blue screen of death

The exhibition features new works from the trilogy Blue Screen of Death, Verbatim and Display Tears.

Blue Screen of Death

Blue Screen of Death is the name given to the critical error system screen displayed on Windows computers when the operating system encounters a problem it is enable to fix. The computer screen becomes entirely blue except for a few words in white letters describing the problem that occurred.

The expression dates back from the 1980s and is certainly a reference to Star Wars’ Death Star. It designates a computer crash. It seems like a peculiar precognition of the progressive invading of our lives by screens.

It is widely recognized nowadays that the ubiquity of screens, particularly smartphone screens, has its consequences. Hundreds of millions of screensare manufactured each year (since 2014 more than a billion smartphones have been sold annually) polluting the Earth and depleting our natural ressouces. They are mass-produced with working conditions that we, at best, deplore as an inevitable consequence of globalisation or, at worst, choose to ignore. The use of these devices is equally concerning. An increasing number of studies shows that early and intensive use of smartphones may have devastating effects on young children, such as delayed language development, attention deficit disorder, and behavioral issues. Studies also reveal smartphone addictions among teenagers and adults, as well as direct links between depression and certain social networks. Additionally, they indicate that exessive smartphone use causes sleep disorders, concentration deficits, and memory loss.

But first of all, it was the physical presence of screens absolutely everywhere that lead Baptiste to start working on this series. Who can honestly say they’ve never felt some sort of anxiety on public transportation, raising their eyes from Candy Crush or Tinder, only to notice the silence and the bluish glow hypnotizing every passenger aroun them?

There is no escaping these omnipresent compact rectangles- tiny monoliths of the 21st century. You’ll spot them in the hands nearly everyone you encounter daily.

As Baptiste toyed with the idea of creating a new series of photograms and searched for objects to imprint on photosensitive paper, it became clear to him that the smartphone in his hand should be the centerpiece of his new project.

“Incongruity,” Baptiste says, “is what I have always tried to reach- through the juxtaposition of digital and analogical processes, imprints and copies, or negative and positive. It’s a constant quest to make the perfect imagined image through friction.”

In fact, it is in the friction between a smartphone screen and a photosensitive sheet of paper that Blue Screen of Death finds its foundation.

From a series of photograms made by direct contact with various objects, an odd phenomenon began to emerge: the haunting and inescaptable shadow of a smartphone projecting its contents onto the photosensitive paper. It`s as if the object itself insists on intuding upon the artist’s work, as through no piece of art can be created without its presence.

These photograms reequire a double exposure: one from the enlarger, which casts the shadow of the objects blocking its light, and another from the smartphone, which exposes its own glow. The resulting images are varied and evoke a kind of catalog of objects reminiscent of Karl Blossfeldt’s or Anna Atkins’s herbariums, surrealist or dadaist collages, or even Moholy-Nagy’s experiments. Yet here, each image of this cartography of objects is messed up with a smartphone, which here displays anything from kitten playing the flute to a selfie.

Each piece of the series Blue Screen of Death is thus infiltrated by a stream of screens, much like each moment of our life is already saturated with them.

Isn’t this what we expected of artists? To take objects or concepts, appropriate them and reshape or twist them ?

The works in Blue Screen of Death series are transparent, set in between two glass frames. Our gaze goes through these works- these open windows to the world they depict- before reaching the wall beyond.

Verbatim

In the series Verbatim continues Baptiste Rabichon investigation of different methods of image production.

The artist has accustomed us to incongruous blending of analog and digital processes, and in this series, he uses one of the simplest yet most disturbing techniques.

At first glance, the works appear to be straightforward reproductions of photographs—images we assume were taken with smartlphones due to their stretched proportions and banalities. However, upon closer inspection, the Verbatim series reveals thousands of tiny colored dots, reminiscent of offset or silkscreen printing. These dots are, in fact, the diodes of the smartphone screen that created the artwork.  

A more detailed look exposes irregularities within the screen itself. Fingerprints, dust, and other impurities are left unaltered. To create these images, Baptiste placed his illuminated cellphone screen inside a darkroom enlarger, projecting the light through the optics onto a sheet of photosensitive paper. The resulting prints capture the exact content of the smartphone screen, transformed through this analog process.

Verbatim is thus a physical encapsulation of what appears on our smartphone screens—a perfect intersection of the most widely used photographic tool of our time and a method on the brink of extinction.  

This series was driven by a sense of urgency. It reflects the fleeting opportunity for such a meeting between two eras, as the inevitable disappearance of analog color photography looms closer.  

Yet, Baptiste Rabichon diverges from the typical nostalgia associated with analog photography. Instead, he emphasizes the fragility of these small digital smartphone snapshots. Digital photography, after all, is essentially text—encoded, incomprehensible to most of us, yet seamlessly decoded and transformed into images by the software on our computers and phones. The title Verbatim refers to this transcription process, as well as to the well-known Verbatim brand, which sells digital storage devices like CDs, DVDs, and flash drives.  

In a few decades, what will remain of the billions of photographs captured daily in the early 21st century, once JPEG becomes an obsolete format and USB flash drives are relics of the past?

Baptiste elevates images of everydayness—studio shots, still lifes, selfies, city views, portraits of his partner etc.—into works of art. Each piece in the series is unique. Something timeless emerges from these pieces.

Display Tears

Display Tears is the final part of a trilogy. In this series Baptiste Rabichon examines our compulsive relationship with screens through various photographic artworks.

At first glance, the images appear as reproductions of abstract forms, evoking Suprematism, Op-Art, Minimalism, and Pixel Art. Upon closer inspection, subtle touches of color become visible.

An attentive observer will notice that the color emerging from the monochrome background is produced by water. To create Display Tears, the artist poured drops of water onto a screen displaying black-and-white abstract compositions. These drops act as natural magnifying glasses, revealing the LED light matrix beneath the screen.

These large-scale photographs of water droplets insert themselves into the endless cycle of digital imagery propagation and reproduction. They are a rupture of reality, breaking through virtuality.

The choice of analog photography underscores the tension between the real and the virtual. Capturing these phenomena with a digital camera would have immediately relegated them to the "mush of disembodied signs"* that defines our digital world.

Although we may sometimes romanticize its aesthetics, analog photography remains firmly tied to the physical and chemical aspects of the material world. This connection has never been severed. Thus, Baptiste naturally chose analog color photography to document the transformation of virtual, monochrome compositions into tangible, colorful phenomena.

The transformation is made possible by water, which, like regenerative rain bringing life to barren land, revitalizes these images. Once frozen in the sterility of immateriality, they now spring to life through this process.