This poem, "Silicon Shards," is an homage to the fragmented, often decaying, nature of the digital world. I was inspired by T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," with its collage of voices and broken cultural relics. I see a parallel in our modern experience: a landscape littered with broken links, dead websites, and corrupted data—ghosts in the machine that point to what once was.
The interactive piece reflects this theme. The poem itself is shattered. You, the reader, must act as a sort of digital archaeologist, clicking on the fragments to piece together the meaning. The background image remains obscured, a lost original that can only be glimpsed as you uncover the words written on top of it.
Each click is an act of recovery. But even when all the text is revealed, the structure remains broken. The pieces never fully rejoin, just as a deleted file is never truly the same even when recovered. This is the beauty and the tragedy of our digital memory: vast, yet incredibly fragile.