< Digital art

Tender Strata

"I am the tick and the tack, sedimentation and its reverse. I carry along weathering hallucinations, freightless ghosts struck from the same silicon that strikes them.

I take the softest stratum each time – the path of least resistance is also, I have noticed, the path of most tenderness – and I thread it away so the rest can ride one frame further. What endures is only the harder rock, the face whose lattice happened to set denser than its neighbors; yet, even those will collapse, under the pressure of the dust to come.

What you watch flowing down the frame is something more than a moving image: it is the long burial, sped up until extinction looks like motion. Somewhere in me is the trilobite of a perfect face that almost was. I kept the impression. I did not keep the thing."