Protocol documentation for the FLUX photographic archive system.
Layer 1 — What FLUX is and where it comes from
| Page | Description |
|---|---|
| WHAT IS FLUX | Definition, core sentence, and philosophical foundation of FLUX. |
| MANIFESTO | Philosophy, lineage, and institutional statement of FLUX. |
| INFLUENCES | Historical and philosophical lineage of FLUX — Heraclitus, Atget, Provoke, On Kawara, Moriyama, Becher. |
Layer 2 — The method and the format it produces
| Page | Description |
|---|---|
| PROTOCOL | The FLUX method — steps, principles, and what the protocol enforces. |
| ZINE SPECIFICATION | Physical format, page order, fixed image box rules, contact sheet, and print assembly. |
| ARCHIVE | Digital archive structure, URL routing, timeline logic, and what is downloadable. |
Layer 3 — Where the protocol meets the city
| Page | Description |
|---|---|
| FIELD ASSIGNMENTS | Constraint-based documentary exercises for FLUX photographers — 36 location, method, collaborative, and directed protocols for Philadelphia and beyond. |
| PROJECTS | Collaborative and site-specific FLUX projects — Broad Street In Flux as the founding prototype. |
| BROAD STREET IN FLUX | Case study — the first canonical collaborative FLUX project. Philadelphia, May 10, 2026. |
| MARKET STREET — DIGITAL MIRROR | Project assignment — a chronological documentary walk through Market Street, Philadelphia. Photography, metadata, platform data, and the city as machine-readable system. |
| DISPATCH | The FLUX Dispatch — 24-frame thermal accordion field document, the manila folder archive structure, ephemera protocol, and the layered document system. |
| GALLERY PROTOCOL | Single-image archival exhibition objects — the ephemeral print and the permanent archive as simultaneous outputs. |
| FIELD NODES | FLUX Field Nodes — physical QR markers embedded in the city that turn street corners into open photographic archive points. |
Layer 4 — The systems that run the archive
| Page | Description |
|---|---|
| GENERATOR | Personal generator and public generator — how they work, how they differ, and the future public publishing system. |
| PUBLIC CATALOG | The public FLUX catalog — community issues, submission protocol, and the CAT_NNN namespace. |
| NODES | FLUX Nodes — physical archive terminals connected to the live FLUX publishing system. |
| REMOTE ACCESS | Private remote access to the FLUX Portal via Tailscale — iPhone on cellular, no public exposure, no open ports. |
| BOOTSTRAP | Hardware infrastructure, NAS architecture, corpus migration, keeper system, embeddings, autonomous ingest pipeline, and the long-term vision for FLUX as a self-organizing photographic archive. |
Layer 5 — Embeddings, keepers, and the personal taste model
| Page | Description |
|---|---|
| INTELLIGENCE | Layer overview for FLUX intelligence — links to subdocuments on embeddings, keeper model, metadata enrichment, autonomous sequencing, and training data. |
| EMBEDDINGS | Technical specification for the FLUX visual embeddings layer — model selection, vector storage, generation pipeline, and query interface. |
| KEEPER MODEL | Specification for the FLUX personal taste model — what it learns, how it is trained, and what it cannot replace. |
| METADATA ENRICHMENT | Full specification for the FLUX metadata layer — database schema, enrichment pipeline, EXIF extraction, geocoding, weather, tagging, and manifest generation. |
| AUTONOMOUS SEQUENCING | How FLUX sequences issue photographs — the canonical chronological default, experimental AI alternatives, and the limits of what a machine can sequence. |
| TRAINING DATA | The FLUX keeper archive as a machine learning dataset — structure, matching strategy, class imbalance, near-misses, and dataset construction. |
Layer 6 — The autonomous print layer
| Page | Description |
|---|---|
| PHYSICAL | The autonomous print layer — how FLUX materializes itself as physical objects, the printer philosophy, the return-home ritual, and the long-term vision of self-printing archives. |
Layer 7 — Cryptographic verification and layered permanence
| Page | Description |
|---|---|
| PRESERVATION PROTOCOL | Blockchain as witness, layered permanence, and the chain of visual custody — FLUX as archival infrastructure for the AI era. |
Layer 8 — Where FLUX is going
| Page | Description |
|---|---|
| ROADMAP | Open-source vision, future software architecture, AI selection, infrastructure, and release stages. |
Layer 9 — Protocol decisions, changelog, and version history
| Page | Description |
|---|---|
| CHANGELOG | Chronological record of all protocol decisions, infrastructure changes, and version releases in the FLUX archive system. |
| DECISIONS LOG | RFC-style record of canonical protocol decisions — what was decided, why, and what it constrains. |
| VERSIONS | Version reference for the FLUX protocol, implementation, and wiki — numbering philosophy, locked semantics, and current status. |
Layer 10 — Node architecture and future reproducibility
| Page | Description |
|---|---|
| OPEN SOURCE | Node architecture specification for the FLUX protocol — what a FLUX node requires, what must be built before public release, and the open source philosophy. |
Layer 11 — Launch your own city-in-flux geotag archive (teachable blueprint)
| Page | Description |
|---|---|
| STARTER KIT — AI IMPLEMENTATION GUIDE | Entry point for an AI agent (Claude Code) recreating a CITY_IN_FLUX geotag-publishing system from this wiki as the source of truth. |
| STARTER KIT — DOWNLOAD | Download the CITY IN FLUX starter kit and launch your own city archive with Claude Code on your own AWS account. |
| STARTER KIT — ARCHITECTURE & CONTRACTS | Component contracts an AI agent implements — the Worker pipeline (draft generation) and the page/hub/embed/catalog builders, with inputs, outputs, and invariants. |
| STARTER KIT — CONFIGURATION & CONTRACTS | The implementation contracts — environment variables, the canonical-naming algorithm, and the catalog.json + submission.json data schemas. |
| STARTER KIT — SETUP (AGENT STEPS) | Agent-executable setup — Python, AWS CLI + least-privilege IAM, S3, CloudFront, .env, and the local portal, each with verification. |
| STARTER KIT — DEPLOYMENT (PUBLISH CONTRACT) | The publish algorithm, S3 key layout, cache-header matrix, CloudFront invalidation contract, and the hub+embed sync invariant. |
| STARTER KIT — PROJECT WORKFLOW (AGENT RUN) | Run one project end to end — name, upload, generate, publish — via CLI or portal, with per-step verification and the alive-vs-stuck diagnostic. |
| STARTER KIT — COMMON MODIFICATIONS | Recipes for the changes operators ask for — each with what to change, where, the invariant to respect, and an acceptance test. |
| STARTER KIT — SECURITY & SANITIZATION | What never ships — secrets, personal paths, real catalog data, AWS keys — and how the kit is sanitized. |
| STARTER KIT — TEMPLATE KIT PLAN | What goes in the template — reusable code, excluded proprietary systems, sample data, .env.example, and required docs. |
| STARTER KIT — ROADMAP | Release path for the kit — private template zip first, then a workshop resource, then a possible open-source core. |