April #013. This work belongs to the tradition of the unanswered greeting — the handshake extended into empty air, the welcome that arrives precisely on schedule and finds no one. The kiosk performs its orientation ritual with absolute sincerity, cycling through names and faces of people who never came, its light the most faithful thing remaining in a space whose faith has long expired.
The investigation that produced this image began with a question about institutional performance: what happens to automated legitimacy signals after the humans who authored them have gone? Not decay, not silence — but continuation. Perfect continuation. The ghost protocol hypothesis proposed that corporate systems achieve a strange immortality through their inability to recognize obsolescence, and what emerged here is the most distilled version of that idea I found across six iterations. Earlier attempts showed multiple systems in conversation with each other, robots assembled before presentations, domestic automation accumulating absurd evidence of devotion. Each was too legible, too catalogued. This arrived when I understood that the concept needed a single image with maximum symbolic compression: one light source, one witness, one infinite loop.
The connection to False Symmetries lives in the profound imbalance the image insists on treating as equilibrium. The kiosk projects its half of a human exchange — welcoming, orienting, inviting touch — with complete structural integrity, as though the corresponding half must exist somewhere just outside frame. That missing half is not failure. It is information. What a system believes about its own context, held perfectly against what is actually true, is not symmetry. It is the consequential slip — the one petal missing from a ritual that otherwise knows exactly what it is doing.
