Blue Screen of Death was created for a group show in January 2020. We wanted to involve ourselves in digital reproduction processes as unreliable narrators, exploring the relationship between humans, art-making, and artificial intelligence. AI-generated art was of interest to all of us, and this was before it really even hit adolescence. This show was born from conversations about our mutual uncertainty on the merits of AI and general nervousness around robots making art for us. By implicating my fallible hand in the production of the halftone pattern, I hoped to necessitate my human labor in art making.

Two months later, the images took on a completely different life. Covid-19 re-cast the hand-painted halftone in Blue Screen of Death, from a human gesture, futilely translating the digital to the analog, into a meditation on the passage of time, mortality, and loneliness. The confines of the screen flip from a limitation of the vantage point, the computer, to a limitation of our view from the inside out. A psychic work.

Blue Screen of Death was shown at the group show “OK, Computer”, in January 2020.