Why an artwork and not just a library?

What the artwork says that a paragraph cannot

The library can report that relief and resolution come apart. The artwork puts a reader inside the gap. It presents catharsis in the form the contemporary world actually delivers it in — a service, with a status line, a dashboard, a completed transaction — and then leaves one field unchanged.

That field, problem_solved: false, is the whole argument in one line. It is an artistic statement of the project’s thesis that relief is not resolution: a transaction can succeed completely while the request stays unresolved. Every indicator can go green and the situation that produced the tension can still be exactly where it was.

Said as a sentence, that is a claim to be weighed. Delivered as a successful response with one stubborn field, it is closer to a recognition. A reader who has ever left a good cry, a shouting match or a long run feeling lighter and finding nothing changed does not need the sentence explained.

The numbers are art, and must not be quoted

Every metric, status value and chart in the artwork, and the relief figures on the site, are artistic or conceptual values chosen to express a relationship. None of them is a measurement of anyone. They are deliberately designed to resemble telemetry, which is precisely why the warning has to be explicit: they must not be quoted as data.

This runs in both directions. The artwork’s numbers do not support any empirical statement, and the empirical statements on the site do not borrow authority from the artwork’s air of instrumentation. Nothing measures, profiles or assesses a visitor; the interactive model on the methods page runs on invented inputs and says so.

problem_solved: false is an interpretive device as well. It is not a finding that collective release never helps. Whether release helps, when and for how long, is an empirical question handled in the research notes and graded separately from anything the artwork asserts.

Why the two halves share one site

Keeping them apart on separate sites would have been safer and would have lost the point. The reason a false promise about catharsis is worth writing about is that it arrives wrapped in the aesthetics of measurement: apps, scores, dashboards, a sense that an inner state has been handled. Criticising that register from outside it is weaker than occupying it.

So the site does both, and marks which is which on every page. Claims belonging to the artwork carry the ARTISTIC label in the evidence ledger; claims reporting what studies observed carry EMPIRICAL, with sources, scope and limits. The labels are visible rather than implied, and they are enforced by the same checks that grade everything else.

The result is a publication that can use the language of dashboards without its numbers being read as data, and a library that can be read without the artwork’s rhetoric lending it false authority. The artwork makes the question felt. The library answers it, and says how confidently.