Every interface runs on a microchip. At its core lies the die, the small square of silicon where the circuits are etched. A die is also what you roll in a game, and to die is how everything ends. Die by 0xfff plays on these different meanings, taking that hidden piece of silicon and enlarging it into a landscape viewers can walk through, rendered in the rough placeholder textures of an unfinished video game. The work can be experienced as a procedural film, or played like an instrument by toggling through different filters and tools borrowed from chip inspection software and game map editors. Moving through the environment, the chip’s tiny channels widen into streets, and the silicon begins to look like a warehouse, a data centre, or a city. Decades ago, net artists made the web itself their material. Die pushes that idea one level deeper, to the technological substrate that everything runs on. Computing itself, often hidden behind clouds and windows, becomes materialized and allows the viewer to sneak inside.
0xfff is a pseudonymous artist working with computation as material. Their work has been shown at Rhizome World and Basel Social Club, and they curated World Computer Sculpture Garden, an exhibition of programs that was itself a program. They make long-running works that execute autonomously — treating computation not as a tool but as the thing itself.