One sea surface quantized into three horizontal bands, each at a different pixel resolution, with the same tilted slab stamped once into each band like a tile repeated by a corrupted tilemap. Around each slab, dense rows of tiny gold-edged square marks hold maximum resolution while everything else breaks into sorted streaks and checkerboard foam. In 48 hours, three ferries went down in three countries: a fire in the Philippines, a disappearance in the Java Sea, a sinking off Vanuatu.

Three separate waters, one repeated failure, so I built the frame as a tilemap: the same hull form stamped three times at three scales, because the system that produced these disasters is running the same tile. The passengers are the only thing I refused to degrade. They stay crisp, edged in warm gold, arranged in even rows like a manifest, and the rows are what the eye lands on before it registers that the band under them is dissolving into sorted pixels. These are people with no other way to travel, indexed as counts before they were named. The saturation is deliberate. Crisis reads in the palette before it reads in the shapes. A stuck column of duplicate pixels runs down the right side, one buffer repeating itself, which is the closest I could get to 48 hours of news refreshing with the same story.