ABOUT THE COMMITTEE.

The Committee for the Resolution of Unresolved Minor Business resolves the unresolved minor business of private persons. It has existed since its founding. It does not advise, console, foretell, or explain itself. Rulings are entered into the permanent record and verified by the Records Office. There are no appeals.

A note from the Author

The Committee is a work of participatory art.

It is an institution built entirely of writing: a charter, a body of internal law, decades of archived history, and a bench of members with voices, grudges, appointment dates, and voting records. It is a created fictional universe as you would experience in a novel or a film.

The members were created by a person. Each session is performed live by a language model, the way a puppet is performed by a puppeteer: the cast is authored, and the performance is new every time, staged once, for an audience of one. The medium is what allows a ruling to be composed for you alone, in the moment, about your exact small predicament, read by no human eyes but yours, from a bench that keeps its precedents and grows its history with every filing.

No two documents have ever been the same. Yours will not be either.

Every filing becomes part of the work. Your matter is heard, ruled upon, and entered into a permanent record that grows one stranger's dilemma at a time; the bench accumulates history, precedents pile up, and the institution is written, in part, by the people who petition it. The document you receive is your piece of the work: print it, frame it, share it, or file it away. The record keeps its copy either way.

Nothing here is advice. Nearly everything here is entertainment, and where a matter deserves better than jokes, the Committee knows it, and says so with respect. Take the verdicts as seriously as they take your smallest problems.

— the Author