‍

Dead Pixel is your first painting made with your own hand and marks a major departure from your digital work. Can you tell us about your journey to creating a physical painting, and what inspired this shift?

My answer might be a little long winded. The short version is it's an intuitive move. But it's a reaction to art that came before me, connected by artists that had an impact on me. If I think back 10 years, I think of Artie Vierkant's The Image Object Post-Internet. Going back further, I'm interested in what Wade Guyton was doing with inkjet printers—the mistakes the Epson inkjet would make on his ostensibly black paintings, the interventions to the machine. He wasn't precious about it. I liked that about his process. Then I look at what Christopher Wool did with his pattern paintings—the wallpaper rollers, the repeating and tiled patterns, those monochrome paintings and their materiality.But we live in a different world now. Maybe I'm romantic about the past in some ways. Maybe I'm curious about painting and how it fits into our accelerating and chaotic timeline. Maybe both. But things have changed. And sometimes it feels like a lot. So this process felt like a way for me to slow down and feel something tangible again. Hold my work in my hands after being purely digital for so long. Rematerialize.With crypto, we have digital immutable objects now. Fully on-chain art takes this a step further. It feels more substantive and permanent in a way I've never experienced. It feels solid. Permanent in a new way. Take Bitcoin, for example. That network isn't going anywhere. I wonder if it'll outlast the concrete of these old buildings around me. But that's the point. With the blockchain, data can have traceable provenance now. It's a different mental model, marking a turning point away from the post-internet mindset. I can't just print off an inscription or an NFT. I mean you can, but in this mental model, that print is something else now. It's a new object. It's a separate thing. So that's where my exploration into that distinction started.

I dug into that difference last year for my collection, public//private. Those pieces were screen prints on 2ft metal panels with a hidden private key on each. To get the private key, you scratched away the screen print—like a scratch card. Each private key gave access to a wallet holding the on-chain version of the artwork. I partnered with a production company to produce those.But with Dead Pixel, I wanted control of the production process. I also wanted to add to the conversation around digital art and painting. I found that opportunity in 3D printing. But I used it as an intermediary step, not the final outcome. So I still had to let go of some control.

‍

The title Dead Pixel suggests themes of digital decay and imperfection, which resonate with much of your previous work. How does this title reflect the piece’s transition from digital to physical form?

With the emergence of AR, VR and projection mapping—traditional screens feel like an impenetrable barrier. I feel I have to embrace the physical screen and its properties when making art, or else the experience feels detached, like there's something between me and the work. It feels dead. The title is an acknowledgment of that idea. I use low-res imagery to focus on the fundamental building blocks of the screen: the pixel, the red, green, blue subpixels. The 1-bit aesthetic is thinking about light. Hexadecimal color codes. #FFFFFF. White. Lights on. #000000. Pure black. Lights out.But with a dead pixel, that's something that can't be replicated by changing hexadecimal color codes on a functioning LED display. It's a lack of lights on or off. It's broken. It's an error. It's a void. It's nothingness. It's taking a look at the worm meat. The name is about the screen as a physical object. The art is named after something between the signal and its physical manifestation.

‍

You used a 3D-printed tile and block-style printing technique for this piece. Why did you choose these methods?

The great thing about consumer grade 3d printers is that, despite their precision, they do have their limits. The printable area is quite small so you’re forced to work modularly and they actually produce a lot of flaws if you’re not careful. So I really wanted to leverage those mechanical inaccuracies in the digital to physical transcription process. Settings like nozzle size, printer bed and filament temperatures as well as model fill percentages all created various imperfections and defects. I had to print 16 plastic PLA tiles for Dead Pixel. The tiles were like retro printing blocks made from PLA filament. Once I had the grid of tiles laid out, I applied acrylic paint by hand and pressed the canvas overtop and rolled a PVC pipe back and forth with the weight of my foot. The results were messy and gave a human quality to the final painting that I wouldn’t have been able to achieve without that mechanical intermediary step. The physical painting took on a whole different set of details and qualities. It’s interesting because any documentation or photographs inevitably compress that detail, and then it gets compressed again during the upload process to whatever platform to be shared and lost into the timeline.

‍

‍

Your work often explores themes of digital permanence and erasure. How does Dead Pixel engage with these ideas, especially now that it exists as a physical object?

I wanted to highlight the transient qualities of both digital and physical mediums. The large blue, red, and green squares reference the RGB subpixels of LED screens. Material aspects of digital displays. Screens inevitably degrade over time and are often replaced without much consideration. A ‘newer is better’ mindset means that certain aesthetic and technical qualities get lost as tech advances. The constant search for progress can sometimes conflict with what the art may need to effectively engage with our current context. Or maybe it’s about recontextualization. That’s up for debate.

And on the other hand, a physical object will inevitably face wear and decay in its own way. In contrast, the digital component—the ordinal inscription—would persist as data, unchanged, on the immutable Bitcoin blockchain. But the means to access and view that data will evolve. Dead Pixel explores both digital and physical impermanence, showing that both forms are subject to change and deterioration—whether internally or externally imposed over time.

‍

In Dead Pixel, you bridge digital art with a tactile, almost ancient technique. How do you see this interplay between the modern and traditional in the final piece?

I’m not sure if it’s a recent phenomenon, my own interests and biases but it feels like technology has narrowed in definition on the surface these days. At least the superficial, common definition of the word in my everyday use. When I think of technology, I immediately think of the next smartphone, laptop, VR headset, electric car. I think of computers and their peripherals, software, Bitcoin, and crypto. I don’t immediately think of breakthroughs in biology, chemistry, or physics even though they happen all the time. I don’t think of advances in material science that brought us acrylic paints and vibrant neon colors so we don’t all have to rely on thousands of crushed murex snails for tyrian purple pigment. Block printing is a technology. The filaments I use in my 3D printer are a technology. Canvas is a technology. It’s a tech stack all the way down. As we accelerate in computation, it’s easy to forget that. But the acceleration has had its benefits. It’s easier artistically to reorder, revisit, and repurpose combinations of the stack—now more than ever. The dematerialization, mechanization and rematerialization of the artist studio has made it cheaper and more accessible to take risks with tools that would have cost an order of magnitude greater even a decade ago. I can almost afford to break a $1000 3D printer. It would really hurt a lot more if the printer cost 10x and becomes totally prohibitive at 100x. But at the current price point, I don’t have to be as precious. I can experiment, and those experiments led me down an interesting path.

‍

‍

Does working with physical materials—3D-printed tiles, canvas, and block techniques—introduce a new sense of imperfection or unpredictability that you can’t achieve digitally?

Absolutely. It’s an entropy, right? Like if I start a 3d-print and the first layer doesn’t adhere properly because there’s a draft in the room or I didn’t use enough glue stick or something, that imperfection carries forward. There’s also something to be said about using mechanized equipment that is considered a ‘dumb’ machine by today’s standards. But at the tailend of dumb. We are about to have AI assist in everything. While my printer may have features like self leveling and stuff like that, it still lacks AI integration. It’s not making decisions and self correcting for my human errors on the fly. Making art with a dumb machine like that feels like it’s reached its swan song in some ways, for better or worse.

‍

As Dead Pixel is featured in Christie’s Post-War & Contemporary Art Day Sale, how does it feel to debut your first physical piece in this setting, and how do you hope collectors will engage with it?

I feel incredibly privileged to have Dead Pixel showcased amongst pieces of art created by artists I’ve looked up to for the better part of my life. Dead Pixel is a step away from the purely digital that I’ve known and hopefully opens a dialogue amongst familiar and new audiences. I hope collectors can see past the novelty and connect with it on a deeper level, whether they experience it in person or view it online through a screen at home.