COVID-19 Pandemic Accelerates Globally: February saw a critical escalation as the virus spread beyond China. The first American citizen died in Wuhan, total cases surpassed 20,000 with 425 deaths in China, and companies like Apple began closing all stores there.
Trump Impeachment Trial Concludes: On February 5, the Senate acquitted President Trump on both articles of impeachment, with Mitt Romney being the only Republican to vote for conviction on one charge.
Deadly Violence: A Thai soldier killed 20 people in a mall shooting spree. Violent protests over India's new citizenship law erupted in Delhi, leaving at least 53 dead. Escalation in the Syrian Civil War led to the deaths of Turkish soldiers and Syrian troops.
US-Taliban Peace Agreement: The United States and the Taliban signed a historic peace agreement, aiming to end America's longest war.
February 2020 was the month the signal collapsed. The background noise of January coalesced into a single, overwhelming frequency: the pandemic. The glitch of this era is the feeling of withdrawal, of the world flattening into data points on a screen.
This artifact simulates the ubiquitous pandemic tracker maps of the time. The red nodes represent the primary signal—the virus spreading, connecting, and dominating the feed. They are active, growing, and urgent.
The other major world events of the month—impeachments, peace treaties, riots—appear as corrupted data. They are the secondary signals, struggling to be seen, their text glitching and decaying as the main signal overwhelms them. They are important, but they are being drowned out.
Your cursor is the ghost in this machine. It is the human element, revealing the names and numbers—the individual lives—that make up the cold, abstract data of the map. It is a reminder of the reality behind the screen.