LOVE, ABSOLUTELY

A talented, successful couple kill themselves. Did the technology that infused their work help destroy them?

On July 10, 2007 Jeremy Blake returned to his Manhattan apartment to relax with a bottle of Scotch. The 35-year-old digital artist, whose work is enshrined in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, lived in a converted church rectory with his girlfriend of a dozen years, Theresa Duncan, a 40-year-old writer and former computer-game designer. He invited the church8217;s assistant pastor, Father Frank Morales up later for a drink. When Blake got to his place, he found Duncan lying dead in their bedroom, with a bottle of bourbon, Tylenol PM pills and a suicide note next to her body. Morales found Blake kicking the walls and sobbing. Blake spent the next three hours with Morales, silently drinking glasses of Glenlivet until the bottle was empty.

8220;It was obvious that he was a suicide risk,8221; Morales tells Newsweek. 8220;We put him on a 24-hour watch, not even letting him walk alone across the street for a cup of coffee.8221; On July 17,Blake boarded a subway train and got off along Rockaway Beach. As the sun set, he walked toward the water, took off his clothes, piled them neatly on the sand and waded into the brownish Atlantic. Near the spot where he8217;d entered the ocean, authorities found a Jeremy Blake business card with a short note. It didn8217;t say much, just that he couldn8217;t live without Theresa.

Jeremy Blake and Theresa Duncan seemed like the perfect couple. But beneath the idyllic surface is a darkly modern tale of obsession and paranoia fueled by instruments of a digital age. Duncan and Blake built their lives around computers and the Internet, using them to create innovative art, prize-winning videogames and visionary stories. But as time progressed, these technologies became tools to reinforce destructive delusions and weapons to lash out at a world they thought was closing in on them. By the end of their lives they addressed friends and colleagues from behind electronic walls of accusatory e-mails and confrontational blog posts, and their storybook devotion to each other slowly warped into a shared madness. Katie Brennan, longtime friend compares the couple8217;s late-life delusions to 8220;a kind of terminal cancer8221;.

Blake and Duncan met in 1995, when he was fresh out of art school and she was a precocious grande dame of Washington, D.C.8217;s computer-gaming scene. The two fell in love a few years later while working together when they teamed up for an acclaimed series of narrative videogames. She wrote the stories; he did the artwork.

8220;They would stand almost physically on each other at parties, with her hand swung over his shoulder or his hand looping her waist,8221; says Brennan. 8220;You8217;d e-mail him and she8217;d answer, or you8217;d call her and he8217;d suddenly be on the phone,8221; says Brad Schlei, a friend.

In 2002, Blake8217;s career began to blossom. He pioneered a genre that he called 8220;moving paintings8221;, a series of digital animations played on plasma-screen televisions. But as Blake8217;s celebrity and creative confidence grew, Duncan8217;s professional luck withered. The CD-ROM market tanked and she struggled with other media. She began to suspect that the Church of Scientology was deliberately thwarting her. In a disjointed 2006 e-mail to an art-world friend, Duncan claimed that Beck, a second-generation Scientologist, had told her about his plans to leave the church. This knowledge, she wrote, would make her 8220;priority No. 1 for their paranoid and dangerous security wing.8221;

Duncan launched a blog called The Wit of the Staircase that catalogued interests such as cinema, perfume and the history of electricity. The blog also served as a base for Duncan to mount a case against Scientologists and others who she believed had a vendetta against her. In May 2007, she posted a sprawling entry that claimed a host of people were conducting a 8220;smear campaign8221; against the couple.

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The night before she killed herself, Blake and Duncan met with Scream producer Cary Woods to outline a noir film. Her friends speculate that she chose to end her life rather than risk losing another film to forces outside her control. Theresa herself wrote in an e-mail, 8220;The CoS is going to have to kill us before we will give up ANY of our free will or any of our constitutional rights to do and say what we please.8221;
-TONY DOKOUPIL Newsweek