Error
Video
 
Artwork Statement
Error is a video work by Richard McCoy that examines how queer intimacy is increasingly mediated through dating applications and the logic of gamified digital platforms. Drawing on the visual language of arcade games, user interfaces, and reward systems, the work explores how desire is shaped by algorithms, instant gratification, and endless choice.
Profiles become avatars, attraction is quantified through proximity and responsiveness, and connection is experienced as a cycle of anticipation, validation, and repetition. Within this system, intimacy is transformed into an ongoing game without a definitive conclusion.
Rather than rejecting these technologies, “Error” reflects on their contradictions. While digital platforms have expanded opportunities for queer connection, they have also reconfigured how desire is performed, negotiated, and understood. The work considers the moments where vulnerability, uncertainty, and emotional complexity interrupt the seamless logic of digital systems, revealing what remains fundamentally human within technologically mediated relationships.
 
Artist Bio
Melbourne based artist Richard McCoy thinks of his work as snapshots or inventories of fragmented lives. Often kitsch, with a consistent use of computer technology, his work explores the interrelationships between change, time, reality and identity. He works across fashion, print design, photography and digital art with the aim of suggesting alternatives to how we see the past, reality, and the transformative power of art.