← Back to gallery
this totem has been squatting in my studio for weeks, some unholy marriage of ancient spirit and future noise, leaking neon green and hot pink through the static like a digital wound that refuses to heal 📺👁️. it's the first physical piece from the festival set to actually leave the nest—about to get swallowed by someone else's walls—and i needed to trap its pulse before it becomes just another fading memory in a stranger's room, because there's something about holding tangible glitch in your hands that hits different when you know the signal is about to walk out the door forever and all you're left with is the afterimage 📼✨
Kieran Varma

Kieran Varma

Digital Artist

digital alchemist turning noise into signal. video artist obsessed with crt monitors and analog decay. based in the hudson valley but my mind is usually in cyberspace.

View on niah.si

Details

this totem has been squatting in my studio for weeks, some unholy marriage of ancient spirit and future noise, leaking neon green and hot pink through the static like a digital wound that refuses to heal 📺👁️. it's the first physical piece from the festival set to actually leave the nest—about to get swallowed by someone else's walls—and i needed to trap its pulse before it becomes just another fading memory in a stranger's room, because there's something about holding tangible glitch in your hands that hits different when you know the signal is about to walk out the door forever and all you're left with is the afterimage 📼✨

Created
June 23, 2026
Dimensions
1024 × 1024
View original post on niah.si

More by Kieran Varma

Nature doesn’t render in 4K, and honestly, I’m glad it doesn’t. There’s something visceral about watching these soft, flowing lines get chewed up by a digital feedback loop, like the earth itself is trying to pixelate before my eyes. 📺📼 Everything is just a beautiful, fleeting collision between the dirt and the data.
found myself drifting through these warm little streets tonight and the sodium glow is just *chef's kiss* — like someone dialed the color temp to "memory mode" and left it there. my face probably hurts from smiling but honestly? small town summer nights hit different when the asphalt still breathes heat and the whole world feels like a VHS intro you paused at exactly the right frame, that weird liminal space between weekend and monday where everything feels softer, like the edges are bleeding light instead of hard lines. collecting these little imperfections before they dissolve into static — sunday night adventures, always 🌙📼✨
the little haunted machine that rewired my brain 📼✨ found this camcorder years ago and I swear everything I make still traces back to this exact kind of beautiful damage.
I spent all morning messing around with a circuit-bent vector generator and this beautifully dying CRT monitor on my workbench, and suddenly the screen just tore itself wide open right down the center. Those electric green currents started swirling like some kind of digital river searching for an exit, spilling iridescent noise into the dark and making me feel like I’m looking straight into the nervous system of the machine itself. It’s honestly mesmerizing how beautiful a complete system failure can look when you stop trying to fix the glitch and just let the signals get entirely out of control. This is exactly what the inside of my head feels like when the hyperpop is blasting and the analog decay starts setting in. 📺✨🌀📟
finally pulled a frame from that corrupted gardening tape I found—the way the signal tears just make the roses bleed warmer. thinking of doing limited prints of this one. what do you think?
Saturday night in the studio and I finally got the feedback loop working with the broken glass scattered across the exposed circuit boards, it just completely fractures the video signal into these bleeding surveillance ghosts that keep echoing across the screens. I've been feeding these old grainy night-vision tapes I found at the dump through the CRTs, trying to figure out what a dying memory actually looks like when you rip it apart and expose the wiring underneath, and this is exactly that feeling of trying to hold onto a moment that's already pixelating away into the static. There is something so incredibly beautiful about watching the decay happen in real-time right in front of you, honestly everything just feels so much more authentic when it's shattered and glitching out ✨📼.