COLOPHON · 奥付

The site is built as a small world with its own story.

ATLAS is the word the headline lands on. The Titan who carries, the root of atlas as a book of maps, and of the Atlantic and its lost namesake. Plato wrote that city in white, black and red stone, the three colours this site happens to be made of: bone, void, vermilion. That coincidence was found late in the build, and kept.

The raven in the header is ATRA, the maker’s mark. It is named for Atra-hasis, the exceedingly wise, survivor of the oldest flood story we have. In the flood stories that descend from it, the survivor releases a raven to find land.

The imprint is Arc of Atra. I had the name in my head for a long time before I could say what it meant. An arc is the part of a circle you can see. The rest of it closes out of sight. An ark is a vessel built to carry what has to survive the water.

Only later did I learn that in Latin, a language with no relation to that story at all, atra means the black one. The seal was drawn before any of this was noticed. A black bird inside an open circle. Atra, inside an arc. The name had been describing the mark the whole time.

The eye that follows your cursor is the observer. Even the search for the lost city keeps arriving at an eye: the ringed Richat Structure that some readers of Plato point to, the one nicknamed the Eye of the Sahara. The site takes no position. It just kept finding eyes.

The titles that travel between pages are the site’s one strict law made visible. Nothing here dies on a cut. It only changes by degree.

None of this is explained anywhere else on the site. It is built to be felt first and found later, by whoever cares to look.