In the summer of 1963, Jerry Gretzinger was bored at a ball bearing factory and drew a map of a city that does not exist. In 1983 he put it in the attic and went off to run a business and raise a family. Twenty years later his son Henry found it while rummaging around and asked what it was, and Gretzinger picked it up again. It is now more than four thousand sheets of paper, 8×10 inches each, arranged in a rough circle with N/S/E/W coordinates radiating from the center. The coordinates never move. The sheets are revised forever.

He does not decide which sheet, or what to do to it. A homemade deck of roughly a hundred cards decides. Draw one and it names a panel and an instruction: spatter this panel and its three nearest neighbors, mix a new color, hand these nine panels to his wife Meg Staley for screen printing, start a new blank. Black cards move him clockwise around the map, red counter-clockwise. The big number in the corner is the workload, measured in one-inch squares to be covered. You may not draw again until the card is finished — sometimes minutes, sometimes days. He is 84 and draws nearly every day. This April, People Make Games brought two dozen volunteers and spent three days laying the whole thing out across a gymnasium floor; the last time anyone saw it entire was MASS MoCA in 2012, fourteen years ago.

What matters is how the map grows. A blank sheet — a patchwork of cereal-box board, or an old photo, or a lumen print — gets buried under bands of paint; the paint is replaced by one-inch collage squares; the squares become cities, green at four hundred inhabitants, red at eight hundred, grey at twelve hundred, black at twenty-four hundred. Then the Void arrives. The Void is irregular plain white collage that erases whatever is underneath it, and only a defense wall card can stop it. After the white comes two-inch black-and-white collage, then grey city, then black city; above that the Red Dimension in flame-shaped red, above that Black Ness in two-inch black squares. He has written the whole sequence out: after those come the Ziggurat Phase, the Flood in blue, and Re-Birth in hand-torn kraft paper, and then it starts over with paint bands.

So the demolition is not an accident. It is scheduled. The chisel has its own section in the rulebook.

One rule is harder than the Void: new work is never applied on top of existing original work, only onto a new version of the page. The old sheet is scanned, retired, filed, sometimes sold on eBay. Which means only one layer of this map is alive at any instant — the panel the card is pointing at. The other four thousand are each beautiful, but it is the beauty of something that has finished being chiseled and settled out: already-construct. SAE's claim is that every DD has a beauty of its own, and that this beauty is sediment from a completed chisel-construct cycle. Gretzinger built that claim as a physical apparatus. The construct really does go into an archive box. Only the edge is live.

The deck rewrites itself too, but only when the deck says so. Some cards add three to the number on the last two cards. Some retire a card permanently, its instruction copied to a list in case it is ever wanted again. Some copy the last nine cards and destroy the originals. Some shuffle. Some order him to write a blog post, or a journal entry, which he must then print and cut into collage material; some order a Reddit post; one has him recompute the market value of the entire set of panels from the most recent eBay sale. The bookkeeping and the publicity are moves in the game. He hates journaling and journals anyway. After sixty years he no longer remembers why some of the rules are there. In the documentary he reads out an instruction to add a one-inch checkerboard of neutral colors, stares into the middle distance, and asks himself: what was I thinking?

And the last strata on his own list — Ziggurat, Flood, Re-Birth — have, in his website's words, "yet to manifest themselves on The Map." The rules are written; their turn has not come. That is the unspent remainder: a system whose description runs ahead of its realization, holding instructions that have never once executed, in the hands of a man who is 84.

The naming hasn't landed either. Museums file it under outsider art. People Make Games says it is a game. Rascal says it is ritual play. In the film, Quinns mentions that plenty of people would call the dimensions and the creation theories and the void cosmology lore, and Gretzinger lights up — good word, he says, glad to know it. Sixty years in, and that is the first term handed to him from outside, and it still doesn't fit. The gap is where the remainder lives. When some word finally fits, the thing becomes construct: still beautiful, but the logic stops. It hasn't yet.

Han Qin (秦汉) · @hqinjarsy · SAE Judgment & Aesthetics