Occasionally Compatible (1999) is a particular work taken from a larger body of animations, distinctive of Fairhurst’s iconography and tragicomic spirit. In these animations, hand-drawn gorillas and free-floating anatomies appear in repeating, uncanny gestures, suspended on color field backgrounds as they gyrate and morph to comic, dizzying or sometimes indecipherable effect. The imagery is often familiar and repeated throughout Fairhurst’s oeuvre. Here they are set in motion using rudimentary software available at the time. In this work, we see two torsos seated on 1980’s era office swivel chairs. Overlayed in a mess of line drawings, one is upside down with legs splayed upwards, the other sitting, using their feet to seemingly rotate them both in a clockwise direction before pivoting and reversing. Both bodies are rendered without heads or arms, both naked except for their underwear. The line work is black, the background a soft peach colour and the bodies and chairs occasionally blocked in white. His videos, including Occasionally Compatible, would often accompany performances by Fairhurst’s band Low Expectations, active from 1995-2001. In these performances, samples of music were repeated over and over and progressively superimposed, while dancers mimed in parallel to the visual loops of works.