🔴 Series 404 -- Do we perceive the border?

                                                 system error captured on canvas.01001000

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404: human not found.

Series 404 begins with a simple gesture — integrating real, discarded electronic components directly into the fabric of the painting. Circuit boards, motherboards, chips, capacitors: fragments of technology that has become obsolete, discarded, forgotten.

These are not ornaments. They are remnants of memory.

Every electronic object once carried a life — messages exchanged, photos stored, hours of work or play. When it dies, that memory doesn't vanish — it freezes. Series 404 gathers this frozen memory and reintegrates it into a pictorial space, where it continues to exist in another form.

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A language to decode.

Every canvas in Series 404 carries a recurring symbolic language, a hidden grammar for those who take the time to look:

• The invariant mention "error 404," present on every piece

• Coded references, woven into the composition

• Literary and cultural nods, never made explicit

• A binary language, decipherable for those who search

 

🔴 Nothing is explained outright. Each canvas reads as a riddle as much as it is seen as an image.🔴

 

What sets Series 404 apart

Other artists work with discarded electronics — through sculpture, through assemblage. Series 404 makes a different choice: painting remains the central medium. The electronics aren't displayed — they're encoded, absorbed into the pictorial composition, treated the same as a brushstroke or a touch of color.

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La Collecte🟢 — a participatory protocol 🟢

La Collecte invites the public to donate a broken or discarded electronic device, along with a personal story — how it was used, how it met its end, what it meant.

That component is then integrated into a canvas. The donor's story becomes, in turn, an encoded element within the finished work — invisible to those who don't know it, essential to those who lived it.

Want to take part in La Collecte? Or send an email to denbky1@gmail.com

Go further  [View the works of Series 404]

 

 

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