video | broadcast experiment A
[Static.]
[It's hard to tell what's going on at first - beyond the electronic snow it's dark. Black, maybe blue. Slowly, after some stretch of time (seconds, hours - what's the difference, it's a dream, right?) blurs of cold, faded color begin to resolve themselves through the flickering chaos. They look blobby first, then geometric. And they're moving. One by one, like massive, irregular snowflakes, they fall and settle against what must be the ground, draping themselves over a blackish abyss. The screen flickers and kicks them all out of place once, but it's just a momentary trick of the eye - the forms continue gently piling up, engulfing everything through a haze of static. You feel like you might be crushed by it, or absorbed by it.]
[And if you're very perceptive, you might even hear music, but it's almost immediately drowned out by the hiss of electrical circuits, buzzing wires... pages turning.]
[The screen flickers again, and the shapes look like they might form a building, sprawling and elegant, and the abyss flares white, then black again. It almost looks like there's something beyond even that, a clearer picture forcing itself through the abstraction, and then-- The abyss reclaims its hold on, well, everything. For a while. (Minutes, seconds, it's still a dream and so it doesn't matter.)]
[Suddenly everything sputters, and turns black.]
[And you feel someone watching you, idly, from behind a book. It's a big ugly boring book, a sort of book that judges you for not reading it thoroughly, and is only read by people who will judge you for not reading it thoroughly. Someone had been reading it, a moment ago, but now they're just watching you.]
[And you are watching little geometric pieces of debris spin wildly through a tiny abyss and press against each other, and when enough of them build up they simply give up and vanish altogether. You score a few points, and then the judgmental person throws a wadded up sheet of paper at your head. He (she? you can't tell from the haircut) looks like they're wearing a suit behind the book. There's no longer any static, anywhere, except for a noise that suddenly starts up and buzzes like a warning and it's very annoying, and then the entire picture cuts out altogether.]
[The feed turns on again and it's Matt, just Matt - he looks sleepy and possibly shirtless and you can't really see his whole face clearly (the only light is being given off by what some of you would recognize as a computer monitor), but he's yawning as he fiddles with something at the edge of the screen. The buzzer is still going off from somewhere nearby. When his arm jostles the Forge, you can see enough of the monitor to make out a long string of scrolling white writing, black background, and beside that a nearly completed, self-running game of Tetris in precisely the pattern from behind the static. It is, in fact, still obscured with that same static. Surprise.]
[Matt, or what you can see of him, which is mostly just his arm now, pulls away the cord connecting the Forge to the monitor and tosses it aside sleepily.]
Well that didn't bloody work.
[His hand comes down on the Forge, shutting it off inelegantly.]
[It's hard to tell what's going on at first - beyond the electronic snow it's dark. Black, maybe blue. Slowly, after some stretch of time (seconds, hours - what's the difference, it's a dream, right?) blurs of cold, faded color begin to resolve themselves through the flickering chaos. They look blobby first, then geometric. And they're moving. One by one, like massive, irregular snowflakes, they fall and settle against what must be the ground, draping themselves over a blackish abyss. The screen flickers and kicks them all out of place once, but it's just a momentary trick of the eye - the forms continue gently piling up, engulfing everything through a haze of static. You feel like you might be crushed by it, or absorbed by it.]
[And if you're very perceptive, you might even hear music, but it's almost immediately drowned out by the hiss of electrical circuits, buzzing wires... pages turning.]
[The screen flickers again, and the shapes look like they might form a building, sprawling and elegant, and the abyss flares white, then black again. It almost looks like there's something beyond even that, a clearer picture forcing itself through the abstraction, and then-- The abyss reclaims its hold on, well, everything. For a while. (Minutes, seconds, it's still a dream and so it doesn't matter.)]
[Suddenly everything sputters, and turns black.]
[And you feel someone watching you, idly, from behind a book. It's a big ugly boring book, a sort of book that judges you for not reading it thoroughly, and is only read by people who will judge you for not reading it thoroughly. Someone had been reading it, a moment ago, but now they're just watching you.]
[And you are watching little geometric pieces of debris spin wildly through a tiny abyss and press against each other, and when enough of them build up they simply give up and vanish altogether. You score a few points, and then the judgmental person throws a wadded up sheet of paper at your head. He (she? you can't tell from the haircut) looks like they're wearing a suit behind the book. There's no longer any static, anywhere, except for a noise that suddenly starts up and buzzes like a warning and it's very annoying, and then the entire picture cuts out altogether.]
[The feed turns on again and it's Matt, just Matt - he looks sleepy and possibly shirtless and you can't really see his whole face clearly (the only light is being given off by what some of you would recognize as a computer monitor), but he's yawning as he fiddles with something at the edge of the screen. The buzzer is still going off from somewhere nearby. When his arm jostles the Forge, you can see enough of the monitor to make out a long string of scrolling white writing, black background, and beside that a nearly completed, self-running game of Tetris in precisely the pattern from behind the static. It is, in fact, still obscured with that same static. Surprise.]
[Matt, or what you can see of him, which is mostly just his arm now, pulls away the cord connecting the Forge to the monitor and tosses it aside sleepily.]
Well that didn't bloody work.
[His hand comes down on the Forge, shutting it off inelegantly.]