User_0x0001
Video, 2025
About the artwork
This is not a person — it’s a process.
User_0x0001 exists in a space where inspiration isn’t measured in bursts of insight, but in system freezes. Time stretches between blank canvases like a loading bar that never quite reaches 100%.
He is assembled from cursors, designed to choose — but there’s nothing left to choose from. Inside a system where every error is fatal, he rises to act but crashes — like a program with no restore point. And he breaks — into fragments, into pixels, into cursors.
This work explores creative failure as the digital twin of burnout.
It’s not the end — it’s a revelation.
Sometimes, to create something, you have to break first.
And allow yourself not to be available for "undo."
Sound design
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underscores much of his art, which often highlights the serendipity of algorithmic mistakes and the nostalgia of outdated interfaces.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.