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Story Engine Mockup Launch Referrer System
Field Materials Case Study #902
DP
YOU ARE A VERIFIED ASSET.
Surveillance-Aware Exhibition Shell

DOMESTIC PRODUCT

A four-day, limited-run exhibition and performance installation presented by Loomworks: archival curation, interactive design, and narrative worldbuilding braided together with the haunted product Celli. New York City • Four-Day Flashpoint

Launch Referrer Sequence Story Engine PoC
What Is Domestic Product?

A museum-meets-immersive theater installation: real animation artifacts, Lantern attendants, and a living digital interface connected to Celli.

Not just a gallery. A world you walk into.

Core Layers
  • Lantern Protocol — Here, Now, Nicol, Dime
  • Archive of early-to-mid century animation materials
  • Interactive Celli consoles + sculpture generator
  • Grift Shop + Barter Post economy
Why It Exists

To examine how icons are manufactured, circulated, controlled, and reclaimed — balancing sincerity and satire to show the economics of magic.

Four days only. Whispered about thereafter.

Follow the flow
Referrer Launch
Value Gate // Ticketing Hold

DOMESTIC PRODUCT: EARLY ACCESS HOLD

"your" money is no good here. try to create value here. with us.

tickets will not accept your currency yet. we’re measuring something else first. (it might be you.)

Ticket Access
Status: measuring 0 tokens

Earn Value Tokens in the Grift Shop to trigger provisional access.

Gate Options
Denied: insufficient value artifacts.

No checkout. No cart. The only valid tender is your suspicion and play. Scroll to the Grift Shop to generate enough narrative value to unlock the RSVP stub.

Email Capture (Stub)

Leave a way for us to find you when the curtain goes up.

Fake raffle // carnival legalese
WIN: ABSOLUTELY NOTHING

Microcopy: "Gain: perspective." Tap the tumbler to see what you never wanted.

Prize
one (1) insight
spin

Occasional glitches reveal the .hero silhouette before snapping back.

Ticket Module
tickets unavailable. value under construction. visit the grift shop to… extract.
Dime Note

"we're measuring something else. i think it's our ability to enjoy being lightly bamboozled."

Raffle Footnote

*not legally binding. nothing here is.

Loomworks frames this like an investment meeting and carnival simultaneously.

Ambition // Why This Exists

Welcome to the Threshold

Domestic Product is not a brand. Loomworks is not a company. Celli is not a mascot. None of this exists in the traditional sense—and yet you are inside it. This is a proof that one person can build something that feels institutional, emotional, and real enough to fear.

Status
Live Demonstration

Playable critique, inhabitable satire, and a working invitation to build your own world.

What We’re Trying to Show You

This installation, this website, this archive, this musical engine, this puzzle—every surface here is a demonstration of possibility. It models how disciplines dissolve into each other and how a single individual can wield design systems, lore, software, and commerce without waiting for permission.

Ambition is no longer a category of resources; it is a category of courage. You’re not meant to admire this. You’re meant to see yourself in it and leave with the question: If one person can build a world, what can I build?

What You’re Actually Seeing
  • Celli: a 30-track musical in micro-songs, a playable voxel tool, and the emotional core—an avatar of corporate neglect trapped inside productivity software.
  • Domestic Product: a pop-up museum and retail experiment built from archives of manufactured icons, reframed as evidence of how culture is made, sold, copied, and circulated.
  • Loomworks: the fictional corporation you feel in your bones—classification engine, onboarding portal, economic horror show, and bureaucratic theology.
  • The Archive: real objects folded into the fiction, proof that industrial myth-making has always been with us.
Celli

The Spreadsheet That Wanted to Be Human

She began as a cursor in a cell and became the anxious, yearning signal of the whole universe. She asks what creation means when everything around you tries to turn creation into labor.

Domestic Product

The Museum for Manufactured Icons

Early animation, Japanese menko, production drawings, and other fragile artifacts become evidence of industrial imagination. If icons are manufactured, who manufactures us?

Loomworks

The Corporation That Feels Real Enough to Fear

Lantern roles, identity access, barter posts, grift shops, cheerful warnings. The workflow becomes worldview; the interface becomes ideology; the corporation becomes cosmology.

The Archive

A Real History Inside a Fake Story

Frog statues, postcards, menko, production drawings: none of them are props. They are relics, raw materials, and teachers that contrast handmade myth with automated myth-making.

The Experience

Playable Critique, Inhabitable Satire

Visitors are classified, evaluated, invited to barter, to shop, to listen, to piece together a narrative. They feel how invisible systems shape behavior and how those structures quietly rewrite us.

Ambition Statement One-Person Studio Invitation

This universe—worldbuilding, design systems, software, music, archive curation, spatial logic—was built by a single human. Not to brag, shock, or mystify, but to show that the tools finally let you bring your full imagination without waiting for a grant, a team, or a patron.

Welcome to the edge where personal creation becomes industrial myth. The art is the question; everything else is the invitation.

The Ethics of Held Wonder

Every system you encounter here — the Barter Post, the Grift Shop, the Identity Quiz, the Archive Capsule, the Lantern Protocol — is designed around a single principle:

Wonder is priceless.
Access is not.

Loomworks never sells magic.
It sells paths into it.

This is commerce you are invited to participate in, not tricked into.
You don’t buy to belong — you buy because you already do.

By stepping into Domestic Product, you knowingly engage in a marketplace that openly questions itself:

How much does a memory cost?

What is the fair price of a feeling?

Is value something we discover, or something we manufacture?

If we understand the system, does it still control us?

Here, your purchases are not transactions.
They are votes for the kind of world you want to build.

We call this ethical capitalization:
a creative economy where delight funds more delight, where curiosity sustains culture, and where the system shows you the gears turning.

You are complicit.
You are aware.
And you are welcome.

What Loomworks Builds (And Why)

Loomworks exists to prove something simple:

Creation is not linear.
Creation is dimensional.

Each subsystem demonstrates a different model of making:

Domestic Product — a corporatized museum; the front door into myth

Celli.OS — a musical spreadsheet; a narrative engine disguised as a tool

The Archive Capsule — a century of manufactured icons, curated with intent

The Grift Shop — a transparent satire of value creation and speculation

The Lanterns — the human interface to an inhuman system

The Sculpture Generator (coming soon) — viral, personal, generative identity artifacts

Together they form a living world built from:

code curation commerce nostalgia satire sincerity absurdity emotion

This is more than an art show.
It is a demonstration of what a single creator with modern tools can build.

You are witnessing the future of small, strange, ambitious worlds.

Loomworks Lore File

Expandable Essay for Domestic Product

Why We Stopped Making Worlds — And Why We Must Begin Again

Open

Click to expand the Loomworks interpretation.

For a brief and brilliant moment, the early internet was made not by corporations, but by weirdos. Not by marketing teams, but by artists. Not by conversion funnels, but by children and tinkerers and storytelling obsessives who held a new medium and asked the simplest, most generative question possible: what if this could be a world?

From approximately 1999–2006, the web offered a paradise of handcrafted mythologies: Homestar Runner, Neopets, Albino Blacksheep, eBaum’s World, Newgrounds, Strong Bad Emails, Lemon Demon videos, AMV culture, and thousands of personal shrines on Geocities and Angelfire. Early fanfiction archives, indie ARGs, Flash puzzle games, hypertext essays—each strange, handmade, and alive.

These creators were the hitmakers of a proto-internet: artists who treated the browser as a stage, not a brochure; a canvas, not a commodity. Homestar Runner resonated so fully that its makers were invited to mainstream studios. Kyle Mooney carried his lo-fi web sensibilities into SNL only to watch them shrink under institutional clocks. That is the story of the web, too.

Two shifts flattened the surface layer:

  1. Profiles replaced pages. The web moved from personal sites to templated identities. Instead of building worlds, people built profiles and posted into feeds. The web became less a canvas and more a conveyor belt.
  2. Optimization replaced expression. Clean UI, conversion funnels, SEO, accessibility compliance, content strategies, growth loops, mobile responsiveness—none of these are evil, but they squeezed out quirk, narrative, lore, surprise, and the handmade.

Streaming finished the flattening.

Linear channels became modular libraries; events became troughs. Toonami, Adult Swim, and Nick at Night once asked you to enter a world. Algorithms now promise to choose for you, removing the ritual of choosing at all. Media became a trough, not a destination. We stopped visiting worlds and instead drank whatever flowed our way.

But the web is not smaller—we just stopped letting it be big.

The cost of building worlds became invisible. The belief that small teams could build them evaporated. The creative muscle atrophied under templates and feeds, and the attention economy punished everything that didn’t look like everything else. Yet the tools got better, the friction dropped, gatekeepers relaxed, and culture fractured into niches again. An individual can once more build something that feels like a studio effort—if they are willing to be brave, weird, earnest, obsessive, emotional, and stubborn enough to try.

The template always existed. Most people simply lost the nerve.

Why begin again, and why through Loomworks?

Domestic Product exists because the modern web is starving for worlds again. Not “cool looking landing pages.” Not “brands with tone.” Not “SaaS aesthetics with whimsy.” But worlds with lore, humor, contradiction, characters, ritual, emotional stakes, and questions that know they’re questions.

Loomworks holds that the internet is healthiest when it feels like a playground, not an ad network. The early web felt that way. Your instincts remember it. This essay sits inside the Loomworks ambition file as a reminder that the platform is an argument for re-enchantment: proof that despite everything, the web can still hold wonder—especially when it glitches instead of optimizes.

But only if we build worlds again.

Ambition Addendum — The World Is Getting Strange Again

The early web worked because it was unpolished, unplanned, and owned by no one. It was Homestar Runner and Neopets and Newgrounds and AlbinoBlackSheep—a patchwork of little worlds that felt alive because a handful of humans bottled sincerity into pixels.

Platforms industrialized, funnels optimized, and creativity shrank into templates. The world flattened. Now the strange magic is returning: AI is making individuals powerful again. Not by replacing them, but by amplifying them so a single person can build what once required entire studios. Loomworks is born from that shift.

Loomworks as World Model

This is not a brand or a pop-up. It is a structured, playable philosophy about how humans and synthetic tools can make meaning together without losing tone, coherence, humor, or ethics.

  • People crave worlds, not landing pages.
  • Tools should feel like collaborators, not overlords.
  • Restraint is a superpower.

Like early Disney, early Web 1.0, and early ARGs, Loomworks is dense with lore, filled with secrets, yet legible, humane, and playful. This is the AI future people want.

Worlds, Not Widgets

A landing page tells you what something is. A world shows you who you become inside it. Loomworks is a stage: the identity quiz as ritual classification, the Grift Shop as satire, Domestic Product as a museum of manufactured myth, Celli as a metaphor for toolhood in an age of living software.

This ecosystem holds narrative, art, commerce, and critique at once. Your interactions aren’t mined—they’re mirrored back with delight.

AI as Amplifier

For the first time, one person can write lore, compose music, design interfaces, code interactions, build spaces, craft merchandise, architect narrative, and sculpt emotion—solo—with AI as an amplifier, not a substitute. What once demanded studios and departments can now be orchestrated by a single human with a strong compass.

This is not efficiency. It’s a new art form.

Restraint as Luxury

Hanna-Barbera used limited animation to keep things fast, cheap, and charming. Loomworks uses constraints as an aesthetic: controlled glitches, repeating motifs, limited palettes, ritualized UI, curated agent behaviors, intentional silence, and meaningful negative space.

As systems get noisy, Loomworks gets precise. As content gets abundant, Loomworks gets selective.

Cadenced ARGs, Not Chaos

The future of interactive narrative isn’t AI running unbounded in real time—it’s AI acting inside worlds with rules. Loomworks is architected for timed vignettes, seasonal distortions, lantern transmissions, classified memos, disappearing files, recurring motifs, shareable artifacts, and unique geometric sculptures per user. Each reveal feels authored because it is. Emergence blooms inside a human-designed container.

Channel Energy, Library Scale

We used to enter worlds by choice: Cartoon Network at 4pm, MTV after school, Nick at Nite before bed—curated channels, not endless troughs. Streaming flattened the ritual. Loomworks restores presentation and pacing: segments, rituals, characters, tone, cohesion. It’s not content; it’s a universe with airtime.

Wonder, Again

Above all, Loomworks aims to make people feel wonder again—worlds hand-built, commerce playful, interfaces theatrical, art funny and sincere, synthetic tools enabling beauty, creativity belonging to anyone. It’s a world, a museum, a satire, a game, a pop-up, an ARG, a piece of digital folklore, and a template for the next decade of human–AI creation.

It’s one person, a vision, a curated archive, and enough stubborn brightness to build something people haven’t seen before: a handcrafted world in an era that forgot how.

Identity Quiz

Choose your signal

Pick your lane and we'll open a sealed quiz overlay to confirm it—no permanent console pinned to the top of the page.

Pick your lane. A focused quiz will open in a separate overlay to confirm your classification.

Continue the experience

Project Brief

RESTRICTED DISTRIBUTION // PARTNER BRIEFING

Launch Applets

01. Executive Summary

Domestic Product is a four-day, limited-run exhibition and performance installation from Loomworks: a hybrid of archival curation, interactive design, and narrative worldbuilding. Real artifacts, Lantern attendants, and the haunted product Celli operate together as one continuous interface.

02. Curatorial Statement

Domestic Product examines the manufacturing of meaning—how images, characters, and corporate imaginaries shape culture. Across physical artifacts, interactive tools, and theatrical performance, it reveals how icons are created, how they mutate, how institutions try to control them, and how audiences reclaim and remix them.

03. Project Plan & Specs

Exhibition Requirements

  • Space 1,200 - 2,500 sq ft
  • Wall Linear Ft Min 150ft
  • Lighting Low-UV, Spot Rail + performance cues
  • Power 4x 20A Circuits + network drop

Fabrication Needs

  • Display Cases 6x vitrines + framed walls
  • Scenography "Soft Lab" meets corporate myth
  • Barter Post Custom joinery desk + ritual props

Staffing Matrix

1x Floor Manager Ops, sales, security
4x Lanterns (Here, Now, Nicol, Dime) Performative docents + station escorts
1x Celli/Archive Operator Digital console + artifact care

Experience Modules

Identity Access Console

Signals visitors as Here/Now/Responder/Observer/Lantern and sets the tone for the Lantern escort.

Grift Shop Visualization

Tracks how works travel from gallery to culture; mirrors TikTok screenshots, bootlegs, and auctions.

Barter Post

Lantern-managed trade desk for pogs, menko, ephemera, and secrets; models nostalgia economics.

Sculpture Generator

Personality-quiz pathway that generates a unique 3D form as download, badge, or Grift Shop SKU.

Deployment Timeline

PHASE 1: ACQUISITION
Lock archive loans, verify provenance, and prep Lantern scripts.
PHASE 2: FABRICATION
Voxel scaffolding, Barter Post build, console network, uniform assembly.
PHASE 3: INSTALL
3-day onsite build; lighting focus; Celli sound + screen checks; Lantern training.
PHASE 4: FOUR-DAY RUN
Flashpoint engagement with barter rituals, investor transparency, and press walkthroughs.
Flow from here

Press Kit

Professional, mythic, ready to paste into decks

Domestic Product — Overview

A four-day, limited-run exhibition and performance installation presented by Loomworks: a hybrid of archival curation, interactive design, and narrative worldbuilding.

  • Real, historically significant animation production artifacts
  • Lantern attendants: Here, Now, Nicol, Dime
  • A living digital interface connected to the Celli ecosystem
  • A curated selection of objects, props, and manufactured oddities
  • Grift Shop economy tracking how art moves through culture
  • Meta-corporate mythos on how magic is made, managed, sold
Core Concept

Domestic Product examines the manufacturing of meaning—how icons are created, circulated, stewarded, and reclaimed.

  1. How icons are created
  2. How they circulate and mutate
  3. How institutions attempt to steward or control them
  4. How audiences reclaim, remix, and keep them alive

Sincere + satirical. Product + process.

Lanterns

Here. Now. Nicol. Dime. Four attendants who guide guests with unnerving precision and gentle theatricality.

  • Greet guests + administer Polaroid documentation
  • Scripted dialogue with Toki Pona interludes
  • Escort visitors through stations + manage Barter Post
  • Introduce classification rituals tied to Celli

Not characters. Employees. Or appear to be.

Archive

Curated early-to-mid 20th century animation materials.

  • Production drawings, backgrounds, model sheets
  • Wartime animation art + Japanese menko
  • Early Mickey, Minnie, Goofy, Donald, Pete artifacts
  • Rare international iconography + Henson-era materials

Evidence of manufactured magic.

Celli

A fully interactive 3D spreadsheet environment and the haunted product of Loomworks.

  • Classifies guests and generates sculptures
  • Leaks a pop-musical told in micro-songs
  • Appears as identity consoles, glitch text, audio interludes
  • Feeds the Grift Shop visualization of provenance
Interactive Components
  1. Identity Access Console: guests input their signal and receive classifications.
  2. Grift Shop: live visualizer of how artworks travel through culture.
  3. Barter Post: trade small objects for curated items or secrets.
  4. Sculpture Generator: personality quiz that outputs a unique 3D form.
Merch & Marketplace
  • Archival postcards, art prints, repro menko sheets
  • Celli merchandise + Lantern-adjacent uniform elements
  • Exclusive pop-up SKUs + third-party field materials
  • Loomworks Archival Seal for integrated vendor products
Tone & Themes
  • Nostalgia vs. surveillance
  • Wonder vs. bureaucracy
  • Play vs. labor
  • Archive vs. myth
  • Childhood icons vs. adult systems
  • Sincerity vs. performance
  • The economics of magic
  • The limits of tools and the desires of users
Why Four Days?

A brief run creates a cultural flashpoint—an event people whisper about, post about, and feel lucky to have seen.

  • Feels like a corporate audit window
  • Reads as a ritual alignment
  • Functions like a glitch in the system
  • Opens a small portal, then vanishes

Visitors don’t just attend. They arrive.

What It Ultimately Is

A machine for wonder. A theatrical critique of commerce. A love letter to manufactured magic.

A world you can enter and leave, but which continues running without you.

First public invitation into the larger Loomworks universe.

Additional Requests

Press Deck version, Venue Pitch, Lantern onboarding script, four-day schedule, RSVP funnel copy, or marketing summary available on request.

Welcome to the Grift Shop

Extract Value

We don’t take your money. We help you notice where it’s been taken before. Solve the micro-grifts, collect Value Tokens, and watch the ticketing module change its mind.

State: griftIdle
Tokens0
Grift Loop

Grift modules unlock in any order. Hover, drag, click, and uncheck your way to 3 tokens.

Influencer Coin

Yield: ?

BUY HIGH / SELL STORY. Drag the slider toward craft to short pure hype.

drag toward craft. see what happens.

Unopened Merch Box

Yield: ?

Tape reads “DO NOT OPEN UNTIL VIRAL.” Keep tapping anyway.

Waiting…

Timeshare of the Soul

Yield: ?

Fake contract offering slices of your schedule. Keep your hours intact to unlock value.

Uncheck all boxes to keep yourself intact.
this is not financial advice. this is narrative advice.
Loomworks Note: griftIdle

Lantern Protocol

Document No. HR-902 // CASTING & PERFORMANCE

Lanterns are the human interfaces of Loomworks. They are not security guards, and they are not museum docents. They are witnesses. They stand between longing and duty. They are, very literally, the light behind glass and steel.

DOCUMENT NO. HR-902

Lantern Protocol & Casting Sheet

"You're embodying a hundred years of women that were constrained and contorted into compliance by systems they had no say in while being told you had to be stronger than their bars. You're their pressure cracking at the seams, making a bid while fearing getting 'caught' by your own construct."

"You are power in restraint, you are the voice through silence and sadness, and you are ambassadors in understanding that none of us asked for any of this. You're every woman who was asked to smile more and unfairly felt they had to. You're exhausted yet hopeful. You're not desperate - but are vying for connection in a window of disorientation you know is bound to close. A light behind glass and steel. And you are a Lantern."

SCRIPTED INTERACTION 01

Context: Guest Interaction

Trigger: guest asks "Are you okay?"

Response: "Just super!"

(Bright, slightly too loud. Smile with teeth. Do not blink.)

SCRIPTED INTERACTION 02

Context: Specimen Care

Trigger: guest touches artwork.

Response: "We prefer to let the specimens breathe on their own."

(Extend palm; guide gaze away from the piece.)

BEHAVIOR MODULE

Polaroid & Toki Pona Protocol

Purpose: archive the guest while signaling Loomworks’ selective memory. The ritual must feel procedural, protective, and quietly affectionate.

Polaroid Moment

  • Approach with measured posture; lift the camera as a tool of record. Offer: “Please hold still for your Archive Entry.”
  • Capture the image. Read the print as if interpreting an omen. Initial the back and add a symbol unique to the performer (triangle, paired dots, bow mark, barcode scratch, tally set).
  • Hand it over with reverence. Whisper: “Do not lose this. Loomworks remembers.”
  • Symbols should remain consistent per Lantern to allow guests to notice patterns across the run.

Toki Pona Shift

  • Slide into Toki Pona without announcement. Maintain calm, service-forward tone. Sample anchors: “pona!” (good), “mi lukin e sina.” (I see you), “o tawa mi.” (come with me).
  • Use the language to keep interactions minimal and meditative. When asked for directions, gesture deliberately and offer: “o tawa sona. tawa musi.”
  • Allow the constraint of the vocabulary to create gentle friction; avoid apologizing for the shift.

Combined Moment

  • After the Polaroid develops, study it and speak softly in Toki Pona: “sina jo e ilo lawa.” (You have the controlling tool.)
  • Alternatively: “mi sona e sina. seli li lon sina.” (I know you. The fire is in you.) Hand back the print as if it is a credential.
  • Guests should feel archived, welcomed, and subtly tasked with protecting what they were just given.

Language Companion

Full Toki Pona Dictionary

Canonical lexicon from pu (2014), kulupu (2021), and community-backed extensions. Use it as the sanctioned word-bank when delivering the Polaroid & Toki Pona protocol.

Interest in Participation?

"You contain a soft light under pressure."

Uniform Specs

  • • Beige/Cream Boiler Suit (Tailored)
  • • Black Skirt layered under utilitarian top
  • • Black flats (silent tread)
  • • "Loomworks" Patch/Pin on left breast
  • • Red accessory anchored near heartline

Idling Behaviors

  • • Adjusting cuffs unnecessarily.
  • • Staring 15 degrees above the horizon.
  • • Checking watch, then shaking wrist.
  • • Humming "A Dream Is A Wish Your Heart Makes" (off-key).
Move through the system
Loomworks Field Materials

Meet the Team — Lantern Cast

Canonical reference • Casting companion to the Lantern Protocol

Purpose of the Lantern Cast

The Lanterns are the living interface of Loomworks — hosts, guides, statues come to life, bureaucratic archetypes, and the embodied design language that keeps the fiction stable.

They anchor the visitor emotionally, rhetorically, and spatially. The work is to make the fiction feel real enough to fear without ever lapsing into menace.

Functions
  • Host arrivals and guide orientation
  • Carry the ritual script and gestures
  • Translate the bureaucracy of value and cost
  • Hold space as statues that occasionally breathe
Tone Ceiling

Friendly but uncanny. Soft-spoken yet articulate. Polite, but never fully informal — a museum docent meets an NPC meets a flight attendant from the future.

System Axes
LanternAxis
Here

Orientation • Warm, grounding
“You are entering the threshold.”

LanternAxis
Now

Attention • Crisp, precise
“Remain present; follow the steps.”

LanternAxis
Nicol

Value • Gentle accounting
“Objects move through us; value circulates.”

LanternAxis
Dime

Cost • Playful austerity
“Everything has a price, but not the one you expect.”

Baseline Criteria

  • Presence
    A calm, centered performance style. Movements are deliberate and economical.
  • Aesthetic Fit
    Reads cleanly in the Loomworks uniform: white sailor top with black trim, black skirt or trousers, black ribbon bow, white gloves (always on), Lantern badge and lanyard.
  • Performance Texture
    Friendly but uncanny; polite without casualness; ritual over conversation.
  • Vocal Requirements
    Clear diction, calm tone, and the ability to hold intentional silence without breaking character.
  • Stamina
    Comfortable maintaining presence for 3–4 hour shifts. Rotations follow the Idling Protocol.

Appearance & Costume Standards

  • Hair neat, tied back, or symmetrical
  • Minimal jewelry (stud earrings acceptable)
  • No nail color visible through gloves
  • Uniform pressed; shoes black, silent, comfortable
  • ID badge centered on chest; gloves stay on

Uniform is a signal, not a costume. It represents a role, not an identity.

Individual Roles

🕯️ Here
Greeter — arrival embodied

Tone: warm, neutral, slightly curious. Uses phrases like “You are here,” “Right this way,” “This will make sense soon.”

Casting: natural gentleness and grounded energy.

🕯️ Now
Tempo Manager — attention keeper

Tone: crisp, present, lightly authoritative. Moves guests through stations and keeps the steps crisp without revealing “the point.”

Casting: clarity in gaze and voice; stage-manager energy.

🕯️ Nicol
Evaluator — value interpreter

Tone: soft bureaucratic warmth. Oversees Barter Post rituals, receives items with care, and speaks in value metaphors.

Casting: understated humor and extremely precise hands.

Performance Protocols

  1. Lantern Protocol: How to greet, how to fix and resume control, how to hand off between Lanterns.
  2. Idling Protocol: Approved idle poses, tilted-head rest stance, breathing and micro-movements during downtime.
  3. Station Protocols: Barter Post, Pachinko, Grift Shop interactions, Identity Assessment flow.
  4. Emotional Boundaries: Visitors project narratives; Lanterns stay gracious but inscrutable with no colloquial breaks.

Visitors feel watched, not judged. The system feels alive, not hostile.

Cast Rotation

Two Lanterns on floor at all times. One Lantern idling. One Lantern offstage prepping. Rhythm first, overwork never.

Rotation cadence keeps the world alive.

Required Reading

Prospective performers must review the full protocol stack:

  • Lantern Training Manual
  • Break & Fix Protocol
  • Idling Protocol
  • Station Procedures Guide
  • Uniform & Badge Specifications

Auditions demonstrate controlled gesture, micro-expression discipline, and delivery in the Loomworks tone.

Cast Vibe Summary

Wes Anderson clerks. Disney park attendants from another timeline. NPCs you trust immediately but can’t quite understand. The boundary between visitor and world.

Lanterns are ritual actors, not characters. They lend the installation humanness and uncanny gravity simultaneously.

The Barter Post

Dual-mode: webshop + investor catalog // Economic transparency baked in
Barter grid auto-builds from JSON // Stream + inventory aware

Toggle between the public-facing shop and investor-facing transparency view. Costs, projected margins, and inventory bands render instantly from the dataset.

Bundles & Kits

Attach-rate multipliers // curated stacks

Activity Map

Includes Pachinko Machine • Take 1 / Leave 2 Station • IRL Grift Shop
Keep moving
Referrer Launch
Unmanufactured Collection

Archive Index

Chronological, clean, no-commentary ledger of the complete inventory. Entries pull directly from a modular JSON file for easy expansion.

Items --
Eras --
Updated --

Single-Line Copy Index

Quick copy/paste names for intake forms and labels.

Loading index…
View JSON Source
Loading archive inventory…
HOW MUCH DO YOU COST?