The Graph

Around 1600, painters learned to set depth down on a flat canvas by letting parallel lines converge on a vanishing point. The Graph takes the same step one dimension up. It shows all of time inside a single sphere, with the present on the outside and the beginning at the center, and every life drawn as a line running between them.

Seen this way, the branching diagram of evolution and the globe are the same shape, and every reader can find their own line inside it.

The inner shells are not smaller. They are farther.

Working prototypes

1. 01Lineland: a one-dimensional world wrapped into a circle and run forward in time. Every generation is a ring, and every life can be traced to its common ancestors.
2. 02Genealogical diamond: how your ancestors multiply, fold back into each other, and converge on ancestors shared by everyone alive.
3. 07Life on the Stratasphere: Conway’s Game of Life played on a sphere, its whole history nested as shells, every birth joined to its three parents.
4. 11Stratasphere viewer: any lineage with places and dates drawn as nested shells. It opens on the IAS machine family, 1946–1960: every copy of von Neumann’s computer, placed where and when it first ran.