from the date and the hour where you are, and the weather at the window is your weather – when it rains where you are, it rains on the glass. Lean in. Put the record on. Change the wine or the record, or ask for another take. The place named at the bottom of the page is a door too – tap it and the room will move to any city on earth.
The stack.
One self-contained page, and the room in it is a print. Every surface is drawn in the page as four inks – yellow, fluorescent pink, blue and indigo – screened into halftone dots pinned to your screen’s own pixels and laid onto the paper the way a risograph lays them, so the darks are overprints and the highlights are bare paper. The glass, the sleeve and the painting are the exception: the same four inks, printed as smooth tone instead of dots, so the things you can open read as what they are. A new pour reprints the table one plate at a time.
The wall asks Wikimedia Commons, live, for a painting to suit the hour, the weather and the place you are reading from – an evening in Honolulu might hang D. Howard Hitchcock or Charles Bartlett, a wet midnight a nocturne, a Paris morning a boulevard. Only public-domain work is hung: every candidate’s license is checked as it arrives and anything still in copyright is passed over. Tap the painting to walk up to it, and again to read what it is – every canvas is titled, dated and credited in its card, with a link back to Commons. (If nothing can be fetched, an Edward Hopper stays on the nail.)
Sun position is the NOAA solar calculation, including atmospheric refraction. The room tone – rain, wind, birds, geckos, the hum of the building – is synthesized live with the Web Audio API from the same conditions. No samples.
Everything the room fetches, precisely: your approximate location, from ipwho.is, and the current weather, from Open-Meteo, so the sky is right. When you name a place, the city, ZIP code or country you type goes to geocoding-api.open-meteo.com to find it. Album artwork through Apple’s iTunes Search API, which is why the sleeve on the table is the real cover, reprinted – when Apple has nothing, the page draws its own. The record itself through YouTube’s embedded player – artist and label channels, archives and broadcasters, and listeners’ uploads and playlists. And the paintings, from Wikimedia Commons, public domain only, license-checked one by one.
The wine is not a recommendation engine. Every pairing runs over the same four numbers – weight, brightness, texture, motion – carried by both the cellar and the shelf, which is why you can change the record and keep a wine that still suits it, or change the wine and keep a record that still suits the hour.
The room keeps a little of you. Every record poured for you leaves a spine on the credenza – on this device only, sixteen at most. The votive is lit fresh with every pour and burns down while you stay, and when a record ends the tonearm lifts. Stay long enough after dark and a car’s headlights will cross the wall. Tonight’s table can be shared as a print from the caption, with a link that pours the same pair.
Keys
R the record · W the wine · P the painting · N or Space another take · ↑ ↓ lean in and back · Esc back out.
Who
I’m Chase Conching – a designer/developer in Honolulu making a series of small experiments at chase.is. Everything here really works: real data, real physics, real time. If you’d like that kind of care on your own project, say hello.
say hello → chase@chase.isgithub ↗linkedin ↗
Weather from Open-Meteo · location from ipwho.is · album artwork from the iTunes Search API · paintings from Wikimedia Commons, public domain · playback by YouTube · print engine after riso-windowseat, MIT. Apple, Apple Music and YouTube are trademarks of their respective owners.