of death

Intentionally obfuscating the language we use to discuss our existential dread with the termination of the operating system, “of death” playfully flips through still frames of the Macintosh or Windows loading icon, which remind us of an impending crash, termination, death. The book further questions and undermines the moving image by transferring each frame to a still image that must be flipped, and to a three-color risograph layout that is slowly reassembled into the short flip-book format. Lastly, the book pulls its title from the widely used digital terminology rising from the “beach ball of death” or the “spinning wheel of death” (SWOD). The books, as sculptural objects, ask us to reflect on our relationship with digital technologies and the way in which these abstractions in the operating system may reterritorialize language, effectively shifting our most fundamental ideas about human experience.