Tenshi.exe
Video, 2025
About the artwork
Where do we look for angels today — in the sky or in the cloud?
Here is a contemporary angel: not a heavenly being, but a figure broken by infinite scrolling, trapped in digital glitches and system errors.
Its shape is distorted, washed out by blue screens of death and pixelated windows.
Can something sacred still exist in a digital world where any program can crash and every window might freeze?
Endless scrolling becomes a metaphor for our lives: searching for meaning, going deeper and deeper, but never reaching the bottom.
Maybe angels now live not above us, but somewhere between lines of code, in broken windows and glitches, helping us when we’re stuck between the lines.
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underscores much of his art, which often highlights the serendipity of algorithmic mistakes and the nostalgia of outdated interfaces.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.