Immortal
Video, 2025
About the artwork
This isn’t a cemetery. It’s a backup.
A landscape where tombstones are replaced by old monitors. Everything seems frozen. The screen is blue, the system has crashed. But then — a cursor emerges from the ground. Then a hand. Then — a body.
Immortal reflects on digital immortality as a paradox: everything is preserved, and yet everything becomes obsolete.
We can remain inside the system — in folders, logs, archives. But that doesn’t mean we’re alive.
This work is about the attempt to come back to life inside a crash. To break through the interface.
To become a body in a landscape that’s long been in read-only mode — where everything is stored, but nothing breathes.
And yet — someone rises. Someone makes it out.
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underscores much of his art, which often highlights the serendipity of algorithmic mistakes and the nostalgia of outdated interfaces.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.