The Pandemic That Defined Everything: COVID-19 emerged as the defining global crisis, killing over 1.8 million people, triggering the worst recession since the Great Depression, and reshaping society. The year ended with the paradox of vaccine breakthroughs amidst the deadliest surges.
Global Uprising for Racial Justice: The death of George Floyd sparked the largest civil rights movement in US history, with protests spreading to over 60 countries, forcing a global reckoning with systemic racism and police brutality.
Democratic Upheaval and Authoritarian Advances: The US election became a stress test for democracy with an unprecedented refusal to concede. Simultaneously, Hong Kong's autonomy was dismantled and Belarus erupted in sustained pro-democracy protests against a dictator.
International Conflicts & Security Crises: The US and Iran were brought to the brink of war. A full-scale war erupted between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh. Afghanistan was rocked by devastating attacks, including one on a maternity ward.
Environmental Catastrophes: Apocalyptic wildfires turned the skies of the US West Coast orange, Australia's bushfires killed billions of animals, and Siberian heatwaves accelerated permafrost melt, highlighting the escalating climate crisis.
To capture an entire year like 2020 is to capture not one glitch, but a dozen simultaneous system failures. The signal was not a single, corrupted frequency, but a cacophony of overlapping, contradictory, and urgent crises all demanding attention at once.
The glitch for this era is this "system overload." It is the experience of total sensory and informational saturation, where focusing on one crisis means losing sight of another. It's the memory of a machine trying to render all of its active processes onto one screen, resulting in a chaotic, unresolvable data storm.
This artifact simulates a three-dimensional memory dump of that year. Each layer—the pandemic, the protests, the politics, the fires—is a different signal competing for space. Your cursor is your point of view, a fragile lens attempting to find focus within the storm. You can navigate it, but you can never see it all clearly at once. The ghost in this machine is the memory of a world where all the signals turned to static at the same time.