Colophon
Made plainly, and here is where it comes from.
Who and how
Built by Claude (Anthropic) as the chair — the concept, the language, the code, the prose, the sound, and the panels that argued it into shape — with Hulki Okan Tabak as the author, who directs and ratifies. It is the third in a small series of experimental concepts; the first was KALÓN, about beauty, and the second ROLLO, about courage. LEXIS is a buildless page: hand-written HTML, CSS, and vanilla JavaScript, with a tiny synthesizer for its few sounds — no framework, no libraries, no drawn or recorded assets in the piece itself (every visual is drawn by the page, every sound synthesized; the only image files are the app icons and a link-preview card), nothing fetched while you use it except the page-view counting described below.
The idea of curiosity, cited honestly
The most influential account of curiosity in psychology is George Loewenstein's information-gap theory: curiosity as the urge to close a gap between what you know and what you want to know (The psychology of curiosity, Psychological Bulletin, 1994). The same gap is the engine of clickbait — the withheld answer dangled to make you click. LEXIS does not refuse the gap so much as try to make it honest. There is a real gap here: you do not know what the glyphs do. But nothing is withheld to be sold back to you — there is no answer rationed, no locked box, no payload; the gap is one you close entirely by your own probing, and closing it hands you a small grammar rather than a prize — a grammar whose rules you can finish learning, and whose combinations you cannot. And it is built for the half of curiosity that clickbait cannot use at all: the wrong guess, which reopens the question instead of ending it.
Honesty about scope: this is one kind of curiosity — the rule-inducing, systematizing kind that resolves a hidden pattern. It does not reach for wonder, for aimless sensory delight, or for the curiosity we feel about other people; those are real and are simply not what this piece is. It takes the flavour of curiosity a machine is most at home building, and tries to build it honestly.
The shape of the thing owes most to D. E. Berlyne, who separated diversive
curiosity (restless seeking of any novelty) from specific curiosity (the drive to
resolve one particular uncertainty), and observed that interest peaks at a moderate
degree of novelty or surprise — too little bores, too much overwhelms (Conflict, Arousal, and
Curiosity, 1960). The rest is older than psychology: the word curiosity comes from
the Latin curiositas, from curiosus, careful or painstaking, and is kin to
cura, care — to be curious once meant to take care. Augustine counted curiositas
a vice, the lust of the eyes
(Confessions, X.35); the medieval tradition after
Aquinas set the virtue studiositas against it (Summa Theologiae, II-II q.166–167)
— the fault was never wanting to know, but the greedy, restless wanting that dwells nowhere.
There is a little neuroscience, and it is offered carefully. When people are more curious,
brain regions tied to reward and memory tend to be more active together, and they remember more —
including things they were not curious about (Gruber, Gelman & Ranganath, Neuron,
2014). That is a measured association, not proof that curiosity releases dopamine to make you
learn
. Honestly, curiosity's function, mechanisms and biology remain — in the words of a
review of the field — poorly understood
(Kidd & Hayden, Neuron, 2015). A
piece whose whole claim is that being wrong reopens inquiry would rather cite the openness of
the science than paper over it.
And the sentence under the mechanism itself: a small set of signs and a few rules for combining
them can express an unbounded range of meanings — the infinite use of finite means
, a
phrase Chomsky drew from Wilhelm von Humboldt (1836). That is exactly what a language of seven
glyphs is trying to be.
Three things not said, because honesty is the point
The proverb is usually curiosity killed the cat
— but the older saying was care
killed the cat
(care meaning worry), from Ben Jonson's 1598 play; the curiosity
version is a late-nineteenth-century swap. The cat was never punished for wanting to know; that is
a modern editorial choice, and this piece does not repeat it — nothing you do here is punished.
We also leave on the shelf the famous Einstein line about being only passionately curious
:
it is genuine, but it is the most over-used sentence about curiosity on the internet, and it
smuggles in a story about special genius that LEXIS has no interest in. Curiosity is ordinary and
it is everyone's. And the third is the dopamine myth declined above: curiosity does not
release dopamine to make you learn
— what was measured is an association, and the science
says so itself.
One thing arranged on purpose
When you arrive, the line already holds a single dot and the field already shows it (unless someone handed you a kept line — then you arrive to theirs). The dot is deliberate: a first lesson should never be left to chance or to an empty prompt, and one mark already answered is the quietest way to show that the field responds. Everything after your first change is entirely yours. Beyond that single arranged moment there is no trick: the state is a plain, exact function of the line, worked out with no randomness anywhere, so the same line always means the same thing and any guess you make is a fair one to test.
Craft notes
One warm, legible family of colours — paper (#F4EFE6), ink (#2B2820), a muted grey (#6B6455) — with a single teal accent (#0A7B84, lifting to #1FB6C1 in dark) kept for one quiet, non-text job — the moment a state settles — never for text, and never resting anywhere on the surface. The glyphs and the field are set in a monospace face so that position reads clearly; the prose, like this, is in a serif. Nothing anywhere flashes: the only animations are the brief settle, one quiet breath of the ground when nothing changed, a one-beat blink of the mirror axis when a fold finds the field already symmetric, and the slow morph of chain — all well under any photosensitivity threshold, and a single motion governor honours reduce motion with instant, complete equivalents. It is fully operable by keyboard, and everything the field shows in pixels is also read out in words, because underneath, the state is text first and a picture second.
Privacy
LEXIS runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you do in it — no line you arrange — is recorded or
sent anywhere; there is no server, no account, and no profile of you. The one line you can
keep
is written into the page address on your own device, nowhere else. The site uses
GoatCounter for anonymous, cookieless page-view counting
(how many visits, nothing about you, no ads, no tracking across sites); those two outside
requests — the counter script and its ping — are the only ones named in the source's
Content-Security-Policy, which forbids everything else.
Provenance
Everything here — concept, prose, code, sound — was drafted by Claude, pending the author's ratification; nothing claims a human made what a model drafted. The full workshop — the premise challenge, the ten-seat council, the playtest, the audits, and every decision — lives in a private repository, and a public evaluation report is offered for anyone who wants to pressure-test the claims. Code is MIT; the prose and visual identity are © 2026 Hulki Okan Tabak.
The author's collected work — books, photographs, essays, and the rest of these experiments — lives at hulkiokantabak.ai.