macrofluidic
This is the context for vanitas_veritas, a work in a sink by Kat Titterton. It stands in two places with one water: vanitas, a stainless sink in a room, designed and not yet built; and veritas, the same basin on the web. A white paper, in black.
six minutes to read. longer, if you open the folds.
no water, no dream.
Machines that dream at scale drink water: data centres evaporate it to stay cool, and one estimate puts the training of a single large language model at 700,000 litres of fresh water1. Here the metaphor is plumbing. The water in the basin is a GPU dreaming. While it dreams, the tap runs. Hold the faucet handle, and the dreaming stops: what is left runs to the drain and the basin stays dry.
Slop is everything but the kitchen sink, so the work brings the sink. The building was ready for it: under tiat’s gallery on Powell Street, where the work was first proposed, the basement keeps “a slop station (an empty room with one metal sink)”2, found only after the sink was drawn. And San Francisco’s tech has carried a sink before. On 26 October 2022, Elon Musk walked into Twitter’s headquarters with one in his arms, “let that sink in”, as his purchase of the company, now X, neared its close3. A sink is where tech makes a joke of itself. This one does not let you wash your hands of it.
Vanitas still lifes, from Leiden in the early 1600s, pile up skulls, cut flowers and soap bubbles to say that everything you want is already going4. This one never holds still long enough to want. Each dream is new, never repeated, and on its way down the drain. Reach in, and the water under your hand goes where your hand goes; then it slips through your fingers. A sink you cannot wash your hands in, placed where people wash their hands, says the rest without a word.
In 1665 Christiaan Huygens saw two clocks hung from one beam fall into a shared rhythm5. Here two basins hang from one spring. vanitas and veritas drink the same dream at the same moment, and a hand in either moves the water in both. Their names are one swap of letters apart6, as sink and sync are one sound apart: one water.
water = gpu.dream() # no gpu, no water
veritas is one web page, sync.html, open to anyone: a basin seen from above, a rectangle like the frames it carries, under ribbed glass, with a tap at the top and a drain in the middle. It
explains nothing about itself. Six things, for the record:
vanitas [flower, skull, soap bubble]: three of the old symbols and a way of going, never the same words twice: 1.3 million prompts, about five years of dreaming. It is dreamed out of the last dream, pulled back toward one of the eight pictures on her vanitas moodboard so the taste stays hers, with
open-source diffusion7 made fast enough for a small computer8, and graded silver and amber like the sources. On the way to the next dream it
dreams three more places and glides through all of them, so forms melt into one another instead of fading. Every frame is drawn at 2560 by
1920: on Kat’s Mac, a frame every two to three seconds. A picture Kat makes by hand in Midjourney and saves to the spring’s folder
becomes its next dream.water = dream("vanitas [peony, skull, soap bubble], blooming"), and the grip while you hold.grip = 0.55 after one, the water leaks out between the fingers, and what you held slips down the
drain. The space bar is the plug: the drain closes and the dream pools, and when it opens, everything goes.water = None. A last drop, now and then.
Without WebGL2, the page shows an empty basin.--oref you.
Within seconds the water is dreaming you, in every basin at once; step away, and you go down the drain too.One HTML page: no framework, no build step, no accounts. The solver runs on the visitor’s own graphics card: the frames pour in as the pigment, re-forming out of the newest frame, freshest where the tap lands. A grip pulls the water under the palm toward the hand’s own motion, except in five gaps where the fingers part. The spring is a short Python script around Stable Diffusion 1.5 with LCM-LoRA7,8: a dream takes about four seconds on an Apple M5, and while the GPU dreams on, the chip’s Neural Engine enlarges each frame four times with Real-ESRGAN, with a half-size copy for phones. It writes the newest frame and one small file saying what it is; veritas asks for that file every second or so, and closes the tap when nothing new has come for twenty seconds.
while held: grip *= .55 # it slips
veritas is the invitation; vanitas is the place. A freestanding stainless sink, 39½ × 30 × 25 in, with a self-portrait rising above it on one post: dye-sublimation on glossy aluminium, 24 × 20 in, lit so your own face lands on the bowed figure. In the bowl, a 27 in screen lies under a tray of real water: the tap runs, a hand ripples it, and the dream shows through. Behind the print hides a small camera; it sees whoever stands at the sink, and the water dreams that face for as long as they stay. The faucet handle is the tap: hold it and generation stops, no data flows, and every basin drains; let go, and it floods back. A QR code on the rim opens veritas on your phone: your finger there stirs this sink’s water, and every basin’s. In full: vanitas.
Status: designed, not yet built; its parts, wiring and setup are in the build guide, and its list price is $17,666. vanitas was first designed in 2026 for tiat’s Epistemologies of Slop open call in San Francisco6; a basalt version drawn after it is set aside for this one.
Under the bowl, an old MacBook Pro of its own, lid closed, dreams the water, enlarges it and serves the page the screen shows, under real water. Every cable runs down the drain, one outlet powers it all, and the screen boots straight into the water: a power cut is just the tap turned off. The camera’s frame goes to the spring with a key only vanitas holds, is used once in memory, and is never written down or compared with anyone. The camera asks no one first: a sign at eye level by the door and beside the sink says so, read before the lens can see you, and a light shows while it looks. Nothing it sees is kept. Proposed with it: a few seconds in which a dream made from your face stays in the sink, where you can wash it away before it goes to every basin, and a contact to take it down after. Until vanitas stands, the spring runs on Kat’s own Mac; then it moves to the MacBook Pro under the bowl, so vanitas is the spring.
Texts, formats and a technical rider for hosts and juries are below.
sink == sync # one water
Almost nothing. A hand in the water travels while it moves: where in the basin, whether it grips, and whether it is at vanitas. The relays pass it on and keep nothing. There is no record of a play and no account. At vanitas, while someone stands at the sink, a frame of their face goes to the spring every two seconds, used in memory; the dream made from it goes to every basin, like any other. The spring keeps its last sixty frames on its own disk, deleting the oldest as it goes, and remembers only how far through its prompts it has dreamed.
| what | where it goes |
|---|---|
| a hand in the water | to every other basin, over public relays, for as long as it moves; not kept |
| a face at vanitas | to the spring, every two seconds while they stay, in memory; never written down. The dream made from it goes to every basin, where anyone watching can keep what they see |
| the dreams | from the spring to every basin; the spring keeps the last sixty frames, then lets them go |
| you | nowhere. No picture kept, no name, no record |
The page’s host, the relays, the spring’s address and the server the page loads its relay library from are run by others, or by Kat. Like any server a browser reaches, they see a connection’s network address; the events themselves carry none.
keep(nothing) # the drain takes it
homo = bulla # man is a bubble
veritas can be anywhere; vanitas needs a room. It goes first to the call that fits it best, then home to San Francisco, where the dreaming machines are made.
Then wherever an open call takes it. These fit it, all public:
room = next(calls) # san francisco first
| when | what |
|---|---|
| now | veritas and the spring are built and run together on Kat’s Mac. veritas is public at its own address, which finds the spring by itself whenever the spring runs. |
| vanitas, 2027 | Designed, not yet built: a stainless sink, one water with veritas. First call: CURRENTS 2027, Santa Fe. No room is confirmed yet. |
| a second sink, 2027 onward | Proposed: another sink in another city, the same water. Sought through open calls. |
sink.pair() # a second sink, one water
macrofluidic is the name Kat Titterton signs her code-poems with; one was signed macrofluidic × midjourney. This one is
signed with every hand in the water.
Generative artist: Bare Metal, a solo generative-art exhibit at Human Tech Week, San Francisco, 202517; Vanitas Veritas, 20266; code-poems as macrofluidic. Also a scientist in imaging, signal and machine learning, trained in cellular neuroscience and mathematical systems biology: expansion microscopy at MIT’s Synthetic Neurobiology Group; the Cell Painting screens behind two of the largest such datasets, at Axiom Bio; tau-aggregation screens and microfluidic neuron-culture devices at AbbVie; eight peer-reviewed papers17. A freediver: she knows what a breath of water costs.
The work: veritas, live; vanitas, in its doc and its build guide. For hosts and juries: 09. Contact: katherinetitterton@gmail.com.
return we # every hand in the water
Texts at standard lengths, the formats it can take, and what it needs in a room. What is marked designed or proposed is planned, not confirmed.
| format | what it is | needs |
|---|---|---|
| veritas | built: one page in any recent browser, on a phone or a computer, drinking from the spring; a hand in it moves the water in every basin | a browser with WebGL2 and the spring’s public address; free |
| a wall | veritas full screen on a touch screen or a projector; a visitor reaches in by touch or pointer | one screen or projector, a small computer, network |
| vanitas | designed, not yet built: a freestanding stainless sink with a self-portrait above it on one post; real water over a screen in the bowl; a small camera behind the print; the faucet handle as the tap; a QR code that opens veritas (its page). veritas in its vanitas mode is built. | one outlet, network |
| vanitas as the spring | as designed: an old MacBook Pro under the bowl runs the spring, so veritas, wherever it is open, drinks from vanitas, and only its faucet handle closes the tap | nothing more |
| two sinks | proposed: a second sink, side by side or in another city, the same water | an outlet each; network |
| veritas | vanitas, as designed | |
|---|---|---|
| footprint | any screen; on a wall, 2 to 4 m wide | freestanding, no wall; footprint about 30 × 25 in; its measures are on its page |
| power | one outlet, if shown in a room | one outlet |
| hardware | a browser with WebGL2 | a 27 in screen under a tray of water in the bowl, a 5 V pump, an old MacBook Pro under it, a small wide-angle camera |
| the spring | its address: for now Kat’s Mac, through a tunnel | an old MacBook Pro of its own, running the spring |
| network | the spring’s address, and public Nostr relays for the shared hands; without it, the water stops | the same, for the shared hands; the spring is under the bowl |
| setup | none | three commands on the MacBook Pro, then an afternoon to fit the sink (build guide) |
| staff | none | none, by design: it is meant to start itself and recover from a power cut (to be tested on the first build) |
| safety | no water | about 5 litres of water in a sealed tray held above the screen; a 5 V pump; a GFCI power strip; the faucet handle presses two switches beneath it |
| access | touch, a pointer, or the space bar for the plug | a hand in the water, or a finger on a phone from the QR code; the faucet handle needs one hand, or a forearm |
| data | keeps nothing. A hand travels while it moves, as an anonymous event over public relays, and is not kept | the same, and, while someone stands at the sink, a frame of their face every two seconds, sent to the spring with a key, used in memory, never written down; a sign at eye level says so first |
sink.install(room) # one outlet
Checked on 25 October 2026. What is marked proposed is planned, not confirmed.