[speaking about the album cover of "As A..."]
Jazmine (JT) Green: So the idea of the dead pixel. This is especially prevalent in modern display technology, because things are being made at scale, super fast. A lot of times LCD panels are not perfect. And it's usually noticeable if the screen displays full white.
There may be a single black pixel that is present. And what is present in there is the fact that like one of the panels is not illuminating properly, which looks zoomed out like a single spot on a perfectly spotless image, right? With the cover of the album...the album takes place from the perspective of the girl's smartphone. It's a gridded red, green, blue pattern. It evokes RGB light, the basic color panels that then make up an LCD screen. Like if you've ever spilled water on your smartphone and you've seen it magnified, you may see bits of these red, green, and blue squares pop up.
What I was curious about was utilizing the metaphor of the dead pixel as, like, a metaphor for the girl in the album. Which in turn, since it is an auto-fiction, you know, I would be lying and saying that some of my life experiences are not reflected in the narrative of the record. And thinking about the girl's life as a pristine LCD panel previously, but then having this one imperfection that sort of infiltrates the facade.
And if you zoom in on I made it super high res for a reason. So if you find the 3000 by 3000 pixel version, if you zoom in very closely at the dead pixel, it actually reveals an image. And on that image, it's a portrait that was taken of me by my partner at a concert around this time last year, where I first went out in gender affirming clothing.
And it was a moment where I felt like there was a part of this new self that was punching through the LCD facade that I built until the point that eventually all the pixels will be dead and then will need to be rebirthed into a new panel in a way.
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