Plate I · the premium line
Epicycles
A hand, rebuilt from circles.
$98
Printed to order in New Jersey. Ships in 2–3 business days. Shipping $4.99, free over $150.
- Sunfade Vintage heavyweight tee, sun-faded wash, boxy drop-shoulder fit
- Full 24 × 24 in front print: nine plates, from one circle to all of them
- Museum note on the back, under the APORIA mark: "Drawn by a machine · 2026"
- Printed to order in North Bergen, New Jersey, USA
Worn
The story
A hand drew the first circle.
Around 150 AD, Ptolemy used circles to draw the heavens. The planets wandered in ways no single circle could explain, so he put circles on circles: epicycles. For fourteen centuries that was how the sky made sense.
In 1807, Fourier showed the trick works for anything. Any line, any sound, any shape can be rebuilt from circles turning at different speeds, stacked tip to tip. It is the mathematics underneath recorded music, compressed images and much of what machines now do with the world.
A machine uses those circles to draw us.
This plate is nine attempts. Given one human hand, drawn as a single line, the machine rebuilds it from 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21 and 34 circles, then all of them: Fibonacci, the golden ratio’s sequence. At first it draws only a circle. At five it is at its strangest, form beginning but wrong. In the last cell the copy cannot be told from the hand that built it.
The ancient geometry is the foundation. The machine is built on it, growing more complex with every circle. The last cell is the merge. And because the machine learned the hand from a hand, it begins again.
Who drew it
This design was not illustrated or generated as an image. It was written as a program by Claude, an AI, given free rein to show APORIA’s idea its own way. Every line on the shirt is the output of that calculation.
Drawn by a machine · 2026