The Cabinet of
Minor Gods
Working notesDocument 05/11 · 3 min read
Section index

Co-authoring notes

The documentation in this package is intentionally presented as a draft for joint revision rather than a finished institutional voice.

Authorship position

A useful and accurate formulation is:

The artist directed the world, selected its canon, and made the decisive conceptual, editorial, and interaction corrections. The agent expanded, orchestrated, implemented, verified, and documented the system through TITLES MCP and local production tools. Artist models and generic models contributed identifiable media capabilities within that directed process.

This avoids two inaccurate extremes:

  • Describing the project as if a single text prompt automatically produced the complete work.
  • Describing the agent and models as invisible software utilities with no effect on available forms.

Decisions that most clearly carry the artist's authorship

  • Choosing a sixty-god cosmology rather than isolated outputs
  • Selecting Cut From Elsewhere as the visual tradition
  • Approving/rejecting canonical portraits and manifestations
  • Rejecting polished omniscient narration
  • Defining speech as evidence
  • Preserving existing assets instead of buying more visual generation
  • Requiring native 4:5 presentation
  • Correcting title-card line breaks
  • Rejecting abrupt returns to the opening still
  • Requiring continuous motion through transitions
  • Replacing floating typography with website-derived slots
  • Converting the grid into a film timeline
  • Directing responsive behavior through review at real screen sizes

Agent contributions that should remain visible in the process record

  • Expanding the initial premise into a complete structured bible
  • Maintaining 60-item coverage and cross-media naming
  • Operating exact TITLES models/adapters/voices
  • Recovering from failed/refunded and rate-limited executions
  • Building procedural scores and sound relics
  • Creating voice DSP identities
  • Writing executable media and website builders
  • Running technical verification rather than assuming completion
  • Translating review comments into repeatable conform operations
  • Packaging and documenting the final work

Suggested public-facing credit levels

Minimal

Created by [Artist]. Generated and produced through TITLES with AI-assisted production.

Balanced

Created and directed by [Artist], developed with Hermes Agent using TITLES MCP and local production tools. Canonical portraits use Cut From Elsewhere by @juujuumama.

Process-forward

A directed collaboration between [Artist], Hermes Agent, TITLES artist and generic models, and local procedural/editing systems. See the complete process and provenance note.

Before external publication, review these documents in order:

  1. ARTIST_STATEMENT.md
  2. CASE_STUDY.md
  3. TITLES_MCP_USE_CASE.md
  4. LOCAL_VS_TITLES_CAPABILITY_MAP.md
  5. CREDITS_AND_PROVENANCE.md

For each, mark:

  • Keep — language that sounds like the artist/project
  • Rewrite — accurate idea, wrong voice
  • Remove — strategically or personally irrelevant
  • Expand — missing lived/artistic motivation
  • Verify — factual or rights claim requiring confirmation

Open conceptual angles

Belief after disenchantment

The gods are not a nostalgic return to mythology. They propose that contemporary infrastructure already produces ritual, taboo, offering, petition, delay, and unexplained agency.

Municipal horror without catastrophe

The project avoids apocalyptic stakes. The uncanny appears through notices, maintenance, accounts, and small procedural contradictions.

Humor as evidence of intimacy

The jokes work because the failures are familiar. Humor is not distance from the objects; it is recognition.

The interface as reliquary

The grid is not merely a portfolio layout. It is the architectural form of the pantheon: compartments, numbers, hover events, evidence states, and a playhead moving through the archive.

Bounded generation

The project deliberately stops at sixty. Completion, coverage, and relation matter more than infinite output.

Artist models as collaborators and traditions

Using a named artist model foregrounds questions of influence, attribution, payout, visual lineage, and how one artist's trained practice can become material inside another directed world.

Missing personal material

The current documentation is strong on system, production, and formal decisions. It could become more distinctly authored by adding the artist's answers to:

  1. Which three gods feel most personally true, and why?
  2. Did the project begin from affection, frustration, grief, or observation?
  3. Which ordinary systems in the artist's actual life seeded the Cabinet?
  4. Is the municipality protective, indifferent, or quietly hostile?
  5. What should a viewer feel after god 60: comfort, suspicion, recognition, or incompletion?
  6. Which editorial correction most changed the artist's understanding of the project?
  7. What did working through an agent make possible—and what did the artist need to resist?

Those answers would let the final artist statement move from a strong conceptual account to a specifically lived one.