Spectrum

A broken LCD panel, screen blacked out except for vertical bands of coloured light, frozen mid-collapse. I framed the shot in total darkness, using a tripod, low ISO, and long exposure to extract every nuance of the emitted RGB shards.

The left stack is dominant—dense, pulsing, lines tightly packed, terminating in a soft arc of failure. The right set echoes it with less mass, more space between columns. Between them, void. The black isn’t absence—it’s the backdrop of digital death. This isn’t a glitch aesthetic. It’s material damage, turned into colour structure.

Technically, I shot at ISO 100, f/5.6, 2.5 seconds. Manual focus. White balance locked to daylight to prevent the camera from neutralising the chromatic split. No post-processing beyond mild shadow lift. The effect is native to the hardware—signal routed to nowhere, pixels frozen into pure spectrum.

Composition follows tension, not symmetry. Two poles of colour, one dominant, one echo. Nothing centred. The arcs and lines build tension without narrative. This isn’t data loss. It’s hardware revealing its anatomy, briefly.

The image records what happens when display logic fails and the system reveals its wiring. Not metaphor, not abstraction. Just light escaping the frame.