«Human.exe»

In 1966 Joseph Weizenbaum, a computer scientist at MIT, wrote a program called ELIZA. It played a psychotherapist and mostly turned your own sentences back into questions. It understood nothing, and Weizenbaum was disturbed by how quickly people treated it as if it did. Today we hand our faces, messages and habits to systems that do the same trick far better, and I started wondering which side of the screen is the program. This glitch portrait painting is my answer, in the form of a file name.

Human.exe is a girl facing you head-on, centre parting, large green-blue eyes. Her face is painted softly, then interrupted. A black bar sits on her forehead above a vertical block of pixels, a small square of static covers her nose, and the lower half of the face slips sideways along a hard horizontal cut. Fine white dots cover the canvas, like a screen seen up close. Behind her, olive green streaks run past a yellow folder icon, purple and blue squares and a small gold-framed portrait. A QR code sits at the bottom, scrambled white text on the right. She wears a white collar.

The dots remind me of Lichtenstein's Ben-Day dots, which he used from 1961 onwards, here turned into the dots of a monitor. Nam June Paik bent television pictures with a magnet in 1965, and in 2010 Rosa Menkman wrote her Glitch Studies Manifesto, arguing that the error is the interesting part. I put that idea on a face. The eyes stay calm while everything around them crashes, and I find that more unsettling than a scream. A glitch portrait painting works best when the face refuses to panic. It is an original pop art painting, and I think it fits art for restaurants and cafés, where people sit long enough to stare back.

This original is still available and ready to ship. Most of my other originals are already in private collections, and I paint new ones to order in any size. To ask about this one, message me on Instagram or by email. There is also a hand-finished lithograph of Human.exe, ordered through Instagram or email.