A collection
Read a body of material
A collection of sound, text, or images turned into something you can move through, question, and cite — with the shape drawn from the material itself, not imposed on it.
Ideoscopic — a studio for bespoke reasoning instruments
We design agent harnesses that hold two kinds of rigor at once — work grounded in code, with statistical and computational experiments reproduced and checked, and deep qualitative analysis of the real material: audio, video, transcripts, text. Each harness maps a domain so its patterns surface, and guides the inquiry from there.
Every hard question has its own method — a way through the material that no off-the-shelf tool quite fits. We design that method as an agent harness: a custom system, run by AI, that reproduces the computation and does the close qualitative work in one loop, built from first principles so its guarantees — not our opinions — are what you rely on. The design of the harness is the whole craft; done right, it points somewhere new — personal cognitive software, a tool that thinks a domain through with you.
The craft
There’s no universal engine here. Each harness is designed from first principles for its own material — a certified search over quantum-network protocols reads nothing like a price-blind map of a market’s stories. What every one of them shares is a discipline.
The harness measures and computes exactly; the qualitative reading interprets only what the evidence earned — never the other way round.
Each harness is designed for the real shape of your problem. The architecture is the method — we don’t bend a general-purpose tool to fit.
Every claim ships something you can check — a proof, a cited source, a guard against fooling yourself. What you trust is the design, not us.
A harness says what it expects before it looks, then tries to break its own findings. Whatever doesn’t survive is dropped, on the record.
What you can commission
We don’t sell fixed products — each commission is a harness designed for one question. But the questions tend to take a few shapes.
A collection
A collection of sound, text, or images turned into something you can move through, question, and cite — with the shape drawn from the material itself, not imposed on it.
A field
An industry, a body of research, a domain of players — mapped down to its handful of moving parts, so you can see the whole and find the edge.
An archive
A voice, a practice, a life’s output made askable — every answer drawn verbatim from the source, never spoken over.
From the gallery
A few of the instruments we’ve built — most commissioned from ourselves, as research, each running a different method. They’re live: open any one in your browser.
Quantum error correction
Six decoder families for quantum error-correcting codes, each rebuilt from its source paper and checked against a published benchmark — behind one interface.
decodes in your browser
Explore the instrument →
Pharmacology
Receptor occupancy across dozens of psychiatric medications, rendered as a terrain you read — the shape of a taper made visible.
35+ medications · 10 receptor classes
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Market narratives
The quantum-computing market laid out by the stories that move it — sovereign compute, quantum-security revenue, hype and skepticism — and how they rise and fall together.
a sector, by the stories that move it
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Portraiture
A constellation of silent-witness video portraits — a body of faces made navigable as one field.
video portraits by John Oliver
Explore the instrument →
How a commission works
A commission is scoped, prototyped, then built. The early version is real and yours to judge — the complete instrument follows only once you’ve seen it reading your material right.
A short, adaptive conversation to find what you actually want to see, and whether we have an instrument for it.
You get a written commission brief — the instrument, the approach, what it will and won’t do.
We build a working instrument over a slice of your material. Rough, but real. You see it before you commit.
If it’s reading the material right, we build the complete version and deploy it as its own application.