Custom Pixel

Reimagining the display

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30. Aram Bartholl's 0,16 (2009) is a wholly analog light installation that uses translucent paper to transform the visitors’ shadows into large-scale pixels.

Brief

Pixels are the fundamental building blocks of bitmap images and digital displays. Conventionally, pixels are square, uniform, and parked in a static Cartesian grid. Challenge these assumptions by writing code to reconstruct a specific photographic image using “custom picture elements” of your own devising. What if pixels were hexagonal? Could they be arranged on an irregular lattice? What if they overlapped, moved, or had a variety of sizes? What if an image was itself constructed from fragments of other images, or from a database of tiny icons, symbols, flags, or emojis? Think carefully about the relationships between your “pixel concept” and the image you choose to transform. At no time should your original image be directly visible.

Learning Objectives

Variations

Making It Meaningful

Artworks comprised of novel pixels are literally “new media”; they illustrate McLuhan's well-worn adage that the medium (itself) is the message. The impact of this message can be weakened, however, when a novel imaging technique is applied without consideration to its subject. Is the project “just a display”? A key path to the production of meaning in this genre of work, therefore, is the purposeful creation of a relationship between form and content: between the nature of a display's constituent picture elements and the subjects they portray. Projects by Chris Jordan, El Anatsui, and Jenny Odell, for example, present the conceptual contradiction that arises when something valuable appears to be wholly constructed out of trash or detritus.

Custom picture elements can create intrigue at multiple scales, allowing for new ways of seeing that urge the viewer to reconsider the experience of image consumption. What was formerly an instantaneous phenomenon (“I saw it”) becomes an interactive process of close observation (“I examined it”). A common strategy is to alternately create and resolve visual ambiguity. Images constructed using a photomosaic technique, for example, provide an engrossing means by which fans can “zoom in” to reminisce about a favorite subject. The Pointillist and Divisionist painters of the late 1800s, by contrast, created paintings that required the viewer to “zoom out,” actively fusing spots of colors in their mind's eye in order to recognize the painting's subject. Multi-scale works also defy easy reproduction, increasing their aura.

The use of custom picture elements can prompt reflection about the conditions of image production. When we pore over a Byzantine micromosaic, we marvel at the evident labor that went into creating and placing each individual tile. Contemporary artworks like 10,000 Cents by Koblin and Kawashima address these conditions directly, making use of networked labor markets like Mechanical Turk to question the nature of digital economies and authorship.

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31. Textile arts such as weaving, knitting, and needlepoint are ancient cultural practices of pixel logic. In works like South of The Border (1958, shown here in detail), textile designer and Bauhaus educator Anni Albers used ingenious combinations of threads to produce custom pixels.

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32. Leon Harmon and Ken Knowlton's Studies in Perception #1 (1966) is a mosaic of small scientific symbols, arranged into the form of a nude using Knowlton's BEFLIX programming language. It appeared on the front page of the New York Times on October 11, 1967, and was shown in the Museum of Modern Art's 1968 exhibition The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age, introducing computer art to a broad American public for the first time.

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33. Jenny Odell describes her Garbage Selfie as “a self portrait composed of everything I threw away, recycled or composted between February 10 and March 1, 2014.”

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34. Charles Gaines dissects photographs into grids of hand-painted elements, using indeterminacy and other mathematical principles, in order to explore the constructed nature of representation. Shown here and in detail is his Numbers and Trees: Central Park Series II: Tree #8, Amelia (2016), a photograph with acrylic on plexiglas.

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35. Aaron Koblin and Takashi Kawashima's 10,000 Cents (2008, shown here in detail) is a crowdsourcing system that produced a representation of a US $100 bill. The artists write: “Using a custom drawing tool, thousands of individuals working in isolation from one another painted a tiny part of the bill without knowledge of the overall task. Workers were paid one cent each via Amazon's Mechanical Turk.” The project's conditions of production and distribution perhaps inadvertently highlight the inequity of distributed labor markets.

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36. Daniel Rozin has spent decades producing hand-crafted pixels from every material imaginable including wood, fur, and even toy penguins. His Peg Mirror (2007) consists of 650 wooden dowels that are cut on an angle and individually motorized. As they rotate, the pegs catch light or cast shadows, recreating the scene captured by a central camera.

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37. Scott Blake's Chuck Close Filter software (2001–2012) transforms any image into the pixelated style of a Chuck Close painting. Following its release, Blake was threatened with legal action by Close, who asserted that the software trivialized his art and threatened his livelihood. Blake's Self Portrait Made with Lucas Tiles (2012) is wholly constructed of squares taken from Close's painting Lucas (1991).

Additional Projects

Readings

  1. Scott Blake, “My Chuck Close Problem,” Hyperallergic, July 9, 2012.
  2. Meredith Hoy, From Point to Pixel: A Genealogy of Digital Aesthetics (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2017).
  3. Christopher Jobson, “People as Pixels,” This Is Colossal, February 24, 2012.
  4. Julius Nelson, Artyping (Johnstown, PA: Artyping Bureau, 1939).
  5. Omar Shehata, “Unraveling the JPEG,” Parametric Press 1 (Spring 2019): n.p.
  6. Rob Silvers, “Photomosaics: Putting Pictures in Their Place” (master's thesis, MIT, 1996).
  7. Barrie Tullett, Typewriter Art: A Modern Anthology (London: Laurence King Publishing, 2014).