Blue Screen: When Nostalgia Meets Malfunction

There's something about a blue screen that hits different. Most people see it and panic — the dreaded BSOD, the system failure, the moment your computer gives up on you. I see it and feel something closer to nostalgia. That's where Blue Screen started.

The Idea

Blue Screen began in March 2026. I was deep in a nostalgia spiral — old Windows 95 UI, vintage error messages, the kind of interfaces that defined how an entire generation first understood computers. At the same time I was seeing so much happening in the world around me: memes, social moments, the chaos of daily life. Somehow those two things collided in my head and wouldn't let go.

The result is a series of looping GIFs that live in the space between nostalgia and malfunction. Each piece takes the visual language of Windows 95 — the grey dialog boxes, the system fonts, the error screens — and pushes it through a glitch effect until it says something about right now. Old interface, new story.

The Process

Every piece in Blue Screen starts with a feeling or an idea — sometimes pulled from a meme, sometimes from something I read, sometimes just from a moment in daily life that felt like it deserved an error message. From there I sketch it out in Procreate or Illustrator, build the composition in Photoshop, and bring it to life in After Effects where the loop happens.

AI plays a role too — sometimes for textures, sometimes for elements I couldn't build manually fast enough. The tools shift piece to piece, but After Effects is always the final stage. That's where the glitch breathes, where the loop finds its rhythm.

Two Pieces Worth Knowing

alternative_reality

This one came from thinking about how much of what we experience online feels increasingly detached from actual reality. The Windows 95 interface became the perfect metaphor — a familiar system running processes we don't fully understand, showing us outputs we're not sure we can trust. The loop in this piece is intentional: it never quite resolves, it just keeps cycling. That felt honest.

tesseract

Tesseract went in a more abstract direction. The idea of a four-dimensional object rendered in a two-dimensional interface — something that shouldn't be able to exist in the space it's occupying — felt right for the series. The glitch here isn't just aesthetic, it's structural. The piece looks like a system trying to display something it wasn't built to handle.

Where It's Going

Blue Screen isn't finished. Eleven pieces in and I still feel like I'm finding the edges of what this series can be. The Windows 95 world is deep — there's still so much visual language in there that hasn't been touched yet. And the world keeps generating new material: new moments, new absurdities, new things that deserve an error message.

Each new piece will keep the same foundation — looping GIF, glitch aesthetic, that specific retro-digital tension — but the stories will keep shifting. That's the point. The interface stays broken. The content keeps changing.

You can explore the full Blue Screen series at the link below, and follow along as new pieces drop.