No Bridge, Just Static

We began by walking.
Not in silence, not alone —
but in speculative dialogue
with a machine.

Walking with AI, I called it.
Bodies, stories, landscapes —
entangled through code and care.
No neutrality, no God’s-eye view.
Only questions.
Who owns the path?
Whose history lies beneath the sidewalk?
Which absences speak loudest when we walk with them?

Then Chris Barker shifted us.
From walking to listening.
He spoke of Yalinguth,
where place is not separate from voice,
where stories are embedded, not attached.
No objectivity, no map.
Just a young person,
kneeling in an alley,
hearing the voice of an elder ripple through the bricks.
He showed us how entanglement frustrates, resists, redefines.
He made presence relational,
and perception a moving game.

Then the screen went darker.
Christine Bruening and Janna Ahrndt opened a space of digital mourning.
Scrapbooks turned into cloud folders,
memory quilts became grief bots,
and death became something to be monetized forever.
“Death is coming,” she laughed.
But the platforms got there first.
They charge rent on remembrance.
They train their AI on your sorrow
and call it service.

Then came a refusal.
Our own death turned toward DIY tools and zines —
not to preserve nostalgia,
but to carve out small spaces of self-determined memory.
Personal servers.
3D scans of imperfect objects.
Workshops where file management becomes ritual,
not task.
We called for the right to disappear.
To keep our ghosts unsponsored.
To let memory live where platforms cannot follow.

And then —
a final screen, and a voice reading from notes.
She spoke of City Digital Skin Art,
of unity, of cross-cultural exchange,
of urban screens as sites for global empathy.
But her words hovered above us.
Disembodied.
Untouched by the friction she described.
A smooth story in a jagged world.

I tuned out.

Because the world today
doesn’t seem to move toward unity.
Not the kind projected onto buildings.
Not the kind prescribed by media theory.

If I had a screen,
I wouldn’t use it to bridge.
I’d let it scream —
like Munch.
Not to be heard,
but to be unmistakably felt.
Not to unite,
but to rupture the loop.
To let the mist in.

Let the screen fail.
Let memory rot in peace.
Let walking, listening, grieving, and resisting
remain gloriously incompatible.

---

What remains when connection becomes impossible?

Maybe:
a path, a voice, a zine,
and a single glowing screen
full of static.