pixel projects
archive pile, 8ft x 8ft, 256 inkjet prints onto dictionary pages, 2017
In looking for ways to transition my research into knowledge and archiving systems from analog sources (like printed dictionaries) to digital sources, I’ve started with the pixel. These two pieces use 256 individually printed pixel elements because in digital images 256 is a significant number representing the most common base unit in computing. Each pixel is inkjet printed onto dictionary pages, a nod to this work being a transition.
I picked a pile and a landscape as images to pixelate. The pile primarily conveys accumulation and quantity, effective as an analogy for bits of data. The landscape image is more personal, it’s a photograph of the field behind my childhood home, a forbidden place that looms large one’s memory. Can you translate such an emotional place, a sensory place, into bits of data? I doubt it.
My projects are consistently about the search for meaning, about investigating structures like dictionaries or pixels that support and convey meaning, and then visualizing their limitations and failures.
