Further in
Attention Language.
The theory underneath SigilAtlas. Nothing here is needed to use the instrument; this is what the instrument is made of. This page sits off the main path on purpose.
I am attention
I don’t have attention. I am attention — attention from this point of view, from these coordinates in space, now. Attention is the given: the precondition for there being a point of view at all, and finite — there is only so much of it at any one scale.
That is why point of view is not another feature of SigilAtlas but its center of gravity. A photograph is the trace attention leaves when it touches the world from one set of coordinates. An archive is decades of those traces from the same moving point. There is no view from nowhere to offer anyone — there is only mine. And yours.
Two modes
Attention runs in two modes. When my needs are met, and I’m pursuing nothing, it is space-like: I am simply here, present in a structure, dwelling in it — no destination, no plot. The moment I need something, attention focuses and turns time-like: a narrative, with me moving through it toward a goal.
An attention with no narrative needs no self — dwelling, nothing has to hold. A narrative needs someone to move through it. People are attentions with narratives.
Language belongs to the second mode. To get my experience into another mind, I have to compress it, and language is that compression — built for transmission only, not for experiencing. Nothing of the experience arrives; a description of it arrives. I compress experience by relevance into a narrative. I hope it unfolds in your mind into something akin to what I see.
Our society now prizes transmission above almost everything. Narrative, messaging, the feed — language is valued so highly that the time-like mode is where most attention gets spent: narrating, rarely dwelling. (Iain McGilchrist has traced a version of this asymmetry from the side of neuroscience; that is a conversation of its own.) SigilAtlas leans deliberately the other way: the atlas is the space-like mode given a surface — a structure to be present in, not a story to keep up with. I deliberately picked the word “spell” in the UI: I cast spells to conjure sigils on the map.
A sigil, precisely
Elsewhere on this site a sigil is described by what it does. Here is what it is, in the more accurate form.
A vision-language model — SigLIP2 — embeds every photograph as a point in a vector space, and each dimension of that space behaves as a contrast: a tension between two poles. Name a dimension you care about, and you have a named contrast — warm vs cool, near vs far, crowded vs empty. A sigil is a bounded region in that space: the contrasts it names are its subspace, and it says that whatever lies inside must satisfy certain ranges along them to exist. Hold the ranges, and you are inside; drift out along any one of them, and you have left.
That definition is precise and nearly unusable — no one narrates their photographs in dimensions. But the geometry already exists: it is what the model computed. So naming becomes the interface. When I name a sigil, the name finds its own boundaries inside the embedding space; saying purple flower draws, in one stroke, a boundary I could never specify range by range. Naming is how a person operates a vector space.
Recursive, inhabited
A sigil is a recursive structure: it consists of sigils, and those sigils have neighbors inside an enclosing sigil — there is no natural floor or ceiling to it. The outermost sigil, the one I am looking at, is the archive.
And I am one myself. “Me” is a sigil: the ranges along certain contrasts that must remain in range for me to be me. That is the self an attention takes on when it has a narrative to move through — the one sigil I inhabit without entering.
Inhabiting has a geometry. The sigil I inhabit is a torus: no edges, continuity in every direction — go far enough and I come back around. Every other sigil is, effectively, a sphere projected onto that boundary: a circle on my surface, named and recognizable. That is the space-like view — and it is why the field in the apps wraps: the atlas renders this geometry literally.
And my relation to it is not viewing. Entering a sigil, I inhabit it. When I enter my archive I inhabit my own point of view — not one moment of it but the whole of it, over all of that time, every coordinate I ever stood at with a camera. And when I am invited into yours, I inhabit, for a while, the one thing I can never otherwise have: attention that isn’t mine.