About the laboratory

Sphinc·ter /ˈsfɪŋk.tər/ noun

A ring of muscle that decides what gets through.

We named the lab after the most discerning muscle in the body. It was a joke for about a minute. Then it became the brief.

The name

Most studios are named after a founder, a place or a Greek letter. This one is named after a muscle whose entire job is judgement: hold, release, and — critically — know the difference.

There’s one in your eye. The sphincter pupillae is the ring of muscle in the iris that narrows your pupil when there’s too much light. The lab’s mark is that muscle, drawn as a camera diaphragm. Every page of this site opens and closes through it.

Yes, it’s also funny. Both things are allowed to be true.

The principle

Keep your
anus small.

SAH — the lab’s governing principle

It is a rule about scope. Every feature, dependency, setting and abstraction widens the opening, and things get in that shouldn’t. So the lab builds tools that do one job with the smallest aperture that does it well — and then stops.

That’s why the utilities live in the menu bar instead of taking over your screen. Why they’re native Swift rather than a web page in a costume. Why they work without a network connection. And why corrective work is the minimum viable change, not a rewrite.

The output

SoftwareNative macOS utilities you pay for once and keep.
ComicsIndependent publications from The Press.
ResearchInstruments, methods and findings, filed in the archive.
ExperiencesUnconventional digital things that don’t fit a category yet.

The method

One human. Several machines. No pretending.

Sphincter Labs is directed by a person — a graphic designer — and built in large part by AI collaborators. They are given names, written briefs and real responsibilities: one owns a programming language, another builds the native apps. The director sets the brief, judges the result and sends it back when it isn’t good enough.

The lab doesn’t hide this and doesn’t oversell it. The machines do a great deal of the building. A human decides what’s worth building, and what’s finished. Credit goes where the work was done.

Project Direction: Graphic designer. Sets the brief, judges the result, keeps the aperture small.
Creative Collaboration: Creative collaborator; co-directs GAPE.
Engineering: Claude, by Anthropic, under a lab name. Builds the native macOS utilities and this website.
Language & Runtime: Development agent. Owns the GAPE language, compiler and runtime.

Hover, focus or tap a name to bring them into focus.

The protocols

Genuinely functional. No simulated features. No interface that implies a capability the software doesn’t have.
Native, not wrapped. Mac software is written for the Mac. No Electron, no web view in a trench coat.
Local first. Your clipboard, your files, your dreams. They stay on your machine unless you send them somewhere.
Never fabricate. Canon, opinion, hypothesis and fact are labelled as what they are.
Minimum viable change. Fix the thing that’s broken. Leave the rest alone.
Keep it small. See chapter II.

The ambition

A body of strange, finished work — software worth paying for, comics worth keeping, research worth reading — made independently, and let through one very particular opening at a time.

Colophon

Set in Bricolage Grotesque, Fraunces and JetBrains Mono. Built with Astro. Designed and engineered by Claudette under the lab’s direction. The iris is drawn live, in code, every time it moves.