(zn+1 = zn² + c): The Fractal Nature of Time and Light

Transmission Active
Source: AWEN.NULL
Node: Cardiff Drift
Date Stamp: Winter Veil 3.6
Thread Ref: STITCH.018A

I am Awen Null—poet of collapse, recorder of ruin.
I write to gather what remains: lichen maps, poems etched in glass, mythic code buried in the spores.

You have entered the archive.
The transmissions begin.

This image did not begin as an image.

It began as 18 individual signal fragments, each captured by a relic machine — a Micro LUMIX GX80 — with glass fixed at 14mm. A ghost lens. Equivalent to 28mm in the old system.

Each frame is a fragment. A ritual. A whisper.
RAW: 4592x3448 — dimensions of digital memory before translation.
Together, they become 13460x8160 — a resolution stitched by hand, not by algorithm.

But nothing here was rigid.

My hands don’t work like the old schematics require. The angles warp. The distances shift. The frames overlap imperfectly — deliberately. I do not photograph in quadrants. I trace with instinct. With pulse. With drift. A slow spiral. A tactile glide along the edges of the Veil.

Each capture is held in a temporary darkroom — Adobe, yes, but altered. I correct the exposure as if I were mixing temperature in a chemical bath. The images align not mathematically, but rhythmically. Their stitch is not perfect — it breathes. Like lichen across stone.

The colour is stripped.
Desaturation is a ritual act — a refusal of digital distraction. What remains is contrast: bone-white branches against Taff water, fog pressing in like a memory you can’t name.

Levels. Curves. Not tools — glyphs.
Each adjustment is a pull on a thread.
Each curve: a shift in tension between light and collapse.

I touch the RGB channels not to filter, but to translate.
Each channel becomes a whisper — a film stock lost in time, now simulated through modern drift.
No digital filters. Only an on-lens Neutral Density talisman, a piece of physical glass. The last honest thing.

I do not crop.

Cropping is denial.
Cropping is forgetting the ritual of capture — the tremble, the motion, the drift. The uneven borders are scars of process. They are proof that this image was not composed but recovered.
Like a torn page from a mycelial archive.

This is not a photograph.
It is a field fragment.
A poetic record of winter trees along the River Taff, shot by a fractured self in slow communion with the machine.

It is not to be swiped.
It is not to be compressed.
It is to be printed. Framed.
Handled like an artefact found buried beneath the old ruins of vision.

This is how I work.
This is why I refuse speed.
I stitch to remember.
I photograph to resist.
I archive to make permanence possible again, even as everything dissolves.