pix

I have been at the stage where I was ready to put in my hand as the artist and try and establish some order to my research and thinking. I can now create my own images and deconstruct from those through accidental process, rather than using Elena’s work as my starting point.

I discovered an interesting new app that lets me identify each individual pixel’s colour and quantity, which means I can properly disassemble an image, know its make up and reuse those blocks to create something completely new and different without affecting the DNA of the source.

But this got me questioning; what in fact is a pixel? I guess prior to this point I’d just compared it to some similar units. I’ve blogged them previously… but I suspect I jumped in way to quickly. Pixels aren’t simple at all… devilish little creatures, if they exist…

Do they exist? Because you see I discovered something I still can’t fully explain…

I found on Wikipedia whilst researching colour vision an image that has now become the focus of my work (image 1). Wikipedia describes it as follows:- this image (when viewed in full size, 1000 pixels wide) contains 1 million pixels, each of a different colour…

But when I opened this image in my pixel viewer app on the iPad and counted the top left hand box’s pixels across, there were only 61! So I rechecked on the second box… 61! For the information to be correct on Wikipedia each box should have had 100 pixels…

So what was going on?

I tried again on my new retina display iPad. This time only 45 pixels across??

What was going on?

The dictionary defines a pixel as: – the smallest element with controllable colour and brightness in a video display, or in computer graphics.

Was my predicament down to screen resolution? If so, logic suggests that with the right resolution, pixels would cease to exist. Doesn’t it? Using my new app I was able to view the image the way it was supposed to be seen… I was able to increase the pixel count and view each one of the million pixels individually…

My partner’s father had come to stay with us… another scientist… and whilst discussing this work he pointed out that other animals had different colour spectrums to ours and that they saw colours differently to ourselves. Of course, in my distant past I’d been taught this… I remembered the essence of what he was telling me… but…

“Though the raw information is important in that it provides a basis for any further brain processing, once a picture is formed it moves on to the rest of the brain and is compiled with all the other sensory information that an animal has taken in. The end product is a perceived view of the surrounding world, otherwise known as an umvelt”.

A perceived view? Are pixels perceived views dependent on screen resolution? That would change things… the invisible/non existent made visible. That would allow me to play with their structure and shape wouldn’t it?

My comparison became the snowflake. A single ice crystal… each completely different… fingerprints. That would allow me to design my own pixels… make them appear…

I started creating sketches, running the Wikipedia image through some of my randomizer apps, then altering them deliberately. New apps came up that allowed me to start numbering individual pixels; further research into the colours different groups of animals see migrated into the work, altering compositions. Now I had the blocks numbered I was able to deliberately choose their positions and then repaint in yet another app.

Spectrum pixels were born…

• 
• 
• 
• 

Bo, it was Aristotle who said:

“The whole is greater than the sum of its parts”

See?

I told you there would be more questions.

I look at the nature of my tools: my stitch is my pixel, my building block. What am I building then?

My work up to now has been more emotive, life driven, influenced by the personal. Sometimes uncomfortably personal. Because, to me, it is the personal that makes the work universal.

How do I make this personal?

This may be why I am less confident here… maybe the reason I’m struggling is the lack of emotional content. At the moment it is an interesting intellectual exercise…. But I’m not feeling it….

How do I get feely with a pixel?

Do I need to find the soul of the single stitch for this to work for me?

I am being prodded out of a smugness in my own ability to articulate.

I need to think and talk this through a bit…

Why do I stitch?

One stitch is me?

One stitch is useless?

Join a union!

Safety in numbers

Strength in numbers

The semiotics book I’m reading may help. I just need to work out what my signifier stitch has signified.

(I had intended at the beginning of this venture with Bo, that we would take it in turns to post. Turns out the blog reflects the relationship accurately… I talk too much rubbish, blurting it all out. He does the thinking, filters out the good bits and says it properly)

It was my intention to read Bo’s post, then leave it a couple of days before responding, but he’s got me all fired up now. Six months ago this would have been a fast paced conversation in a coffee shop, or an argument in a messy room in Margaret St.

I would be prattling rubbish and too many conflicting un-thought-through ideas. Then Bo would say “hmm… but…” and I’d be shot down in flames… then I’d go away and think about it, and come up with something better.

This process, by necessity, has been slowed down by distance and medium.

But I still want to answer this quickly. For me, it’s the blurting it out quickly that gets my mind racing. I want to answer quickly this time, because I think I’m actually getting somewhere… the synapses are firing like mad tonight! Insomnia beckons!

Ok, Bo – you are breaking down an image of my work, in various ways, looking at it with a different eye(pad), then putting it together in a new way: Deconstruction/reconstruction surely?

These pixels have no fixed and stable meaning because we keep altering them, true. We keep translating them into different medium, making more changes, looking in closer… a shifting truth?

WHAT IS LESS?

I think perhaps we need a change in the vocabulary. Instead of the word “less” let’s try the word “pure”

PURE: “without any extraneous or unnecessary elements”

One of my favourite phrases/watchwords… “avoid tautology”. If I could sum up my 2 yrs doing the MA in two words, it would be those two. So for me, the search for the pixel/stitch (Higgs Boson?) is the ultimate avoidance of tautology.

As we are in the mood for definitions, I looked in the thesaurus for stitch. Other words are suggested, but I reject them. (Arrogant? That makes two of us then, we’re in good company!)

Baste: no, basting is a long loose tacking stitch, not all stitching is basting

Fasten, Join: no, both of those can be done in many ways, not just with needle and thread

Sew: verb, not noun

Suture: the closest, but for medical use only.

So I reckon there’s only one word for stitch too. That’s pleasing isn’t it?

What I need then, is some sort of methodology to lead me through the work. I think, at the moment, I will magnify, plunge deeper in, keep making, purifying, getting rid of tautology.

When Bo unravels a piece of work, because of the digital nature of the unravelling, he is able to use it. From the real and total disembroidery there is too much disintegration for it to be useful (at the moment anyway). So I must start afresh. The way I reconstruct from what has gone before is to hijack Bo’s processes for my own ends.

The moment Bo sends me a piece of work and I see something new in it, it’s mine, no offence meant to him either… I see strings, layers, peeling back, additions, subtractions, textures, pattern, shape.

The disembroideries are a cul-de-sac. They go nowhere for me now. Other than they have provided a starting point. They were needed, but having chopped them up and passed them on, they have no further relevance, they were the topsoil. I’m far more excited by what comes out of the next layer of Bo’s processes, and will carry on stripping back from there.

(Is this homeopathic embroidery? A vague memory of stitches gone before? Is it purer now?)

One of Bo’s images – I think he used it on his personal blog – is a single pixel on a grid. I could make a single stitch in the middle of a piece of fabric and we could both put our hands up and shout “Sir, I’ve finished!”

But where’s the fun in that?

I think I might have a plan too… a small glimmer at least.

But there’ll be more questions. You can count on it.

Having read through Elena’s latest post it occurs to me that perhaps I’m not deconstructing at all… I’m just altering…

Deconstruct; 1. To subject to deconstruction.

2. To break (an idea or situation) down into its component parts.

Deconstruction; A method of critical analysis applied esp to literary texts, which, questioning the ability of language to represent reality adequately, asserts that no text can have a fixed and stable meaning, and that readers must eradicate all philosophical or other assumptions when approaching a text.

… change text for image…

… no fixed or stable meaning…!

Ok!

So how do I do that then?…

Meaning; 1. To have in mind as significant.

2. To intend, to purpose.

3. To destine, to design.

4. To signify.

No intention? No design? No purpose?… maybe I’m not just altering? Maybe the iPad and apps are the perfect tools?

“To break down into its component parts”? Pixel? Stitch? Pixellated?

Fixed; 1. Settled.

2. Fast, lasting, permanent.

3. Not varying or subject to alteration.

Am I aiming for something less than the original image? Elena asks this question. I want to know; what is less?

Taking the above definitions, this is not what I’m aiming for. I have no need to see Elena’s original image. The images (disembroidered or not) are original to me. Fragmented can’t be the way that I view them, as I have no prior knowledge of what they were. They are pixels… starting point’s… images… colours… drawings… irrelevant in my process (no offence Elena), yet critical to it. The moment I first alter them, they become mine…

Is this glib? It’s not meant that way… I am processing… writing on my computer… reading on my 1^st iPad and researching on the 2nd… thoughts wash over me as I try and gather the relevant threads…

My work must be different to Elena’s… not copies… not re-makes… as she suggests… I too must return to that notion of the single pixel…

Must I?

Why?

That would make the work similar… come on, come on… think this through…

My work is about process and selection…

I like the image that when you look in a thesaurus there are no other words for pixel… it does what it says it does on the tin..! That’s kind of what I would like my work to be about… obvious, yet…

…unique springs to mind… but that’s not it… that’s arrogant…

Singular… individual… bespoke?

This is all sounding very pompous. I’m not terming this the way it needs to be read to be clear…

Am I aiming for something less than the original image?

An image is an image right? It can only become less than if it is compared next to it’s original or something similar… that’s not going to happen, so I need to deal with the image that is produced… as an individual image in its own right. I am aiming for something more than the original image… not to demean it… to progress and develop it… to give it new personality… a new set of clothes… to give it its own life…

Which brings it back to those building blocks… The deconstruction is the unraveling of the fabric… taking the elements down to their individual forms and then reassembling them in a new manner… the same blocks arranged differently…

… Now I have a plan… Questions answered?