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 epidemic and of his own body as it succumbed to HIV-related illness.

Like the artificially chilly room in which it was projected, Sylvestre and Jones’s Blue Description Project at first recalls the antiseptic environments associated with the AIDS crisis. But the layers of collaboratively sourced descriptive audiovisual captioning superimposed onto Jarman’s Blue pull focus from the ubiquity of death and redirect it toward the poesis of failure. In her remarks following the film, Sylvestre stressed that BDP is a “cripistemological practice in multiplicity” that favors the material over the representational and the “non-retinal” over the visual. Initially, I was distracted by the discordant captions and the yellow stage light that illuminated four very expressive ASL interpreters. This is the point. What BDP offers is not mere descriptions of Blue but its refracted afterimage: an index of system failures apprehended from the vantage points of the individuals who experience, catalog, and share them. Sylvestre described the space of the caption as “crip space,” open to the subjectivity of experience and expanded authorship.

Unfortunately, this ideal of collaboration failed to manifest in the conversation between Sylvestre, Visual AIDS director Kyle Croft, and contributing artist Constantina Zavitsanos that followed the film’s screening. Its highlight was neither Zavitsanos’s periphrastic incursions into the ontology of light waves nor Sylvestre’s digression into crip theory but rather another system failure: Zavitsanos’s laggy Zoom connection, which distorted their voice into what Croft described as “whale song.” On my way home, caught in the deluge, I thought about how apt it was to end the evening on that note, slowing down our thinking and dwelling in the mysterious distances between our bodies, thoughts, and (dis)abilities. A day later, I awoke to the news of the global CrowdStrike failure and thought: Now the whole world gets to experience BDP!