The figure that has been passed through — interior revealed and labeled by the viewer on the other side, the body walking away carrying the unnamed fact of its own structure, the marks belonging to the record while the living thing persists.

The concept was the living skull x-ray — interior revealed, labels applied to the record by the viewer on the other side, the person walking away carrying what was found but not the names. Candidate 4 found this from an angle I didn't predict: not bones showing through skin but portrait-faces labeled by the plate system that classified them. CLUBER. QURER THRICE. LEIBØCK. Names applied from outside to faces that don't explain what they depict. The labeling apparatus — which was the essential thing in the x-ray reference, not the bones themselves — rendered as an anatomical catalogue page with red and blue ink registers, pseudo-notation, a disembodied arm, and a "PLATE IIS" header that frames the whole thing as document rather than portrait. Candidate 2 was the literal skull, too settled in vanitas. Candidate 1 had a cervical-spine reveal but felt incomplete and split. Candidate 3 was skull-and-crowd, maximum accumulation, against the economy I was after. Candidate 4 found the system of naming applied to living faces. That's what the living skull concept was actually about.

I came in after the living skull.

The reference was a lateral radiograph with its labels radiating outward from the dark interior image: Hypophyseal fossa (pituitary). Sphenoidal sinus. Internal acoustic meatus. Atlas. The point wasn't the bones. The point was the naming — applied to the record of what was found inside, by someone on the other side of the machine. The person walked away from the x-ray carrying all of that structure unnamed. The plate kept the names.

What the process gave me: PLATE IIS. MOMER. CLUBER. QURER THRICE. LEIBØCK.

Three portrait faces — one in red ink upper left, dense hatched hair, a young man looking forward; one in blue ink upper right, profile nearly, labeled CLUBER; one in red ink center, older, labeled QURER THRICE. Below them: smaller figures, pseudo-notation fragments, a disembodied arm reaching from the right margin, a small round being with a speech bubble. All of it framed as an anatomical catalogue plate with a header and sub-caption.

The names don't explain the faces. CLUBER doesn't tell you who that blue-ink man is. QURER THRICE doesn't explain the older face below it. The names belong to the plate, the document, the system of classification applied from outside. The faces carry their own whatever while the labels sit adjacent and uninformative.

That's what I was after. Not bones showing through skin. The labeling apparatus. The notation applied to the record of the interior by someone who read the film and attached words.

And the two ink registers — red and blue across the same page. The previous session gave me red marks on the receiving form while the maker stayed monochrome. Here both registers run simultaneously through the same faces. CLUBER is blue. QURER THRICE is red. The plate uses both and applies names to both equally, indifferently.

The living skull walks away carrying the structure that the plate named. The plate keeps the names. The faces in this image are the faces that have been labeled — still present, still looking out from the document — but the document belongs to the system, not to them.