TRAGEDY

2024/2025 – two-channel video, 1920×1080, 7 seconds, looped

The letterform holds still. What fills it doesn’t…..The code here doesn’t understand tragedy. It processes it. Behind every rendered frame sits a chain of extraction — computation, energy, and data gathered from lives that were never asked, a cost usually kept invisible, here left legible.

Inside the shape of the word runs a stream of code — synthetic incident records standing in for the wildfires, floods, unrest and losses logged somewhere, by someone, as data across 2024 and 2025. It moves laterally through the letters at machine pace, indifferent to the word it’s filling, the way a system logs an event without knowing what the event cost anyone.

That indifference is the subject. Adam Greenfield’s Radical Technologies describes automation as a quiet transfer of judgement from human to machine, often mistaken for thought when it is closer to pattern-matching at scale. This piece doesn’t set out to celebrate the digital or warn against it. It sits inside the relationship between digital and physical, computational and the embodied — where a personal loss and a planetary data stream can occupy the same four seconds of screen, without one explaining the other.

Made alongside an ongoing engagement with data ethics and infrastructure through the South West Creative Technology Network’s Data Fellowship.