Jenny has a couple of older pieces up on their website, "Refusal" and "Close to me, a self-portrait,” that I visit often.

Refusal is a two-minute four-second video of Jenny standing silently outside, facing away from the camera. Only their head and shoulders are in the frame. The sun highlights a patterned blouse they wear, and the reddish ends of their short brown hair. A breeze blows every so often, gently lifting a few strands of hair off their shoulder and creating a sense of movement—a feeling of anticipation.

"Close to me, a self-portrait," similarly, is a nearly three-minute compilation of the sound of Jenny’s breathing. It's clips, I think, from a bunch of different recordings, edited together. Jenny never speaks, just breathes softly into the mic. I’m embarrassed to admit that I never paid close attention to the sound of their breathing when they were alive, though the sound—as mediated by the recording—is instantly recognizable to me now. There are several moments throughout where Jenny sounds like they’re just on the verge of saying something, but they never do.

Flusser wrote that the technical image would transform our experience of death. Through the technical image, he predicted, we would become immortal. Historical existence would turn into a kind of ahistorical ever-present moment. Indeed, I often feel grateful that Jenny left behind a body of artwork that I can continue to access whenever I’d like. Perhaps Flusser even obliquely predicted the way I sometimes visit Jenny’s website and play both self-portraits at the same time—a cheap attempt at digital reanimation.

Understanding Flusser and the technical image does not prepare me for how far away Jenny feels for the duration of the recordings, how much I want them to be almost-there. I play out scenes in my mind:

Reach into the video and tap their left shoulder, wheel them around to face me.

Reach into the video but pause before tapping their left shoulder because I am not brave enough, instead get that almost-touching feeling in the palm of my hand.

Step into the video, feel the sunshine on my scalp, feel relief because they are there before me in real life, I knew it.

The only words that come to me are phrases of the functionary: Turn around! I miss you. We miss you. Where are you? Come back. I knew I could find you.

For the duration of the simultaneous recordings, I pretend I can tell the difference between grief, desperation, rage; I pretend I don't know the difference between the image and the subject; can still get closer to Jenny by understanding the processes of abstraction that they utilized—how photos work, how light works.

I even pretend the reanimation works. In two minutes and four second intervals, I try to pretend that Jenny is still alive, just exerting their power to refuse.

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