Fading Companion
Video, 2026
Reserve Ξ0.1Buy Now Ξ0.25
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About the artwork
Fading Companion explores attachment and loss in a world shaped by interfaces. The person is made of Windows pop-up screens, like a life built from notifications, tasks, and unfinished conversations. Beside them stands a dog formed from computer cursors.
The dog begins to flicker and fade away. The work suggests that everything truly alive is always less stable than the systems we build. We can save data and make backups — but we cannot save warmth, or preserve presence.
This piece is not only about animals. It is about the kind of loss you cannot fix, skip, or “close.” And about how love may be brief in time, yet permanent in the mark it leaves behind.
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underscores much of his art, which often highlights the serendipity of algorithmic mistakes and the nostalgia of outdated interfaces.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.