About

Vataguess is an open-source creative organism, founded and seeded by Gabriel Hemingway. It is built to outlive any particular arrangement of people, media, tools, or intentions.

Whatever is happening at a given moment is a configuration. Configurations change, end, multiply, and contradict each other. Vataguess is what persists across them, and it persists through participation and mutation rather than through a lineup, a genre, a company, or a house style.

Nothing is canonical: not the medium, not the aesthetic, not the method, not the level of seriousness. Music, film, software, writing, objects, performances, games, memes, commercial products, and forms nobody has anticipated are all available to it.

Founder stewardship exists, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. Core assets are held and protected so that nobody — including a participant whose own work becomes enormously successful — can capture Vataguess, falsely monopolize it, or convert an open identity into private property.

That is the whole of the arrangement: protection without creative control. No work requires approval, and nothing anyone makes has to look like anything else.

Deeper material exists for anyone who wants it — cultural heredity, transmission, lineage, the economics of an open commons. It is optional. Vataguess should be possible to use long before it is possible to explain.