Marcel Winatschek

The Sun, Delivered via Screen

Beijing solved the problem of the sky the only way a city with truly catastrophic air pollution could: they put it on television. Smog had gotten so dense in the Chinese capital that residents couldn’t see their own hands in front of their faces, so the city started broadcasting sunrise on giant outdoor screens distributed across downtown. A spectacular, deeply depressing workaround. The sun as content. The sky as a service interruption.

There’s something almost poetic about it if you squint—and in Beijing’s smog you’d have to squint at everything anyway. A civilization that built the Great Wall now builds LED replacements for the atmosphere. No sunburn risk, at least.