Rhapsody in Zoom

I arrived at the Whitney a few minutes before closing and stared out at the thunder clouds rolling in over the Hudson. As the last tourists exited the revolving doors, I flashed a guard my ticket for Liza Sylvestre and Christopher Jones’s Blue Description Project (BDP) (2023) and entered the queue for the elevator. My fellow attendees made up quite a different crowd than the tourists that had just left: an array of artists, healthcare activists, and a few faces I recognized from Visual AIDS’s previous collaborations with the museum. Once inside the Whitney’s nondescript and excessively air-conditioned third-floor theater—apparently the only space in the museum without a view of the Hudson—the glaucous atmosphere of the impending storm was replaced by the deep lapis of International Klein Blue, the color of Derek Jarman’s monochromatic video work Blue (1993). That blue has since become identified with the “blue screen of death” that accompanies technological malfunctions, but Jarman was grappling with other system failures: of healthcare infrastructure during the AIDS…