When Death
Becomes Art
My journey from PTSD to Computational Expressionism
In 2018, I watched myself die.
Not metaphorically. Literally. On a hospital monitor, during my fourth heart operation in a series of medical disasters that nearly killed me. The line went flat. Everything stopped. And I was awake to see it all.
That moment changes you in ways I'm still discovering. It gave me PTSD. It isolated me from people I thought cared about me. And eventually, it gave me a new form of art I call Computational Expressionism.
Lying in that hospital bed, I made a choice. I could let this trauma define and destroy me, or I could channel it into something useful. Every time I felt the darkness building, I started making art.
Not just any art. I began creating anti-selfies — digital works that expose the raw, unfiltered emotional devastation that Instagram culture works so hard to hide.
Where normal selfies are curated performances of happiness and success, my anti-selfies show only the worst of my internal emotional state. They are deliberately ugly, honest, and disturbing.
The references are old and obvious. Bacon for the meat. Vermeer for the light. Hals for the painterly hand that refuses to settle. The machine is there. So is the doubt about which is which.
- 01 Source material Pencil sketches or selfie photographs capturing the darkest moments
- 02 Digital corruption Custom code glitching and distorting pixels — breaking the image into fragments of itself
- 03 Digital painting Natural media synthesis painted into the corrupted image — expressionism meets algorithm
- 04 False authenticity The same filters that make regular selfies "perfect", applied in reverse — to reveal, not to flatter
- 05 Physical manifestation Printed on canvas, mounted in deliberately fake distressed rococo frames — artificial woodworm holes and all
A fake antiquity around a fake image becomes a hall of mirrors. The anti-selfie doesn't try to escape simulacra — it pushes through to the other side. If selfies are simulations of happiness, my anti-selfies are simulations of despair, but in their obvious falseness, they open the possibility of truth.
— RFA, When Death Becomes ArtWhen these works are displayed in galleries, people cry. Not from sadness, but from recognition. They see their own hidden struggles reflected in digital distortion and expressionist anguish. That is when I knew I had succeeded in creating something beyond personal therapy — a form of digital art that addresses what makes us human rather than just clever bio-machines.
We live in an age of digital deception, where AI can create perfect images of things that never existed, where everyone's life looks amazing on social media, where authenticity is just another filter. These works fight back — using the language of Northern European Expressionism, from 17th-century Dutch masters through Francis Bacon, combined with computational methods.
- Don't stress — and don't do anything you don't want to do.
- Remember the healing power of art. It can be remarkable.
