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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Chris Dorland is a New York-based artist whose work explores the aesthetics of digital decay, surveillance, and techno-capitalism. Merging painting with glitch aesthetics, video, and AI-generated imagery, Dorland creates fractured, hypersaturated worlds that reflect the contemporary condition of relentless mediation and extraction. Dorland’s first institutional solo exhibition in Europe will open at Museum gegenstandsfreier Kunst, Otterndorf in June 2026, while a monographic publication by Robert Hobbs, Chris Dorland: Future Ruins, will be published by Hirmer Publishers in Spring 2026.
Dorland has exhibited internationally at institutions and galleries including the Queens Museum; the Neuberger Museum of Art; the New Museum; and Lyles & King, New York; FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art; Super Dakota, Brussels; Nicoletti, London; and Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Los Angeles, among others. His work is held in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Bronx Museum of the Arts and the Neuberger Museum. In 2024, Dorland was awarded a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant.
Annie Pereira is an art historian and advisor with experience in both institutional and commercial contexts. She began her career as a researcher at the Wellcome Collection, specializing in archival and conservation practices in the Iconographic collections of the museum, and has since worked in creative consulting and in galleries as a Manager and Associate Director. She spearheaded the global expansion of a Mayfair-based contemporary art gallery, overseeing post-war and contemporary art exhibitions and fairs around the world. She holds a BA in Art History and Material Studies from University College London as well as a Diploma in Music Performance from the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music.