On Painting’s Digital Ruins

Through a combination of painting and new media, Chris Dorland has carved out space for critical inquiry between analog and digital worlds. By hacking together the painting process with a range of hardware — from scanners to printers to drones — his work imagines the unintended consequences of technological excess in the age of surveillance capitalism. His recent exhibition “Clone Repo (server ruin)” at Nicoletti Contemporary considered the emergent consequences of technical failure through a series of “Interface” paintings, juxtaposed with a central LED monolith whose glitchy looping conjured an image of cloud computing on life support. Backed by an original, elegiac score by Leon Louder, the show amplified the material and psychological burden of our increasingly invisible systems.

With the prospect of machine superintelligence fueling fears for the future of humanity, Dorland asserts the role of art in coming to terms with new technology. In this conversation with Annie Pereira, he discusses the persistence of painting as well as the precarious beauty of the postdigital world.

‍Annie Pereira: In “Clone Repo Server Ruin” your work envisions a landscape of decayed servers and corrupted archives. What inspired you to depict digital infrastructure as a form of environmental ruin?‍

Chris Dorland: I’ve always been drawn to infrastructural decay; JG Ballard was a major early influence. More recently, I’ve started imagining internal narratives around the work; not something I share, but as a way to frame things for myself. 

For this show, I kept thinking about the archive — less as a metaphor but as a physical place. I imagined a kind of Borgesian repository: endless rooms of servers storing everything. Then I asked, what happens when that infrastructure fails, when the servers break down and the data glitches? From there, the show just snapped into place. ‍‍

‍AP: The title of the exhibition evokes notions of replication gone awry and a decomposing digital landscape. In what ways can the aesthetics of technical error confront promises of seamless optimization? ‍

CD: Every dominant system tells its own story. Capitalism, for instance, thrives on the myth of progress — of endless optimization and smooth functionality. These myths inspire, but they also cause immense damage. 

Art can’t necessarily stop the machinery, but it can expose its limits. That’s where the glitch comes in. Technical error becomes a rupture in the smooth interface — a break in the fantasy. My work lives in that break. I think of it as a ruin left behind for future species to interpret. ‍‍

‍AP: The audio soundscape by Leon Louder envelops the visitor in digital crackles and low hums. How did you envisage this sonic component augmenting the experience of the audience?‍

CD: I don’t always use sound in my installations, so when I do, it’s intentional. From the beginning, I knew that Untitled (server ruin) (2025) needed a strong audio presence to shape the experience of the exhibition. Leon and I have been collaborating since we were kids. He’s one of the most gifted musicians I know. Our process is loose and intuitive — we bounce metaphors back and forth, make weird sounds at each other, laugh, and hang up. 

When he sent the final audio, his text said, “It’s like a lake of dead-server sadness. A dead server soundbath.” I knew he had nailed it before I even hit play.

‍AP: As soon as they walk into the gallery, visitors are met with a glowing LED screen playing a continuous loop of glitchy Instagram reels. The sound, heat, and weight of the screen feel monumental. What are you seeking to emphasize about our consumption of media, which feels increasingly dematerialized in the cloud or concealed in the latent space of a deep learning algorithm?‍

CD: It’s a techno-ruin. A leftover. The obelisk from 2001: A Space Odyssey. A physical embodiment of the cloud — the real-world cost of all the invisible systems we rely on. It hums, radiates heat and emits light. It’s heavy. It’s very much there. It’s also a self-portrait. 

My face and body are in the piece, but it’s not just about me — it’s about all of us. These narcissistic, self-documenting humans and our endless image loops. The piece is a monument to that cycle. A grave marker for obsolete tech and inflated egos. ‍

AP: Your studio practice involves custom software that glitches your own imagery. Can you talk us through that process and its conceptual purpose? ‍

CD: I think of myself as a scrapper — a scavenger working with debris. In the studio, I push things around until they fall apart in interesting ways. I’ve built up a whole toolkit of scripts, hacks, and processes, not unlike a mechanic with a busted engine; it doesn’t matter how you get it running, only that it runs. 

The glitch is both method and metaphor. I’m not trying to break the image purely for aesthetics. I’m trying to find something inside the break — a new structure, a new kind of beauty, a new kind of failure. ‍‍

‍AP: Your “Interface” paintings, which utilize metallic pigments, inks, and polymers, create visually dense and abstract compositions that resemble stills from a drone scan of a degraded digital environment. They seem to sit at the intersection of painting and code-based generative art. How does this hybrid aesthetic challenge the purported “clarity” of ubiquitous surveillance?‍

CD: That’s exactly what I was thinking about — how our technologies promise sharpness, clarity, legibility. High-definition everything. But what happens when those systems degrade, when the image stutters, pixellates, or collapses into noise? 

‍Those breakdowns start generating their own strange beauty — new kinds of images, accidental topographies. My paintings try to capture that moment of collapse when the system fails and something more interesting emerges. ‍‍

‍AP: In this show, paint, screen, sound, and moving image combine to create a viewing experience that oscillates between digital and analog experience. Recently, the artist Sara Ludy spoke of “postdigital” painting that is “not about rejecting the digital, but about having moved through it.” Does that statement resonate with you? Do your paintings and digital works serve different roles even while they both seem to express the same postdigital condition? ‍

CD: Absolutely. My work has always tried to merge painting and digital space — to treat them not as opposites but as deeply entangled. I’m not sure it’s about moving through the digital so much as grafting into it. 

‍I’m interested in collapse — when categories blur and binaries fail. I want my work to exist in that collapsed zone. Maybe it’s postdigital, maybe posthuman — but it’s no longer either/or. ‍‍

‍AP: By working so convincingly and compellingly with different media, I’m wondering if you think it is still possible for painters to continue operating within a discrete canon of painting. At a time when painting, photography, and video are regarded indiscriminately as data for the training of AI algorithms, are artists all image-makers in general whether they like it or not?‍

CD: Yes, all artists are image-makers — but painting has its own strange magic. It’s both image and object, and that duality gives it a kind of occult logic. You can’t fully understand a painting through documentation. You need to stand in front of it to absorb it. That’s why painting persists. It’s not nostalgia — it’s alchemy. The world is getting more disembodied, more virtual, more automated, and I think that makes the physical act of looking — really looking — even more necessary.‍‍

‍AP: What role can artists play in revealing and even reorganizing the unseen infrastructures of emerging technology?‍

CD: A crucial role. Artists notice what others overlook. We make unexpected connections. We trace the fault lines. As more of our lives are shaped by hidden systems — algorithms, data centers, predictive models — art becomes one of the few ways to access those black boxes. Not to decode them necessarily, but to reorganize them. To suggest new maps, or at least remind people that maps exist.