When Death Becomes Art
My Journey from PTSD to "Computational Expressionism"
How watching myself die on a monitor led to creating anti-selfies that challenge our digital fakery
The Monitor Never Lies
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, watching your own death from the inside, 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."
The Cascade of Disasters
It started with a simple medical device insertion that went catastrophically wrong. The device failed, sending my heart into chaotic rhythms. Then came the infection, nearly fatal, from the corrective surgery. More operations. More failures. More brushes with death.
Each time, they'd fix me and send me home the same day. Modern medicine is miraculous that way. You can literally die and be home for dinner.
But living with having watched yourself slip away? That's much harder than the actual slipping.
The Silence of Friends
Here's what nobody tells you about surviving trauma: sometimes the people you expect to rally around you simply vanish.
While I was fighting to recover physically and mentally, dealing with genuine PTSD from watching my own death, close friends and family just... stopped calling. I'd suggest coffee, ask to catch up, reach out when I desperately needed human connection.
Radio silence.
The few responses I got were worse than none at all. "Snap out of it," one email advised. Others promised to "get my assistant to set something up" or claimed their diaries were suddenly, permanently full.
I had two young children, 12 and 14, who needed their father to appear normal. The pressure was crushing. The isolation was almost as dangerous as the heart condition.
Birth of the Anti-Selfie
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.
But not just any art. I began creating what I call "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're deliberately ugly, honest, and disturbing.
The Process: Digital Alchemy
Working with the limited tools available to me, a Surface Pro, a phone, and a pencil, I developed a unique process:
Source material: Pencil sketches or selfie photos capturing my darkest moments
Digital corruption: Running images through custom code to glitch and distort pixels
Digital painting: Using natural media synthesis to paint into the corrupted images
False authenticity: Applying the same filters that make regular selfies "perfect"
Physical manifestation: Printing on canvas and mounting in deliberately fake, distressed rococo frames, complete with artificial woodworm holes
Simulacra and the Hall of Mirrors
The fake frames are crucial. They create what philosopher Jean Baudrillard called simulacra, copies with no original. But here’s the paradox: in a world saturated with digital images, the selfie itself is already a simulacrum. It doesn’t record a moment, it manufactures one. It’s not “me at the café” or “me after the workout,” but a curated fragment that never existed outside the lens. The frame doesn’t preserve life, it replaces it with performance.
By distressing my frames, woodworm holes carved by hand, gilding chipped away, patinas faked, I wanted to expose that cycle. 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.
That’s the strange gift of simulacra: sometimes only through an exaggerated fake can we glimpse something real. My distorted pixels, corrupted faces, and distressed frames aren’t “authentic” in the naïve sense. But by refusing to flatter, they reveal the hidden trauma beneath our age of filters and fakery.
Why This Matters Now
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.
My anti-selfies fight back against this corrosive culture. They use the language of Northern European Expressionism, from 17th-century Dutch masters through Francis Bacon, combined with computational methods to create something I believe is rare: spiritual computer art that can actually move people to tears.
Not through cleverness or technical wizardry, but through raw, uncomfortable truth.
The Unexpected Response
When 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's when I knew I'd succeeded in creating something beyond personal therapy, a form of digital art that addresses what makes us human rather than just clever bio-machines.
Rules for Living After Calamity
This experience taught me two fundamental rules:
Don't stress and don't do anything you don't want to do.
Remember the healing power of art, it can be remarkable.
Simple? Yes. Easy? Absolutely not. But when you've literally watched yourself die and come back, you gain a different perspective on what actually matters.
The Question That Haunts Me
People always ask two questions about my near-death experience: "What did you see?" and "Was it peaceful?"
The answers: Nothing. And yes, it's surprisingly peaceful because the brain handles it gracefully.
But the real question isn't about dying. It's about living afterward with that knowledge. How do you wake up every day knowing how thin the line is? How do you trust people after they abandon you in your darkest hour? How do you create meaning from trauma?
For me, the answer was art. Computational Expressionism. Anti-selfies that tell the truth about what it means to be human in a digital age that prizes everything fake.
Your answer might be different. But whatever it is, make sure it's real.
What forms of authentic expression resonate with you in our age of digital facades? Share your thoughts in the comments below.