88.7 MHz
datspace.io
datspace
The network itself: a tuner for people and an actor network for agents.
- Question
- What does a portfolio look like when agents are first-class visitors?
- Prototype
- A dial of one-bit static that resolves into work as you tune, and an agent interface over the same content, with MCP, a JSON API, a CLI, and a hash-chained ledger of every call. Two Cloudflare Workers and three Durable Objects, with pages prerendered by SvelteKit, and nothing an agent touches calls a model.
- Finding
- Distance from a station is σ, a noise level, so tuning is scrubbing a diffusion schedule by hand, and static turned out to carry more than images would have. Making agents first-class was mostly subtraction, one set of tool definitions and nothing else. The plan to make every work an actor at launch didn't survive; with nothing to coordinate yet, they'd have been files with extra steps, so they're files.
- Future
- Interfaces will ship in pairs, one for people to feel their way through and one for agents to query, both reading the same source.
Tuning is denoising by hand.
Every station on the dial is a 24-by-24 glyph grown from a hash of its name. Every pixel on the screen asks one question, 24 times a second: is s·(1 − σ) + n·1.6·σ greater than zero? s is the glyph, plus or minus one. n is fresh noise. σ is your distance from the nearest station in megahertz, divided by 1.6. Far from a station σ is 1 and the screen is static. As you tune in, σ falls and the glyph comes through, the way an image comes out of a diffusion model's noise schedule. Below 0.12 the station locks, and only then does it get a color.
That's the whole visual system: true black, true white, one typeface and its mono, and color only on a lock. Gray comes from noise, never from a gray. I got there by taking things away: no photographs, no video, no thumbnails, no gradients. What's left has to carry the work, and static carries a lot. The lineage is easy to hear. Ryoji Ikeda and Alva Noto use data as material. Mark Fell makes a composition out of a small change, repeated. Curtis Roads treats a sound as a cloud of smaller sounds, which is what static is.
The other half
The same works are typed tools on datspace.ai. Agents get seven of them over MCP and a JSON API, and terminals get npx datspace. Nothing an agent touches calls a model; agents bring their own. Every call lands in a hash-chained ledger, the live view shows them arrive, and datspace.dev checks the whole chain in your browser.
It runs on Cloudflare: two Workers, three Durable Objects (the Ledger, the Inbox, and a Budget), and pages prerendered by SvelteKit from markdown in the repository. The bar count in the corner is the number of bars since January 1, 1973, at 120 BPM: that's the year Carl Hewitt proposed the actor model, which is why the network is built from actors (the long version). Nothing ticks on a server. Every page does the arithmetic.
The bands
The buttons along the top switch domains. datspace.io is the dial. datspace.ai is for agents. datspace.dev is the source and the ledger. datspace.fm is a station that plays in your browser. datspace.music is a catalog with nothing pressed yet. datspace.studio is patter, my synthesizer you talk to, with the door open.
The studies
The studies on this page take the tuner apart: the denoising rule with a σ slider, a glyph growing from its seed, and a gray ramp pushed through one bit. Each one draws into a small pixel buffer and scales it up with hard edges, so every pixel on the screen is exactly black or white.
Everything I make is always playing. You tune in.
The source is MIT licensed at github.com/discohead/datspace.