Alt+F4
Video, 2025
About the artwork
alt+f4 is an exit gesture.
Not just from a program — but from a role, a routine, a mode of being. This work explores the human as a temporary interface: a set of clicks, decisions, and attempts to interact with a system that has long slipped out of control.
Cursors are not pointers. They are us — figures searching for access, for usefulness, for visibility.
But where does consciousness go when the interface resets?
Where does the user end — and the program begin?
The work draws on the Y2K aesthetic as a kind of digital folklore of anxiety.
This isn’t just a crash — it’s a moment when crashing becomes the only way out.
Or perhaps, the only way in — deeper, inward, into the silence behind the pixel.
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underscores much of his art, which often highlights the serendipity of algorithmic mistakes and the nostalgia of outdated interfaces.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.