Overprint

One sheet of the edition. The token stores only a seed; this page is the press that prints it — the same algorithm, every time, forever.

The composition is a density field per plate — shared geometry, so the plates argue about the same stripes rather than printing four unrelated pictures. Every sheet is bands: warped runs a few degrees apart so the interference is the picture, laid out as parallels, concentric rings, spirals or sunbursts. Some editions are detuned, each plate at fractionally its own frequency so the moiré arrives as slow beats across the sheet; some chirp tighter from one side to the other; and some run the black plate at a multiple of the colour frequency, pinstripes threading between the bands. Screens are round, lined or squared, at the classic press angles or knocked deliberately wrong, and misregistration is rolled per plate — a few pieces come off the press badly enough to be the good ones. The stock is never white: kraft, chipboard, newsprint, and the yellow plate sinks into it the way real ink does. Most sheets flow — the stripes bent through a drifting field before they are ever screened, or caught in the curl of that field, divergence-free eddies that swirl the bands like a liquid without ever tearing them. Some print a plate twice as a doubled grating, a few degrees and part of a phase apart, so each colour interferes with itself before it ever meets another; some spread the plates wide into a shear where the moiré stops being an undertone and becomes the subject; and some clash their halftone screens — two plates angled within a few degrees, the classic press mistake, the strongest interference the medium has. Where all three colours cross heavily a skeleton black rises underneath, so the knots go to true black instead of brown; and now and then the fountain is split, each ink blending into its neighbour along the press. Every sheet is a proof: bordered, with registration crosses, a colour bar and its seed in the margin, the way work leaves the shop before anyone decides it is finished.