Description
A city built out of dead broadcast. Every surface is a screen, every screen is looking for a signal that stopped transmitting long ago, and the whole thing is rendered one pixel at a time by a software rasteriser — no WebGL, no engine, no textures loaded from anywhere.
Built On Teletext Infinity
The teletext screens in this work are not imitations. They run the actual Teletext Infinity engine, with its layout system, typography and page generation intact — four of its iterations, captured and fixed so each corner holds a different one permanently while its animation continues to play.
Mint your own Teletext Infinity: https://bootloader.art/generator/generic-web/90
The Anatomy
At the centre lies a NO SIGNAL test card — a vast circular pattern of colour bars, greyscale wedge, crosshair and a blinking caption box. Its castellated outer ring turns slowly clockwise while a finer band beneath counter-rotates, two mechanical layers grinding against a frozen image.
Four teletext screens occupy the corners, each running a different page layout with its own banner: TELEFANTASY, NEXTVIEW, ASTRAL INDEX, NIGHTFEED. They are live — background glyph fields drift, shaders churn, indicators blink. Inside each one, in the empty box beneath the SUBJECT label, an animated asset plays through a chromatic separation filter, three colour-shifted copies lightening over one another.
Three giant lattice towers rise from the centre in an Eiffel taper, ringed by eight smaller radio towers in fourfold symmetry. They are wired together: trunk lines to the hubs, an octagonal ring between them, and patchbay-style cables running from each tower to the edge of a teletext screen. Current travels visibly along every wire, cycling through the broadcast palette as it goes.
A perimeter of electricity pylons frames the entire composition. The city ends where they stand.
Between them: grey panel ground with glowing grid seams, roads with neon kerbs and traffic, and buildings whose bodies are grey and whose rooftops carry broadcast colour. Scattered through it all are analog video devices built at architectural scale — CRT televisions, cassette decks, video recorders, tapes with turning reels, cameras with concentric lenses, microphones with mesh grilles. Each is designed to be read from directly above, its identity carried entirely in the top face.
The screens themselves run a taxonomy of failure: rolling colour bars, vertical hold collapse, macroblock glitch, and six distinct grades of noise — fine snow, coarse blocks, horizontal tearing, RGB channel separation, banded interference, salt-and-pepper. Beyond the pylon frame, in the outer ring, sit the text screens: channel listings, UHF and VHF tuning readouts, page numbers, index tables. You only find them by moving the camera out past the boundary.
The Sound
The audio is generated entirely in the browser. No files, no samples, no frequency analysis. The clock runs on the audio thread, so tempo never drifts when the frame rate does.
Underneath everything sits a slow drone — four detuned oscillators breathing through a filter that opens and closes across a forty-second cycle.
On top of that, the city is audible by proximity. Approach a teletext screen and data chirps rise, sweeping upward like a page loading. The centre test card carries the classic one-kilohertz tone. Noise panels hiss, and their filter opens as you close in. Power lines hum at mains frequency. Nodes travelling along cables click out computation. Towers carry a low carrier drone; devices turn over with motor noise. Every voice is panned to where its object actually stands.
Distance is a filter. From above, the city is muffled and drowned in reverb — the master cutoff sits at 430 Hz. Descend into it and everything opens to 8 kHz as the reverb dries out and the low end arrives.
Seven voice types would be mud if they all played at once, so only the five strongest are heard; the rest fade rather than cut, swapping in and out silently as you move.
Camera and Interaction
The piece opens on a slow descent that stops at a chosen framing and keeps orbiting from there — it never dives to the floor and never stops moving. Left alone, it is a continuous shot.
Take over at any time:
Drag to rotate and travel across the city
Wheel to descend into the streets or pull back to a full plan view
S to toggle sound