Every viewing spends a little of it

Four spiked black sunbursts in a row, each with a red disc at its centre, all the same drawing at the same size. The left one is sharp. The second carries faint horizontal streaks. The third is smeared with broad bands. The right one has come apart into noise with a ghost of its outline left.

Nothing was done to it. It was watched.

Why is the same drawing printed four times?

Because degradation is the one thing changing across the row, and a single copy of it would say nothing at all.

Same mark, same size, same height on the line. Put four of them side by side and the eye reads left to right without being told to, and reads the row as elapsed use rather than as four separate designs. On its own the fourth one is a smudge. Standing next to the first one it is a measurement.

That is why there is no caption on the garment. The sequence carries its own explanation, and a line of text under it would be explaining something the reader has already worked out.

What actually wears a copy out?

Playing it. A picture on tape is held in a thin magnetic coating on a ribbon, and to read that coating back the machine drags the ribbon across a head that is touching it.

Every pass takes a fraction of the coating away and leaves some of it behind on the head, which is why a household kept a cassette whose whole job was to wipe that head clean in the drawer beside the tapes. The tape has no idea it has been played a hundred times. It simply has less of itself left each time, and the picture it hands back is made out of what remains.

Why does the damage run sideways?

Because the picture is laid down and read back as a stack of horizontal lines, one after another. When a line comes back short of information, the failure takes the shape of the line — it spreads along the width rather than outward in a ring. So the second sunburst frays into streaks at the same height as its spikes, and by the third the spikes have run into each other in broad bands. Damage spreading in every direction at once would be a different fault with a different cause.

Why keep watching a copy this far gone?

Because the fourth one is still readable in outline, and readable in outline was enough.

A household could follow that film from the shape of it, having watched it often enough to supply the rest. Replacing the tape gets you the film back and loses the copy: the interruptions in the middle, the label somebody wrote, the exact place the sound thins out. A rented print that came back marked got pulled and inspected by somebody whose job that was. A tape at home had no such person, and the only vote was whether anybody minded.

Wear also arrives in instalments rather than smoothly. A tape that came out at the same point of every year is a stack of a few dozen viewings with long gaps, and the row of four is that stack drawn out flat.

Does a pattern of wear belong to anybody?

The film belongs to whoever made it. The state your copy got into belongs to you, because you are the one who put it there.

Titles, artwork and performances are somebody's property and they are licensable — studios and estates do it constantly — so if a particular film is the point of what you are making, the permission is part of the job rather than an obstacle to it. If it is not the point, there is no reason to take on the paperwork. The mark in this print is an invented sunburst that identifies nothing, and the invented one is usually the stronger shirt anyway: a recognisable one is the shirt a thousand other people already own. Style has no owner. A work does.

Does it work for something that is not a film?

Anything that was spent by being used rather than lost by being neglected.

A record side played until it hissed, a paperback carried in a coat pocket, a route walked so often the boots gave out — the drawing is the same argument each time and the mark changes to suit. Four stages is a comfortable number; three reads as a shrug and six starts to look like a chart. For a household, one mark per person works as a set of four shirts, each at a different stage, which only makes sense standing together.

Isn't this just wear used as decoration?

Read as a surface effect the row falls apart, because a surface effect has no first and no last.

What the sequence states is a cost, stage by stage. The second has lost its edges, so it no longer cuts against the ground. The third has lost the spikes as separate objects, so the count is gone. The fourth has lost everything except where the thing used to be. That is a ledger, and it happens to have been paid in evenings.

Does it print well?

Yes, with the last two stages needing the most care.

Two inks carry it: one black for the sunbursts, one red for the centre discs, on undyed or bone cotton. The first mark is straightforward flat colour with hard edges. The trouble is the streaking, because fine broken speckle sitting below the floor of the weave fills in and comes out as flat grey — the bands want to be drawn coarser, larger and fewer than a photograph of real damage would have them, with clean edges rather than a soft fade.

No box around the row. The marks' own outlines are the edge of the print, and the empty cotton between them is doing as much work as the ink.

How do I get one made?

Describe the sequence at JustOG — what the mark is, how many stages it runs through, how far gone the last one is. Pick a direction, drag the crop frame, see it composited on the real garment, and it's made to order and shipped.

Designs other people have published are in the shop.

Somebody in that house pressed play again, and the fourth one is what came back.