“Big Pixels: Pictoglyph to Favicon, A History of the Pixel” presented by Brodsky
Symposium:
Session Title:
- New Art Theory
Presentation Title:
- Big Pixels: Pictoglyph to Favicon, A History of the Pixel
Presenter(s):
Venue(s):
Abstract:
The Pixel has become the fundamental building block of digital New Media. It looms as large as Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square, 1913, Oil on Canvas Painting and it as expansive as Ray and Charles Eames’ Powers of Ten, 1968 film. The Pixel has become so ubiquitous that the very nature of visual language seems to exist on a near cellular level where it syntactically requires ever-increasing density to transmit detail and nuance. Yet in the Pixel’s ever decreasing size along with a corresponding increase in density, it can never achieve the reality that we need, so we continue, as in ancient times, to define ourselves through abstractions, symbols and icons which require less, not more data, to represent people as pictorial forms and to create pictorial forms from people.
