Will Barnet was a cat lover, and his works repeatedly depict people he knew intimately interacting in various ways with cats. The slight abstraction in these depictions, the paring down of reality into simplified lines and blocks of colour, removes a sense of specific individuality and gestures towards a representation of ‘the human’ and ‘the animal’ more broadly. As such, his paintings seem to explore how humanity engages not only with its architectural environment, but with animal forms of life as well. In ‘The Blue Computer’, which references Barnet’s ‘The Blue Thread’ (1984), the cat remains, while the mother and child are removed and replaced with the figure of the computer. This replacement seeks to ask how the computer sits alongside the animal. Where do we place the computer along a continuum of autonomy? Is it more or less alive than the cat?