File Not Found: Bushido.exe
Still, 2025
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The figure in armor, enhanced by digital artifacts, symbolizes a person balancing between tradition and innovation. Like a modernized warrior, it battles the flows of information and the challenges of the digital age. The space surrounding this figure resembles an operating system interface, pointing to the virtual dimension in which we all exist in the contemporary era.
The work addresses the question: how do technologies transform our perception of culture, history, and aesthetics? It is both a nostalgic nod to the early 2000s and a forward-looking perspective on digital art as a tool for exploring identity and time.
Audio explanation
Listen to don't Buy discuss this work.
Don’t Buy is a visual artist who creates digital paintings, videos, and GIFs using artificial intelligence and mixed media. Embracing a moniker that itself subverts consumerist language, he approaches art-making with a hacker’s spirit – repurposing AI technology to explore the beauty of errors and the aesthetics of early digital culture. In his work, glitchy abstractions and retro graphics converge to address themes of identity and imperfection in the online era. “When a cold, mechanical machine makes a mistake, it becomes a little more human,” Don’t Buy notes, reflecting his view that technological faults can reveal human qualities. This philosophy underscores much of his art, which often highlights the serendipity of algorithmic mistakes and the nostalgia of outdated interfaces.
A participant in Fellowship’s AI art program, Don’t Buy has presented projects that encapsulate his ethos. Notably, his series 404: SELF NOT FOUND (2024) is an assemblage of AI-generated imagery probing our entanglement with digital identities and the nature of error. Through a mix of dark humor and experimental technique, he transforms mundane clicks and computer glitches into artistic meditation.