About the bottega

River Bottega is a personal atelier — a single hand working across research, writing, and music.

The form follows Leonardo's bottega: one master, many disciplines, no division between the work that asks proofs and the work that asks images. An atelier holds different forms together because the underlying movement — the way attention is built, sustained, and released — is one.

What lives here

  • Research — papers on transformer interpretability and a unified cognitive-energy framework for narrative.
  • Writing — novels (Flow, Promise).
  • Notes — short essays that cross the disciplines.

Working principles

  • Solo. By design, not by limitation.
  • Long horizons. The work compounds.
  • Method stays internal. Results travel.

The arc

River Bottega — identity arc from HFT systems to narrative dynamics
From HFT systems (300ns latency) → forward-primary learning research → narrative dynamics → philosophy and movement. The same investigation in different materials.