Project VIGIL

"Could cure. Could destroy. Could change everything." That's how modern news talks about anything uncertain. Headlines built on speculation, not fact. Alerts designed to trigger anxiety before anything has actually happened. The reader supplies the anxiety. The headline takes the credit. VIGIL is a conceptual art piece that critiques that system using its own tools: the headline, the push notification, the "breaking" alert. But VIGIL inverts them. Most of its notifications exist to tell you nothing has changed. Only one, ever, tells you something has. Like most art, VIGIL observes a single event from the public discourse. What it reports is deliberately bare, a Rorschach test built from a headline instead of ink. You decide what it means. Should the event occur, VIGIL confirms, archives and a new observation period begins. What VIGIL does: • Observes one undisclosed event, every 15…