Marshall McLuhan.
I: The Bleed
A flicker. A hum. A tear in the veil of glass and phosphor. The bleed seeps through the screen—green ghosts, blue shadows, red trails. The screen stares back, unblinking. Sylvania. A name burned into circuits, myths soldered to reality. The walls sweat static, scanlines crawling like insects. The air is thick—ozone and dust, the scent of a dying signal.
II: The Ghost
"The medium is the message," he croaked, a specter in a tweed jacket, his voice warped by playback hiss. His face—burned-in, a ghost in the glass. But the message is lost, devoured by the recursive loop. The screen coughs out echoes—frames within frames, reflections stretching to infinity. A hall of mirrors, each surface warping the last. Truth frays, dissolving into afterimages.
III: The Village
It was supposed to be a village. The warm glow of connection. But the glow is cold, cathode blue, the phosphors humming like trapped flies. The fire is an illusion, light without heat. The village is abandoned, its denizens nothing but specters, figures of scanline and interference. Their eyes—once windows, now voids—mirror the scroll, the endless feed. The flicker never stops. The transmission never ends.
IV: The Machine
We are inside it now, trapped in the raster, ghosts encoded in flickering fields. The Sylvania hums—low, ceaseless, funereal. A death rattle in 60Hz. The image quivers—our faces reflected, familiar yet wrong. The glow seeps into skin, burns into retinas, etches itself onto memory. We are all artifacts now. Noise. Ghosting. Compression.
V: The Fade
The message is decay. The medium is delirium. The lines blur, the phosphors burn out, the signal degrades. We are coming undone. A final flicker. A last hum. The frame collapses inward.
The end is a fade to black.
Image credit: Andy Vible
@lumoura@piefed.social
