“Aesthetics Of Decay, Design for Dying Electronics”_Immersive Cinematic Experience

“Aesthetics Of Decay, Design for Dying Electronics”_ a 14-year exploration of the fragile beauty and inevitable demise of consumer electronics.

***—LINK TO FULL PITCHDECK / THANK YOU FOR ALL THE WAYS YOU HELP SUPPORT THIS PROJECT—***

OVERVIEW

Aesthetics of Decay: Design for Dying Electronics is an emotionally charged, technologically pioneering cinematic experience that explores the intersections of memory, loss, and our entangled relationship with machines.
This immersive film blends real-life footage, AI-assisted datascape flythroughs, intimate family voices, video sculpture, and decaying technologies into a visually arresting meditation on impermanence—and the ghosts that flicker within our screens.

Developed over 14+ years by [dNASAb], Aesthetics of Decay merges personal archive with collective experience, charting a poetic journey through the ways our devices preserve and distort memory. These machines become not just tools, but digital altars—repositories of grief, identity, and unresolved echoes of the past.

“A cinematic requiem for our dying
devices—and the memories they refuse
to release.”

 

CONCEPT

It began with a glitch. The artist’s mother had just passed when the family television froze on a ghostly image — a distorted reflection that eerily resembled her. His younger sister pointed and said:

“Look… there’s Mom.”

That uncanny moment—technological and spiritual—became the genesis of this cinematic exploration.
As time passed, the artist found himself losing her again and again across the slow erosion of digital memory: corrupted files, obsolete formats, broken phones, and vanishing cloud accounts. Devices once thought of as vessels for memory became fragile, fallible, and ultimately entropic.
Each failing screen became a shrine. Each update, a quiet erasure. Each device, a monument to impermanence.

“Every device that fails,
little bits and pieces of her are lost:
painfully, pixel by pixel”
[dNASAb].

This immersive film is born from that grief — a contemporary conundrum told through cinematic language, AI datascapes, video sculpture, and experimental storytelling. To help carry the narrative, I’ve digitally reanimated my mother and myself—at multiple ages—using AI-generated avatars. These rendered pixel souls drift through the datascape as ghostly actors of memory, grief, and love across technological time.

 

 

ABOUT THE WORK

Since 2010, Aesthetics of Decay has evolved into a multi-channel, interdisciplinary meditation on digital entropy, grief, and the fragile bond between memory and machine.

What began as a single emotional impulse—preserving a fleeting moment of connection with the artist’s late mother—has expanded into an ongoing body of work that spans video sculpture, installation, photography, traditional film techniques, and immersive AI-assisted cinema.

The project explores how we store loss in our devices, and how technology decays in parallel with our own emotional erosion. Developed across continents, formats, and technologies, the work exists as both archive and disappearance—a ritual of remembering in an era of constant obsolescence.

Selected Exhibitions & Screenings
Wallplay Gallery — Pixel Ooze, LES, Orchard Street,NYC
CYBERFEST 2013 — “Ästhetik des Verfalls; Design for Sterben
Electronics”16-Channel Site-Specific Installation, The WYE, Berlin, Germany
Lesley Heller Gallery — Sculptural Installation, NYC
Mykonos Biennale — Crisis + Paganism, Greece
Irvine Contemporary — Dataklysmos, Washington D.C.
Music Is Art Festival — Multi-Screen Installation, Buffalo, NY

 

THEMATIC THREADS

Death as a Digital Process — Fragmented grief across formats.

Technology as a Flawed Vessel for Memory — Fragile machines, fragile memory.

Glitch as Haunting — Ghosts in corrupted data.

Mourning in Code, Format, and Signal Loss — Grief encoded in decay.

Digital Reanimation as Memory Ritual — AI-generated avatars of the artist and his mother.

Legacy and Media as Spiritual Containers — Devices as reliquaries.

Real Stories, Recomposed in Artificial Vision — Memory re-imagined through AI.

Emotional Reconstruction through Machine Vision — Grieving in a post-human age.

A 21st-Century Archive of How We Remember — Survival through digital storytelling.

 

TECHNICAL DETAILS

Medium: Immersive, multi-channel, hybrid XR cinematic experience;
adaptable to Domes, VR, Site-specific, and Spatial platforms.

Length: Modular, expandable, feature-length experience tailored to curatorial needs.

Audio: 360° spatial sound layered with glitches, ancestral echoes, and ceremonial chants.

Live Performance Layer: Sound Healing Orchestra led by Jared Bistrong with world-class percussionists.

Visuals: Original cinematography, video art, archival decay, generative cinematic AI

Narration: AI-generated avatars of the artist and his mother, reanimated Actors, “pixel souls”

Exhibition Compatibility: Domes, Spheres, Museums, Planetariums, Festivals and Immersive Art galleries

Phygital Integration: Media sculptures activated with AR—bridging physical and digital realms.

 

 

WHY THIS PROJECT MATTERS

In a hyper-digitized world, we are conditioned to swipe past grief. Compress it. Archive it. Delete it.

This film refuses that erasure.

It honors the complicated painful reality of loss—and interrogates the machines we now entrust with our memories. What happens when those machines forget?

This is not nostalgia. It is a techno-spiritual elegy. It speaks to Everyone who:

Lost a loved one with no files left behind
Found old photos they can no longer open
Searched for someone in old devices
Heard a voice now locked in obsolete formats

This is a Cinematic Act of Mourning in the age of Artificial Intelligence.
Technology will Glitch, Memories will fade,
yet there is Beauty in the Entropy”

 

 

Please Support & Participate in This Cinematic Elegy

Aesthetics of Decay: Design for Dying Electronics is a decade-long labor of love—fusing grief, memory, and entropy into a sacred, cinematic media installation. We’re seeking Patrons, Supporters, Curators, and Executive Producers to finalize this immersive work and expand the project into exhibition-ready formats.

Your generous contribution will directly enable us to:

Finalize post-production: AI rendering, cinematic edits, immersive sound, and performance integration

Fabricate sculptural editions with Augmented Reality layers

Adapt the work for domes, museums, festivals, and spatial XR platforms

Build educational outreach: curriculum, talks, and digital memory dialogues

Continue new chapters of the story in the age of artificiality

**Sincerely Appreciate your Support**

 

 

Ways You Can Support:

· Donate: Every contribution helps complete the next phase
→ Venmo: @dnasab · Zelle: dnasab@gmail.com · PayPal: paypal.me/dnasab

· Become an Executive Producer:
· Screen credit, legacy co-creation, VIP private events + VIP Studio access

· Collect The Work:
· Limited-edition Archival AR prints, Video sculptures + Media Arts Gear Collector Store: dnasab.myshopify.com

· Honor a Loved One:
· Contribute archival traces to future narrative iterations

Stay Connected: dnasab@gmail.com | linktr.ee/dnasab | Insta@dnasab

**Thank You**

 

 

“The clarity of the bubbling video goo, oozing from the cracks and melted holes in the led screen, jittered glitch-y line drawings of sadness, whilst I killed it.” [dNASAb]

 

 

“Aesthetics of Decay: Design for Dying Electronics”_TEASER/TRAILER_[dNASAb]

 

“Aesthetics Of Decay, Design for Dying Electronics_Live iterations #21” by dNASAb 2025

 

“Aesthetics Of Decay, Design for Dying Electronics_A.I assisted iterations #17” by dNASAb 2024

“Aesthetics Of Decay, Design for Dying Electronics” is a 14-year exploration of the fragile beauty and inevitable demise of consumer electronics, catalyzed by the personal loss of a loved one. The series began as a response to technological failure, where the cracks and glitches of broken screens became metaphors for the way we experience loss. The digital residue of my loved one—text messages, photos, and memories—slowly disappeared through the inevitable breakdown of the devices that once held them, leading me to confront the ephemeral nature of our digital lives.

“Aesthetics Of Decay, Design for Dying Electronics_A.I assisted iterations #10” by dNASAb 2024

This exploration took on a cathartic dimension as I began to physically destroy electronics—burning, breaking, and dismantling them—to harvest the beauty of their decay with intention. The act of destruction became a form of healing, a way to reclaim power over the technology that so often fails us. By photographing each step of this dilapidation and layering the images, I sought to reveal the hidden aesthetics of entropy and death in these devices, finding solace in the act of creation through destruction.

“Aesthetics Of Decay, Design for Dying Electronics_A.I assisted iterations #18” by dNASAb 2024

As the series evolved, it embraced new technologies, including AI-assisted, post-human cinema iterations. These works are trained on the images that began this journey, extending the narrative into the digital realm. This evolution underscores the importance of using AI as a tool for creative exploration, rather than allowing it to shape us passively.

“Aesthetics Of Decay, Design for Dying Electronics_ glitch-y ai. assisted line drawings of sadness,” 2023 | mp4 | 24fps | 1.28 mins

The original works compelled viewers to confront the inevitability of their own devices’ decay by mapping video into the broken areas of screens, creating glitching visuals that symbolized the relentless cycle of technological obsolescence. This juxtaposition of new technology and its inevitable death highlighted both the beauty and tragedy inherent in our reliance on these devices.

“Aesthetics Of Decay_glitch-y line drawings of sadness,” 2023 1.28 mins

Themes of loss and death permeate the series—loss of data, privacy, memories, and ultimately, parts of ourselves. As we increasingly project our identities into the digital domain, the failure of these devices becomes more than just a technical issue; it becomes deeply personal, as each malfunction erases fragments of our digital selves.

“Aesthetics of Decay, Design for Dying Electronics_pixel ooze” 2014 by [dNASAb] 1:40 mins excerpt, 1080p HD, 24 fps with original audio.

In this extension of the series, the importance of actively using AI, rather than being used by it, is paramount. As technology becomes ever more intertwined with our daily lives, this work serves as a reflection and a reminder to retain our agency in shaping these tools. The series captures the tension between human experience and technological failure, where loss is both real and virtual, and where the beauty of decay reveals itself in the most unexpected ways.

1:35 min excerpt of Video Art that animated the 16 channel VideoSculpture “Screenscaping Berlin _ Ästhetik des Verfalls; Design for Electronics Sterben” by [dNASAb] 2013

“The instant my mother passed away; every screen in the house-glitched-and froze. My sister pointed at the screen and said, ‘there she is,’ and she was right.” This moment encapsulates the essence of “Aesthetics Of Decay, Design for Dying Electronics”—the intersection of human emotion and the cold, inevitable entropy of technology.

“Aesthetics of Decay; Design for Dying Electronics #3” 2011 1080p HD Video, edition of 5 + 2AP 1 min. exerpt of large multi-channel video installation. [dNASAb]/Frederieke Taylor Gallery

“The clarity of the bubbling video goo, oozing from the cracks and melted holes in the led screen, jittered glitch-y line drawings of sadness, whilst I killed it.” [dNASAb]

Aesthetics Of Decay Video Sculptures

The “Aesthetics Of Decay” series has also been transformed into physical video sculptures. Some of these sculptures feature multiple embedded screens playing the videos, while others involve projection mapping onto up-cycled shipping materials from consumer electronics. Both types use video to tell the story of loss, death, and planned obsolescence. I envision an immersive video installation that integrates new AI iterations with these 1/1 video sculptures, Augmented Reality, and projection mapping onto the up-cycled by-products of the project.

An example is the site-specific project I created in Berlin titled “Screenscaping Berlin _ Ästhetik des Verfalls; Design for Electronics Sterben” in 2013, which featured 16 LCD screens, 48 feet of LEDs, cast plastics, speakers, auto-start media players, and HD audio/video tracks within a 10 ft x 10 ft installation.

Stills_”Aesthetics Of Decay.Design for Dying Electronics”

I have a vast array of works spanning different years, including AI-assisted pieces in my latest projects and earlier non-AI-assisted video works. I’ve trained models on my past “Aesthetics of Decay” pieces to create new iterations for the future. My work evolves in tandem with the tools and the ever-growing significance of the conceptual framework. I’m seeking a strategic partner to collaborate on the release, sales, and presentation of this body of work. Please feel free to reach out with any questions, comments, or to schedule a studio visit at my immersive Wynwood, Miami laboratory.