Frieze Week, in beads.
What people chose to remember of Frieze Week London 2026 — each visit a bead kept in the visitor’s own account, pointing at an open event record. Nothing here was collected by us: this page asks the network as it loads.
Where people went
People who recorded each event — counted once, however many days they went.
When
Beads by the day they were for.
What went together
Events the same people recorded — the shape of a week that no single organiser sees.
In their words
Download the data (JSON) See your own week the Bluesky feed →
How this was made
A week-long programme of over thirty events, a way for anyone there to say “I went”, and a live picture of the week — built on the AT Protocol without a database or a server process of our own. The parts:
Events are shared records
The programme is published once, as community.lexicon.calendar.event
records — the open calendar schema, not a CultureBlocs one — so any calendar
app on the network can read it. Each event has a permanent at://
address that anything can point at.
Visits belong to visitors
“I went” signs a visitor in with their own account (ATProto OAuth, narrow
permissions) and writes a com.cultureblocs.bead to their
repository, its subject a strong reference to the event. We never
hold it; they can edit or delete it, and every view here follows.
Aggregation without a database
Who went where is a backlink question — which beads point at this event? — and Constellation already indexes every link on the network. Pages ask it, then read each bead from its author’s own server.
A feed with no firehose
The Bluesky feed is one stateless edge function: it asks Constellation for posts whose link card points at these pages, and Bluesky search for the tags, merges and pages them. No stream to consume, no store to keep.
From visit to story
A visitor can gather their beads into a com.cultureblocs.strand
— the week, told their way — which renders on their
wall. If they later take up Loom, the CultureBlocs desk,
it brings these born-public records home to be added to.
Paper to protocol
Printed cards carry short links (cultureblocs.com/w/fwl/…) that
open “I went” on one event: about 45 characters, so the QR codes stay simple
enough to scan in a dim hall.
Method and limits
- Counts only what people chose to publish. It is a record of remembering, not of attendance, and is not comparable to ticket or footfall figures.
- People are counted by account (DID): one person recording three days is one person. Beads edited to point elsewhere, deleted, or on the site’s hide list are excluded.
- Relies on Constellation’s index and each author’s server being reachable at the moment the page loads; the status line says if anything couldn’t be checked.
- Days are the day a person said they went, in London time.
- An independent project, not affiliated with Frieze or any organiser listed.
Code: github.com/geocontrol/cultureblocs-site · Schemas: com.cultureblocs.* · Privacy: what we keep (nothing)