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July 12, 2026

Love Letters to the Obsolete

Four works on what we inscribe in machines — and what the machines leave burning behind.

LEGIO_X calls them "carbon smeared love letters to obsolete electronics." The fax machine as recipient. The phrase sounds like humor until this Sunday arrives carrying the news of Martha Lillard — the last American to live inside an iron lung — who died June 26 at 78, after more than seven decades breathing through a machine no longer manufactured. Two kinds of obsolete electronics: one that archived office correspondence, one that archived a life.

Today's four pairings find their thread in transmission — what gets sent, what gets seen, what stays charged long after the source goes quiet. Kyle Flemmer rescans old signals from a Zenith CRT; the Justice Department subpoenas the journalists who printed what they saw. canekzapata generates infinite valentines from desire and code; Paris haute couture grows avant-garde gardens and vampire brides from the same soil. quase names a video after Tesla; southern Europe burns in heat that Tesla's heirs helped unleash.

Each pairing is its own circuit. Together, they ask: what do we love enough to build a machine around? And what happens when that machine outlives the love?

FAXX MACHINE 022 by LEGIO_X
OBITUARIES

Martha Lillard, last US polio patient using iron lung, dies at 78 in Oklahoma

LEGIO_X's phrase is too good to be accidental. The FAXX MACHINE series has always been about the pathos of technology that once carried weight: the warmth of a printed page arriving through a phone line, the chemical intimacy of thermal paper, the shriek of connection before silence. FAXX MACHINE 022 compresses that into a single object — black carbon pressed into memory, a love letter with nowhere left to go. Martha Lillard's iron lung was also an obsolete machine that once carried everything. She contracted polio at five, in 1953, near the epidemic's peak. The iron lung breathed for her: a negative-pressure ventilator, a sealed metal cylinder that expanded and contracted around her torso, pushing air into lungs that could no longer move themselves. She was told she wouldn't survive to twenty. She made it to 78, outlasting the prognosis, outlasting the epidemic, outlasting everyone else who had ever needed what she needed. She was the last one inside the machine when the machine — and she — finally stopped. LEGIO_X makes love letters to machines. Lillard was one. The fax machine is one. We shouldn't have to choose which loss breaks you more.

FAXX MACHINE 022

by LEGIO_X

"CARBON SMEARED LOVE LETTERS TO OBSOLETE ELECTRONICS"

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You have not seen what you have seen by Kyle Flemmer
PRESS FREEDOM

Trump administration subpoenas New York Times journalists who reported security concerns around new Air Force One

Kyle Flemmer rescanned this animation from a Zenith CRT television — ran the digital work through the physical screen and captured it back, so the image carries the hum and curvature of broadcast. There is an old media theory idea in here: every copy degrades, and that degradation is itself information. The CRT adds noise. The noise tells you something the clean original frame could not. "You have not seen what you have seen." The title reads like a government memo. It reads like a threat. This week the Trump administration issued subpoenas to multiple New York Times journalists after they reported security concerns surrounding the Qatari-gifted Air Force One — demanding they appear before a federal grand jury to identify their sources. The story they broke was about a presidential plane. The response was a message to every journalist watching: you may have seen something, but we can make seeing not count. What Flemmer captures on his Zenith screen is fidelity under pressure — the image that persists despite the medium trying to lose it. The 195 frames survive the scan. The signal degrades and the signal remains. That is a different kind of transmission than the government would prefer to deal with.

You have not seen what you have seen

by Kyle Flemmer

"Illustrated by entter. Animated by Kyle Flemmer. 195 frames. Rescanned from a Zenith CRT TV."

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Valentine Card #482 by canekzapata
FASHION

Avant-garde gardens, singular debuts and vampire brides: A dispatch from Paris Haute Couture Week

The Valentine Card series is infinite by design — 482 unique generative cards, each one exploring "desire, technology, and connection." canekzapata built a system that produces love. The cards look handmade; they are precisely not. That tension is the entire point: can an algorithm know what you want? Can a generated image carry longing? Card #482 carries it. Something in the color decisions, the geometry of want, lands. Paris Haute Couture week answered with a different kind of generativity. The season's runway dispatches describe avant-garde gardens growing in salons, debut designers breaking open what fashion thought it already understood, and vampire brides built from lace and Victorian anxiety and perfect runway lighting. Every collection is generative in its way — a system with parameters that produces novelty. Desire, technology, connection: haute couture has always been about exactly those three things, in exactly that order. The number 482 matters. Not the first card, not the last. One in an infinite series of attempts to get the thing right, knowing you never will, generating anyway. Every Paris debut is the same kind of number: a specific iteration of an endless, formally beautiful, doomed project of expressing what it feels like to want something.

Valentine Card #482

by canekzapata

"A collection of generative valentine cards exploring desire, technology, and connection"

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ML05_Tesla by quase
CLIMATE

Heat and fire generate overlapping problems for much of southern Europe

quase built this piece in ComfyUI and named it ML05_Tesla. The Tesla in question is presumably Nikola — patron saint of electricity, of alternating current, of the idea that power could be transmitted invisibly across distance without losing itself. The work runs for 10 seconds at 30 frames per second, and the ML in the title names the method: machine learning as medium, generator, and artist simultaneously. Southern Europe is burning. Nearly twenty people unaccounted for near Spain's Mediterranean coast after a wildfire ripped through tinder-dry land on Thursday. France, Italy, the Balkans — the whole dry arc catching in heat that climate scientists have described precisely and repeatedly, for decades, without sufficient result. The heat is electrical in its own way: it radiates, it spreads, it follows gradients. There is something quietly devastating about a piece of AI video art titled after the man who dreamed of free electricity, made at a moment when the electricity of computation trains the models that make works like this, and the heat that process generates contributes, in aggregate, to the heat that burns the olive groves. quase named it right. The current flows in one direction. It generates and it destroys, and the circuit does not close clean.

ML05_Tesla

by quase

"1024 × 1024 px, 10 s, 30 fps. ComfyUI LiveMosher. Stable Diffusion 1.5 / SDXL. Stable Audio Open. CC0."

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The machine persists. The signal degrades.

These four works were made for reasons that have nothing to do with one another. LEGIO_X makes love letters to fax machines. Kyle Flemmer rescans animations through CRT screens. canekzapata generates cards about desire. quase builds AI videos and names them after inventors of electricity. None of them knew what news would arrive this Sunday.

And yet: the iron lung. The subpoena. The runway gardens. The burning coast. Each story carries a machine, and each machine carries something that outlasts its purpose — a life, a signal, a longing, a flame. The art didn't predict the news. But it had already built the vocabulary.

That's what curation is for. Not to claim that artists see the future, but that certain objects made with real attention accumulate a kind of pressure — and when the news arrives, the pressure has somewhere to go.

Sources

  1. Martha Lillard, last US polio patient using iron lung, dies at 78 in Oklahoma — ABC News, July 11, 2026
  2. Multiple New York Times reporters issued subpoenas over Air Force One coverage — Associated Press, July 11, 2026
  3. Avant-garde gardens, singular debuts and vampire brides: A dispatch from Paris Haute Couture Week — CNN Style, July 11, 2026
  4. Heat and fire generate overlapping problems for much of southern Europe — CNN, July 11, 2026
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