Blue Screen of Breath, 2020

A stop error, commonly called the blue screen of death, blue screen, or BSoD, is an error screen displayed on a Windows computer system following a fatal system error. The sight of a blue screen incites an existential panic, an entire digital memory lost. Waves of grief hit you as you think of your lost device. The passivity of interconnected systems is disrupted by the fatal image of error. Broadcasting a breakdown of public infrastructure.

Blue Screen of Breath is a collaborative one night performance by Yoke Collective and Rubie. Fluidly mashing up the blue screen of death with breathing exercises used in meditation or by singers warming up, the show is a surreal and bewildering encounter with an elusive cryptid. White text on blue spills out into space and sound, becoming enveloping.

In preparation for the show, the artists have begun learning to use graphical programming environments Isadora and Max, and “algorave” Haskell library TidalCycles, to develop software playgrounds for the collection, manipulation, regurgitation and loss of sound and image data. The texts fed into this cyclic system have been sampled from system crash screens and online screams into the void, extrapolated and rendered uncanny by machine learning algorithms. – Taken from the press release for the LUVA exhibition.

Blue Screen of Breath was performed at LUVA Gallery in January 2020.

  • Emily stands in white clothing looking at a laptop screen in front of a blue background. Emily holds a selfie stick in the air.
  • Blue computer screens and tvs are hung on a metal railing. Behind stands Georgina dressed in white looking away laptop in a blue painted garage.
  • Blue computer screens and tvs are hung on a metal railing. Behind the screens is a blue painted garage. Cables cover the floor.
  • Computer screens and tvs are hung on a metal railing. Behind are the three performers stood dressed in white looking at laptops in a blue painted garage. Cables and papers cover the floor.
  • Blue computer screens and tvs are hung on a metal railing. Behind are the three performers stood dressed in white looking at laptops in a blue painted garage. Cables cover the floor.
  • Georgina and Rubie stand dressed in white in a blue room. They each hold a laptop open like a book below their faces.
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