the pixel

The association of the pixel to the square is a misconception; the way the majority of graphic cards, scanners and printers function is better described as gaussian (?), working in overlapping points. The conception that an image on screen is made of little squares stems from the fact that when zoomed image processors group together similar colors in a process of box filtering. This is because the processing power required to render the image is impractical.

Nevertheless I still find the pixel remains a pleasant poetic, the simplicity and categorized certainty within the enormity of the larger image. There is a charm to the technological connotations; the nostalgia to cream off-white plastic casing, game cartridges with their exposed edged microchip, the floppy disk and its mechanical groans when inserted into the machine. Out-dated devices contain a beauty in the way they extract sympathy, remind one of their childhood, a history that has been transferred to memory.

I realize the cartridge is a fantasy, an emotive stream of memory like a square of color. The gameboy is the framework and its systems are the grid on which the color is added. The color is a small box, which is surrounded strategically by thousands of other dashes of color. This repetition aestheticizes the experience.

Think of a housing complex as a shell, each room is a square pixel. The beauty inherent in the repetition stems from the possible narrative each pixel contains. The outside façade is like a map of the complex; behind each window is an imagined space, in which fictional lives and relationships exist.

The same poetic works at the scale of the microchip, which then mirrors a sprawling cityscape. Skyscrapers inherent the mentality of life inside a box, living as a pixel, an avatar, inside a cartridge video game, people are an inventory of characters experiencing the emotions, the state of being alive. The world is a network linked by shipping containers, electronic fields, imagined space and things beyond intelligence.