The one rule

In a museum, the wall label gets to you first. You read the name, the date, the nationality, and by the time you look up, the painting has already been explained. You are no longer looking; you are checking.

Cabinet locks the label away. A painting arrives with no title, artist, or date, only a codename. You choose the point that interests you, follow what it resembles, and the record opens afterwards. Not the other way around.

How wandering works

Stay for one painting or keep following resemblances. Today offers the same starting point to everyone, while every chosen point opens a different route.

Then the room gives itself up

This is the case above, opened. Touch a ring to read what the record says about that exact place.

Every case carries this much writing. 309 others are still sealed.

Where the paintings come from

Every case is a public-domain work, shown from Wikimedia Commons, with the reuse terms of that exact photograph recorded beside it. The painting being out of copyright and the modern photograph of it being free to use are two different questions, and the catalogue answers both separately for every case.

The writing is hand-authored, one file per painting, and checked against the holding museum's own record. Where scholars genuinely disagree, the case says so and names the disagreement rather than choosing a side for you.

The crowd is honest

When you submit a point, Cabinet adds one count to a coarse grid cell for that painting, one to that painting's tally for the calendar day, and, if you step onward through an echo, one to the count for that pair of paintings. It stores no account, session, network address, timestamp, or raw coordinate with any of them. These anonymous totals can show where visitors collectively looked without creating a history of any visitor.

Nothing about the crowd is modeled. An earlier version of the Cabinet drew an estimated heatmap generated from the painting itself; that estimate has been removed rather than relabelled, because a fabricated crowd shown beside a real reading is a lie however carefully it is captioned. A painting with too few real points now says so and draws nothing. The figures are off by default and live behind one switch in the Workshop.

Visual echoes

You choose the single most interesting point in a painting, and Cabinet shows you up to eight details from other paintings that most resemble it. Step into any one of them and choose again. That is the whole loop, and it runs as long as you like.

No generative AI is used during play. A precomputed comparison of patches of paint records which ones look alike; it never sees a title, an artist, a date, or anything written here. The tiles come before the label for the same reason a case file hides the title, which is so that the looking happens first.

A resemblance is not an argument. Two paintings rhyming does not mean one borrowed from the other, or that they share a meaning. It means they look alike, measurably. Whether that is interesting is your call.

What it costs

Cabinet is free. Every painting, every authored reading, every room, the streaks, the paths, and the lessons cost nothing and always will. Your play record lives in your own browser, and you can walk away with it at any time.

Why it exists

Most of us look at a painting for a few seconds and then read about it for a few minutes. Cabinet inverts that on purpose. Not to test what you know, but to give your eye somewhere to practise before an explanation arrives.