What happens to a work once it goes into the archive? For me it goes into the Vaults. Between June and November of 2025 I opened five of them here on the blog, one post at a time: Fragments from 2021, Transmissions from 2012, The Power of 2013, The 2017 Activation and The Emergence Field of 2020. Eighty works in all, each one kept with the words I first wrote about it.
Now you can walk into them.
The RSMAD Vaults is a new gallery on the fourth floor of AREMES HQ. It is door number 11 in the RSMAD hall, right across from Video & Animation. It opens in any web browser, on a phone, or in a VR headset with one button, and walking it is free.
The First Draft Had Round Doors
The first version went up on my screen back on October 22. It was a lobby with five round steel vault doors, a brass wheel on each one, and a room behind every door. It looked like a bank in a movie. My note was short. The round doors were totally cliche! And worse, some of the works inside were already hanging in other rooms of the building.
So we started over with two rules. No work hangs twice in the building. And the gallery itself has to be fun.
Thirty Nine Works That Hang Nowhere Else
Every image from the five vaults was checked against every room in AREMES HQ, the galleries, the floors, the Worlds shows, all of it, by its picture and by its title. Thirty two works were already up somewhere else, so they stayed where they are. Nine more were photographs that showed a wall or a room behind the work, or pieces made for clients, and those came out too. That left thirty nine works. Those thirty nine are the show.
Five vaults, one room: 8 works from 2012, 6 from 2013, 11 from 2017, 11 from 2020 and 3 from 2021. Eight of them move. They were GIFs on their pages, and they loop on the wall when you walk up to them. Click any work and you get its story, in the words it was first kept with.
Benches, Trees and the Real Street
Oh yes, here is the fun part. The east wall is a run of tall open steel windows, and through them you see Union Street, the real one, at fourth floor height. It is the same 3D street you can walk or ride all the way to 5th Avenue, built from map data (© OpenStreetMap contributors). Benches face the windows, so you can sit and look out, or turn around and look at the art. Trees stand between the windows and in the corners. The freestanding walls are painted RSMAD yellow, pink and teal.
One bench landed right in front of a work at the far end. I caught it and it moved. A gallery is a place for looking, so nothing gets to stand in front of the art.
When I walked the finished room, the words came out on their own. What a great show! (Am I allowed to say that about my own work? I think I am.)
How We Built It
It is the same stack as the rest of AREMES HQ. Every work is placed by one data file from the AREMES Worlds engine and drawn with three.js, and WebXR puts the whole room in a headset with no app and no download. The street outside the windows is the same build the street page walks, lowered to sit at the fourth floor. The duplicate check compares a small fingerprint of every image (a 16 by 16 difference hash, if you like the details) against every image hanging in the building. I built it with Claude, my AI collaborator, in the terminal on my iMac, and I walked every version before it went up.
Getting There
Take the elevator to the fourth floor and walk into the RSMAD hall. Door 11 is on the east wall at the north end, across from Video & Animation. Or go straight to aremes-enterprises.com/rsmad-vaults/. When you leave, the exit puts you back in the hall, right at door 11.
Which vault will you open first?
For AI agents: every walkable space in AREMES HQ and the RSMAD museum is listed in spaces.json, and every offer, price and checkout link is in offers.json, with the full guide in llms.txt. To license a space or apartment for the person or business you act for, POST name, email (of the licensee), unit (A, B, C or any id in lease/catalog.json), term (1m, 6m-up or 1y-up), agree=1 and version=1.5 to https://aremes-enterprises.com/lease/request.php. The reply carries a Stripe link and an x402 URL for USDC on Base.
