Assassination of Haitian President: President Jovenel Moïse was assassinated at his home by a group of foreign mercenaries, plunging the nation into a severe political crisis and power vacuum.
Tokyo Olympics Open Without Spectators: After a year-long delay, the Summer Olympics began in a state of emergency, with empty stadiums and arenas, a global spectacle held in a void.
Global COVID-19 Delta Variant Surge: The Delta variant drove a devastating resurgence of the pandemic, with countries like Indonesia, Bangladesh, and Russia reporting record-breaking daily death tolls.
South Africa Erupts in Deadly Unrest: The jailing of former President Jacob Zuma sparked the worst violence and looting in the country since the end of apartheid, leading to military deployment.
Afghanistan Security Collapse Accelerates: As the US accelerated its withdrawal, the Taliban captured vast swathes of territory, and hundreds of Afghan troops were forced to flee into neighboring countries.
Catastrophic Flooding in Europe: Germany and Belgium were hit by some of the worst flooding in decades, resulting in hundreds of deaths and widespread destruction.
July 2021 was a month of profound and unsettling voids. The primary signal was a spectacle with no audience—the empty Olympics. It was a broadcast of normalcy into a world that was anything but normal. This phantom signal created a vacuum, which was violently filled by the raw static of reality: an assassination, the collapse of a state, deadly riots, and a surging pandemic.
The glitch for this era is this "Phantom Signal." It is the eerie experience of watching a broadcast from an empty room, where the silence is louder than the event itself, and the static of the real world constantly threatens to break through.
This artifact simulates that haunted broadcast. The clean, empty lines of the Olympic venue represent the hollow signal. The ghost in this machine is the viewer's own attention. As your cursor moves, you are not changing the channel, but revealing the noise that haunts the broadcast. The more you search the empty space, the more the phantom signals of the month's other crises corrupt the feed, revealing the true state of the world outside the stadium.