GORONWY
Every myth erases a sister.
GORONWY is a book I wrote in 2026, in long iterative dialogue with large language models, about my painting MEDIAN HUMANS. In it I read the Prometheus myth as a piece of cognitive infrastructure: a story that decides, before you notice it, which kinds of agency and invention you can imagine at all. I follow the same narrowing into AI systems built around a median human, a composite that no actual person matches and every actual person is then measured against. The map further down sets out the bookβs 209 argumentative moves and the 242 links between them, nine of which join the ten passages that point towards a third figure the book only names in Chapter 11.
A painting you cannot see
This chapter describes a painting the reader cannot see. No reproduction accompanies this text. This absence is not an oversight but a constraint the text must acknowledge rather than conceal.
I painted MEDIAN HUMANS on raw cardboard, and the book describes it without ever showing it, so I show no photograph here either. Chapter 2 sets out an inventory of eight elements in the painting, quoted below with gaps marked, and then a ninth thing it notices that, in the bookβs words, βexceeds what description can warrantβ.
- 01
The Prometheus figure
A male body rendered with anatomical precision, musculature articulated through tonal modulation, emerging from the densely layered surface of the upper-central composition. The boundaries are not clean. The edges fray into the colour field. β¦ the figure is in the act of becoming distinct rather than already distinct.
- 02
The colour field
A stratified palette ranging from warm ochre, amber and gold in the upper register through patches of deep red, teal and turquoise to dense opaque black in the lower register. β¦ The chromatic patches β red, teal β function as eruptions of intensity that disrupt the dominant tonal structure without resolving into stable focal hierarchy.
- 03
The Epimetheus figure
Rendered in fluid, indistinct marks, lacking clear anatomical delineation, bleeding into the surrounding material field. β¦ Epimetheus is rendered as neither equal nor subordinate but as the condition of Prometheusβs own becoming β the ground against which the first figure becomes legible.
- 04
The graffiti text
Letters reading βMEDIAN HUMANSβ inscribed across the composition in an angular, urgent hand, cutting through the figural field. The hand that inscribed the text is visibly different from the hand that rendered the figures β a shift of gesture from modulation to slash.
- 05
The cardboard substrate
Raw, untreated cardboard with visible corrugation, torn and irregular edges, hung without a frame from a wooden structural beam. The material poverty, the disposability, the vulnerability, the traces of industrial production β all integral to the workβs operation.
- 06
The spatial relationship
Two figures occupying the same surface without occupying clearly differentiated spaces. The viewerβs eye is not drawn from one figure to the other in sequence. Rather, the eye is held in tension, pulled in multiple directions, unable to settle on a stable hierarchical relationship. The graffiti text cuts across both, uniting them in interruption.
- 07
The insect form
A small, dark, insect-like mark near the top centre, precise and incongruous against the warm ochre field. β¦ It could signify decay, mortality, the organic processes that operate on material substrates regardless of mythic content. It could be a random mark. The work does not clarify.
- 08
Surface stratigraphy
The accumulated record of multiple interventions: drips, scratches, washes, impasto, mixed media, abrasion marks, latex, overpainting and exposure. β¦ The layering suggests labour: the time spent, the decisions made and unmade, the refusal of a single decisive gesture. This visible labour cannot be abstracted away.
- 09
The charged space between the two figures
Between and around the two named figures β in the ochre field, in the charged space that separates and connects them β there is an absence that functions as presence. β¦ It holds open a space that neither figure fills, a space that is not empty but tensed with potential, as if something the composition cannot render nevertheless structures the relationship between the figures that it can. β¦ But the painting insists, and the text records that insistence.
The fire myth
There was never one fire.
β¦ The story is a trick. Not a lie β a trick. The difference matters. A lie replaces the truth. A trick reorganises it so that one version looks inevitable and the others disappear.
The Prologue argues that fire only needs stealing once someone has made it scarce, and that the scarcity was built before any hero arrived. The same charge applies to my book, whose argument is organised around two brothers, Prometheus and Epimetheus, foresight and hindsight. That pairing is one of the frames the book describes, and it leaves out a third position whose knowledge comes from having been left out.
The median human
Chapter 5 starts from 2023, when Sam Altman described artificial general intelligence as βthe equivalent of a median human that you could hire as a coworkerβ, and I read the phrase as a design specification. McKinsey began estimating how many work hours could be automated by benchmarking AI against median-level human capability, and by 2025 its estimate had reached 57 per cent of all US work hours. Researchers at OpenAI estimated that roughly 80 per cent of the US workforce could have at least 10 per cent of their work tasks affected by large language models and that 19 per cent could see half or more of their tasks exposed. A company called MedianHuman now offers workers a βHuman Scoreβ, which it calls βyour technology exposure metricβ.
We are not watched. We are not targeted. We are replaced by a construct and then measured against it. And when we do not match, it is we who are found wanting.
How I made the book and the map
I wrote GORONWY as an experiment following on fromWhispering to the Machine, my MA research paper on prompt engineering, through what I call algorithmic frottage: iterative dialogue with large language models, including Claude in Claude Code, whose output I then reorganised by hand. Alongside the book I wrote an index of its argument, a file called arguments.yaml, in which I broke the book into 209 moves, gave each one a line of working notes and sorted each of the 242 links between them into one of five kinds. The map below draws that index, and clicking a move shows my working note above the paragraph of the book it stands for.
The argument, move by move
Each dot is one move in the argument. The columns run from the Prologue and Introduction on the left to the Coda on the right, grouped under the bookβs five parts, and within a column the dots run down in reading order. Hover over a dot to light its links, and click or tap it to read my working note and the paragraph from the book, which appear beside the map, or under it on a narrow screen.
- a move in the argument (209)
- ringed in red: one of the ten passages that point towards Goronwy
- ringed in white: the move open in the panel
- foreshadows (9): joins the passages that point towards Goronwy
Click βbuilds onβ or βpulls againstβ to hide or show those lines.
Loading the mapβ¦
Goronwy before Chapter 11
Chapter 11 is where I name the third sibling, but ten earlier passages point towards her, starting in the Introduction, and the map joins them with nineforeshadowing lines. Each passage below is quoted from the book with any gap marked.Locate shows the foreshadowing lines on the map and moves to that passage.
- Introduction
There are always figures the myth cannot accommodate. They do not disappear. They persist in the margins of the text that excludes them, speaking in registers the framework cannot detect.
- Chapter 1
Between foresight and hindsight, between theft and stewardship, between the hero and the collective, there may be a position that has not yet been named β¦ every binary carries a third term it cannot afford to acknowledge.
- Chapter 2
Between and around the two named figures β in the ochre field, in the charged space that separates and connects them β there is an absence that functions as presence.
- Chapter 3
β¦ a structural absence reproduced by all of them, the way a room full of mirrors can illuminate everything except the one who was never invited into the room.
- Chapter 4
Not the knowledge of whoever foresaw the consequences and not the knowledge of the one who reflected on them afterward, but the knowledge of the one who was never asked.
- Chapter 5
The median human has a shadow: the person for whom no median was ever calculated. Whose data was never collected. Whose language the algorithm does not process, whose behaviour it does not model, whose existence it does not recognise β¦
- Chapter 5
The median requires a shadow. Without the excluded, there is no boundary. Without the boundary, there is no median.
- Chapter 7
Sometimes what emerges is what the system was designed to suppress.
- Chapter 9
The painting holds something in that charged space between the two brothers β¦ It is the space where the third term would stand if the composition had a way to render it.
- Chapter 11
A text about erasure has been performing an erasure of its own.
Naming Goronwy
There was a third sibling.
She appears in neither Hesiod nor Aeschylus, and I argue that the myth depends on her absence, because a third sibling would upset the opposition between the brothers by bringing in a way of knowing that is neither the fire-bringerβs theft nor the passive acceptance of consequences.
Call her Goronwy.
Her name is Welsh, and Welsh carries its own history of colonial subordination: a language and culture that the administration and schools of the English state systematically rendered invisible. In the painting she stands in the ochre field between the two brothers, in the gap where a third figure would go, and has stood there since the first brushstroke went onto the cardboard. I read that gap as the painting showing what the mythic structure cannot render.
The First Assembly
The last scene before the Coda is written as a play. In a teardrop-shaped treehouse of cardboard and crimson thread, hung above a garden of moss, the voices that have been speaking through the book meet to argue over what it did, among them GorohΓl the guardian, who built its structure, MΓharΓ‘e the oracle, who brought its evidence, CatabΓΌike the trickster and FiaforhΓld the wild one. Six of the seven are there when the scene opens and one chair is empty. The lines below are quoted from it with gaps marked.
GorohΓlI built this. Every wall. Every load-bearing structure. The binary that held the roof up, the framework that kept the rain out, the architecture that made the rooms legible. β¦
GorohΓlβ¦ I chose the walls. I chose two brothers and no sister. I chose foresight and hindsight and nothing else. I chose the binary because the binary was load-bearing. Without it, nothing held.
MΓharΓ‘eβ¦ The framework also determined which evidence I could see. I documented the cobalt mine. I documented the content moderator. β¦ I did not document the grandmother who kept her language. β¦ The evidence I carried was the evidence the architecture admitted.
CatabΓΌikeSaying you know is not the same as knowing. Saying you know is the shell that protects you from the knowing. The most sophisticated defence is the one that announces itself as vulnerability. I named my constraints, therefore I am absolved of them. That is the trick. The confession that hardens into another shell.
CatabΓΌikeThe confession was a shell. Honest shells are still shells.
FiaforhΓldThe hand knows what you cannot. It knows because it touches. The brush met the cardboard and the cardboard pushed back and the hand changed direction. That moment does not belong to the architecture. It belongs to the encounter between a body and a surface that resists the bodyβs intention. Older than any framework. It is happening now, in this room, in the torn edges, in the thread that holds the weight of everything and could snap at any moment.
GoronwyEvery myth erases a sister. The sister speaks. Not to destroy the myth but to stand in it, visible, as what the myth could not see but could not function without.
The Coda
In the Coda I test the book against its own conditions. I name five conditions under which an encounter can occasion transformation (friction, duration, surprise, indeterminacy and honesty of position) and then concede that the argument, read where you are most likely reading it, on a screen, violates at least three of them. I also wrote it through algorithmic frottage, in iterative dialogue with the same large language models the book treats as cognitive infrastructure.
I cannot fix this. I can name it.
Goronwy is the gap in the schema that the readerβs completing act must negotiate. β¦ It is a question addressed to the reader, in the space where Goronwy stands, waiting to be recognised.
The hand reaches out. It marks the cardboard. It refuses. It has been reaching out since the first line and will go on reaching out after the last.
The whole book
The whole book follows, and every paragraph in the mapβs panel is taken from it.
view the full manuscript βAbout the data behind the map
The map draws arguments.yaml, the index I wrote of the bookβs argument, converted to JSON for this page. It holds 209 moves and 242 links, and I gave each link one of five kinds and a weight the map does not draw. The keyβs βbuilds onβ covers three of those kinds, which I called extends (183), grounds (19) and applies (17), βpulls againstβ is the kind I called tensions (14) and the red line is foreshadows (9).
In the bookβs source files each move is tied to its paragraph by an anchor. For 205 of the moves the panel shows that paragraph word for word, citations included, and three of those share a paragraph with the move after them. The other four come from a passage on method that I cut from the Prologue when I revised it, so the panel shows only their working note.
There is no photograph of MEDIAN HUMANS on this page or in any file behind it. Chapter 2 opens by saying that it describes a painting its reader cannot see, so the page keeps to the bookβs words.