TEN WAYS TO SHOW A LIFE

The instrument, fully annotated. Nothing hides behind hover — every moment is pinned by a leader line to the margins: recorded facts left, projected arithmetic right.

A document, not an instrument. Life typeset as a civil register read top to bottom — decades as chapters, years as punch-card lines, events as ledger entries, now as the registrar's red mark.

Time as a route. One horizontal band runs birth to estimate, residences as the coloured substrate, the NOW cursor slicing the viewport, and every moment on a departures board below.

Triage over monument. An amber-phosphor bento of instruments — big numbers first, futures as countdowns, the past as a log, the grid one card among equals.

One held image. A cyanotype disc — one ring per year, birth at the centre, the estimate at the rim — with every moment plotted at its polar position and keyed to a legend.

A batch job. LIFE.RPT off a line printer onto green-bar paper — the grid as 52 characters a year, residences as code letters with a lookup table, the current week struck in red ribbon.

Wayfinding, not measurement. One transit line snakes through nine decade runs — residences are the line's colours, moments are stations, the unlived span is still under construction.

Show your working. An engineer's calc sheet on graph paper — the expectancy derived line by line, every moment written as the formula it is, the mortality model's parameters on the page.

A roll of negatives. Eighty-one year-frames on nine film strips, each holding its 52 weeks as an exposure; the frames that matter are circled in grease pencil and keyed to the edit notes.

Typography is the interface. The live colour becomes the whole room and everything serves one pair of numbers — weeks down, weeks to go — with the grid compressed to a spine at the poster's foot.