Dwell Poetically

Poetically, man dwells on this earth.
Dwell sets out to find, restore and keep the poetry in everyday life.

Choose a photo or Live Photo. Dwell reads the scene on this device — the hour, the pentad, the colours it already carries — finds a fitting line among 368 lines of Chinese verse and prose, each checked against its source, and sets it on one of the objects below.

Photographs, with the day around them.

A photograph remembers what you saw and forgets the rest — that the day was the second pentad of Qingming, that the hour was wei, that the colour you kept looking at has a name six hundred years old.

Colophon · vertical text, a poem, three seals
Ticket · a stub, the lightest of them
Letter · mostly paper, a little picture
Instant print · a white border and the line beneath it
Glass · the photograph full-bleed, under a band of colour
Brocade · the poem woven into a floor of coloured bricks — and it scans
Heart Knot · colours from the photograph gather and knot into a heart
Postcard · the photograph on one side, the line on the other, as if mailed from where you took it
Vinyl · your photograph at the centre of a record, the poem pressed into its grooves
Desk Calendar · your photograph stays clear in the frame; its date and solar term settle onto paper
Exhibit Label · the little card beside a painting in a museum, with your photograph as the exhibit
Star Jar · the photograph's colours fold into paper stars and drop into a glass jar, each with its traditional name
Print Envelope · the kraft envelope from a photo lab, the line written in its notes
Luggage Tag · a card tag for a suitcase, bound for the solar term it was taken in
Folding Fan · your photograph opens across a fan, the poem along its ribs
Bookmark · a slim bookmark, the poem down its length, a tassel in the photograph's colour
Frosted Glass Card · a blurred copy of the photograph as mist, the clear one held on frosted glass
Poem Mosaic · the photograph rebuilt from the poem's own characters, the original beside it
Rubbing · the photograph mounted above, the poem lifted white out of black ink
Photo Booth Strip · four frames from one photograph, on a photo booth strip

On a festival day — Mid-Autumn, Qixi, the Double Ninth — the line written for that day comes first. Say who the work is for, and it chooses a line for them.

Gather works into an album and leaf through it page by page; the last page carries its title, how many works it holds, and the days they span.

It does not touch your photograph. No filters, no grain, no grading; the original in your library is left exactly as it is.

It writes nothing it has not looked up: 384 traditional colour names, 368 lines checked against their sources, a Yuan-dynasty almanac of the seventy-two pentads.

Your photos are never uploaded. No account, no analytics, no server. The one network request is optional city-name lookup — off by default, and it sends only a location already rounded to about 10 km.

Free, and staying free: Colophon, Ticket, Exhibit Label and Bookmark, every colour name, every poem, albums, export with no watermark.

The other objects come in cases, each a one-time purchase. Case I unlocks Letter, Instant print, Glass and Brocade, with Live Photo export from still images. Case II unlocks Heart Knot, Postcard, Vinyl and Desk Calendar; Heart Knot and Vinyl save with their motion, as a Live Photo or a video. Case III unlocks Star Jar, Print Envelope, Luggage Tag and Folding Fan; Star Jar and Folding Fan save with their motion and a little sound. Case IV unlocks Frosted Glass Card, Poem Mosaic, Rubbing and Photo Booth Strip, each saving with its own motion. Cases I–IV can also be bought together as one bundle, which covers these four cases only. Any case lets you save an album as a page-turning video. A work you have already made is never taken back.