The word “transit” comes from the Latin “transitus”, meaning to pass across or through. Off the subway in Brooklyn, down the stairs into the busy green room of On Air Fest, we meet Jazmine (JT) Green.
|| Ephemera, change, sound. ||
Transformation through Repetition (feat. Jemma Rose Brown) - aired on Jazmine’s experimental audio podcast U+1F60C
Jazmine (JT) Green: ...Sometimes transitioning feels like dying in a video game. And then when you're dead, the “continue” icon appears and the countdown appears. And you have ten seconds to say Yes or No. And then you say “yes”, and then you spawn back to that position prior.
And not only in that metaphorical sense... I've had two near death experiences with pulmonary embolisms that, I was physically dead for a brief period of time and then revived.
And it's one of those things when you're on your third shot at life, then you have another metaphorical death. You really begin to look at every single decision in your life, down to the time you spend, and, you're like, every minute, every second is a gift.
[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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Featuring:
Jazmine (JT) Green | music • website • Molten Heart
Jemma Rose Brown | website
Thanks to: Eleanor Qull, Jemma Rose Brown, Ray Pang, all the folks at On Air Fest.