The Place Where It's Buried — 2025
LED matrix panels and steel plates collapsing poetry into code. A meditation on digital decay, bed rot, and the quiet erosion of self beneath luminous grids.
The installation functions as both sculpture and computational poem. Born from manic bed rot, each fragment of language is hidden, obfuscated, and revealed only when the software chooses to align its panels. Viewers encounter a restless surface that slowly glitches into legibility, echoing BitRot’s meditation on data decay and the erosion of the digital self.
The piece was conceived with the launch for the Phreaking collective—a stage to explore how poetic systems and hardware can co-author a narrative. The show title anchors the work, bit rot, bed rot a poem drawn from depth of both, interfaced with a bed of cold steel.
Eight Adafruit microcontrollers feed a 42×64×2 pitch LED matrix array, each panel running a different slice of the poem. Everything routes through a Mac mini running Amalgo.py, a custom matrix control suite I have been building across multiple panel projects. The software’s GUI, serial mapping, and timeline sequencing allow the installation to breathe—shifting from calm pulses to intense cascades.
Amalgo.py was also used to painstakingly align the panels so that, when summoned, they can briefly resolve into a cohesive image. Then they fracture again, returning to static, drifting text, and the sense that the poem might never be fully recovered.