Pixelart

Thursday, November 24th, 2005 | pop culture

Currently listening to: “Don’t Blame Your Daughter” by The Cardigans

Art can be described on many dimensions: abstract versus concrete, impressionistic versus expressionistic, and dark versus light are just a few. Another one is realistic versus naive: Naive art expresses itself in an untrained, often child-like manner becomes fascinating due to conscious self-limitation of its degrees of freedom: Because the artist choses not to use the whole spectrum of expressive possibilities (e.g. by painting only “flat”), this expression within narrowly defined boundaries concentrates meaning more intensely.

Pixelart is the continuation of naive art in the digital medium. Defined as “digital paintings that are constructed pixel by pixel”, the technical possibilities of pixelart are extremly limited: Only a small amount of colors can be used, it’s not allowed to anti-alias (blur) lines to make them smooth, and the whole painting needs to be drawn pixel by pixel – implicating a very slow process. It’s digital (=binary) art in its purest form.

I was surprised how many pixelart resources are out there. Just because it takes such a long time to build a painting, it offers itself to collaborative projects where many artists work on different portions of the “canvas”: Pixeldam for example is a huge design project where artists can design individual blocks of a big pixelart city with many diffent areas. The Joint is a similar project, where artists can design rooms of a multi-story apartment block. Wee! is a collection of pixelart people, and shows the strong kawaii influence on pixelartists (Japanes culture being fixated on cute and simplistic design). Many of the works also often remind me of my own Lego projects when I was a child.

Finally, an impressive and disturbing pixelart work was created by Jon Haddock: His series “Screenshots” shows important scenes from mass media – for example the Rodney King video – and fiction – e.g. from “12 Angry Men” – as isometrix pixelart paintings. In essence, it the works look like scenes from “The Sims”, and remind the viewer in a subtle and frigthening way of how removed we are when we are confronted with terrible events through the news: The world becomes pixelated, flat, a video game.

Tags: art, pixelart

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