New York City artist Bill Sullivan rephotographs screens, transforming pixels into detailed photographic prints in works such as Courts, Touch Screen, Volleyball, and Landscapes. In an interview for Hitspaper, Sullivan says “I think digital allows us to really take images apart and figure out how they work on people.” The interview continues:

“So I wanted to figure how to create new arrangements of contrast, and do it in kind of a new way. I started taking LCD screens apart, at first the little ones the older cheap cell phone ones and then older larger ones I got on Ebay. And began studying and photographing the matrix. I broke down the matrix and recombined them. And I started to wonder, “What is the structure of light”, I mean how do we know light – I wanted to treat it like it was a physical thing. I kept thinking in my head things like “what is the structure of overexposure” and how do we feel that blank space that the light has burned.”

Contemporary photography blog Conscientious has another interview with Bill Sullivan which discusses some of his other photographic work.

As part of Assignment 4 (Pixel Art), we’ve been looking at art that uses pixels in some way. As you work on this project, you may find it useful to draw in Photoshop in a way that gives you control over individual pixels. Here are some things to remember:

• Photoshop has many filters which you can use to ‘pixellate’ an image, including the Mosaic, Pointillize, and Crystallize filters. You can also reduce an image to a small number of pixels by using Image Size to resize it to a very small image.
• You can use the Pencil tool to draw pixel-by-pixel. The best way to do this is to choose the Pencil tool, then select the 1px brush from the Basic Brushes library. The Pencil tool is better than the Brush tool for pixel art, as it will fill in individual pixels without anti-aliasing the surrounding pixels. Similarly, you can use the Eraser tool on individual pixels by selecting a 1px brush and setting the eraser mode to Pencil.
• You can draw circles and other shapes as filled pixel areas without smoothed edges. To do this, choose a shape tool such as Ellipse, then click ‘Fill pixels’ from the context menu at the top (it’s the third option, and will fill in pixels instead of creating a path). Then uncheck the Anti-alias option.
• If you try to enlarge a pixel-art drawing, Photoshop will try to resample the image, which disrupts the pixel-art effect. To avoid this, choose Image Size, then select “Nearest Neighbor” from the Resample Image drop-down menu at the bottom.
• Photoshop will automatically show a Pixel Grid when you zoom in to work on a small image. You can turn this off by click View → Show → Pixel Grid. You can also turn on and off the regular Grid, and you can adjust colour and size of the Grid using Photoshop’s Preferences settings.
• You can use the Window → Arrange → New Window command to create a second window for the image you are working on. This is useful when working on tiny pixel art images, as you can view your image at its actual size in one window while working on it in a second, zoomed-in window.

This OSXDaily blog post details a couple of other techniques for creating pixel art in Mac OS, including a neat trick to use Mac OS’s Zoom feature and screen capture to quickly create pixellated versions of anything on your screen without using Photoshop.

There are also many web-based tools you can use to draw with pixels or voxels (3D pixels):

• Piq
• Pixie
• Q-Block
• Voxel
• Cubescape

We started this class with a fantastic presentation by Barb Hunt about digital textiles. Barb showed many great examples of artists who are working with textiles in a way that references or uses digital media, whether through modular patterns, electronic circuits, or interactive elements. Here are links to some of the artists whose work Barb showed during her presentation:

• Joanna Berzowska and XS Labs
• Barbara Layne
• Lisa Anne Auerbach
• Laura Vickerson
• Karen Trask
• Sherri Lynn Wood
• Barry Ace
• Tara Donovan
• Becky Stern
• Lia Cook
• Joana Vasconcelos

Barb also talked about the Jacquard loom, a mechanical loom invented by Joseph Marie Jacquard in 1801. Because of the way it used punched cards to control its operations, the Jacquard loom was an important precursor to the development of computer programming and hardware.

During this class we also looked at some examples of pixel art, and how to create pixel art in Photoshop. I’ve put up separate posts on this site for each of those things.

Here are some links to artists working with the idea of “pixels” that we looked at during Class 15:

Artists working with pixels:

• eBoy
• Army of Trolls
• bugpixel
• Arjan Westerdiep
• Super Nashwan
• Patrick Jean – Pixels
• Guillaume Reymond – Game Over

Artists translating pixels into non-digital media:

• Aram Bartholl – TVFilter, 0,16, Google Portrait Series
• Bill Sullivan – Touch Screen
• Rashid Rana
• Jim Campbell – Low Resolution Works
• Post-it War
• Space Invader – Rubikcubism
• David Clark – Screen Play
• Shawn Smith
• Jude Buffum – 8-Bit Terrariums and Painting with Pixels at GDC

Non-digital media that use grids or matrices in a way that is similar to pixels:

• Mosaics
• Cross-stitch (a good example is the work of weelittlestitches)
• Quilts, bead curtains, brickwork and floor tiles, and so on.

My Desk is 8-Bit, from the amazing artist/designer/illustrator/typographer Alex Varanese. “I’d like to think I’m the first person to be inspired by Michel Gondry and R-Type on the same project.”

During this class we critiqued everyone’s work for Assignment 3, which asked you to use Photoshop to create an image that both presents a truth and contains an element of fiction or fabricated reality. It was great to see so many different approaches to the assignment, although I’d like to see more particpation during our group critiques.

We’ve started Assignment 4 already. For this assignment you’ll be using the idea of pixels to create an artwork which is not a digital image. Pixel art usually involves digital images drawn pixel-by-pixel, a time-consuming process that generally involves very small images. Many pixel artists work with Photoshop, although there are also software tools designed specifically for pixel art. eBoy is a group of artists who create elaborate pixel art drawings. We’ll look at some other examples during our next class.

In this class, we watched Art 21: Paul Pfeiffer, and took a look at some Photoshop tools and techniques:

• Free Transform is used to rotate, resize, or distort the contents of a layer. You can also transform multiple layers at once by using Shift+click to highlight multiple layers before choosing Free Transform.
• Advanced selection tools include the Magic Wand (to select areas of similar colour), Magnetic Lasso (to draw an outline that snaps to edges), and Quick Selection (to paint a selection area that automatically snaps to edges). You can also choose Color Range from the Select menu to select a range of colours from your entire image.
• Layer Masks are a great way to hide part of a layer so that the layer beneath it becomes visible. It’s better to use Layer Masks to create transparency rather than the Eraser tool, because Layer Masks are nondestructive – they preserve the image data on your layer, which means that you can easily modify or remove the mask later.
• Similarly, Adjustment Layers are a nondestructive way to apply adjustments such as Brightness/Contrast, Curves, and Hue/Saturation to your layers, because they can easily be modified or removed later. By default, an Adjustment Layer applies its adjustment to all layers below it. To apply it to just a single layer, check the box that says “Use Previous Layer to Create Clipping Mask” when creating the adjustment layer.
• Hue/Saturation adjustments can be used to modify the saturation of various colours in your layer. You can also use it to tweak the Hue, or click the Colorize box to apply a colour tinge to the entire layer. Hue/Saturation can also be used to make your layer black and white, but try using a Black & White adjustment layer to do this, as you have more control over the result.
• We took a quick look at Content-Aware Fill, which is a way to have Photoshop automatically, seamlessly fill an area with content from another area.

During this class we also started Assignment 4 (Pixel Art).