My last unit of work ended in an investigation into the pixel and how it has changed the way we see our world. These three dots of red green and blue light have the ability to come together to recreate (almost) any image. The pixel brings order to a chaotic world. The world in front of the lens is ever changing and unpredictable but once an image is taken it becomes data. This data has values that are either on or off, on a microscopic level one pixel can only show or not show the colours red, blue or green. This ordering of light allows the capture of image, it also makes it possible to invent photographs from a random order of values. In a similar vein to the infinite monkey conundrum, pixels on a screen have a finite number of possible combinations. Even for a small selection of pixels this number is so huge that it appears comprehensively infinite but nether the less the fact is that it is a finite number. A screen resolutions become larger and larger this number of possible images increase dramatically.
With the correct values we can reproduce any image, the image of every human who has ever lived, the image of their birth and their death. In my previous work I had been exploring the pixel as a deconstructed item, taking it apart and expanding it to a level where it becomes completely non-representational and so that the light creates subtleties and abstractions. I wanted to move away from this approach as start to construct images through set of a values. working at at minute scale of just a few pixels wide could any form of representation be created through a random selection of values.
This image has been created through an entirely random set of data. Photoshop uses an Adobe RGB colour space, the values for Red, Green and Blue are all between 0 and 255. Using a simple online random number generator, with limits set between 0 - 255 I began creating individual pixels. This involved manually inputting a lot of values. This grid is 25 pixels squared and with three different values of RGB for each pixel, there fore it involved 1875 individual values to create this image. Its hardly a quick process but the results are very interesting. Of course there is no representation in the image, it would involve a great deal of luck to be able to see any thing within the image especially on a first attempt.
Instead of any sort of representation the greatest similarities that I see with this image are to the abstract paintings of Ellsworth Kelly. Conceptually the image is more closely attached to Sol Le Witt. Le Witt’s Wall Drawing’s existed as ideas before they were ever painted, they could be realised through a set of instructions. My image could never be truly realised with out making it, yet its structure was planned long before the image had been created. All of the work mentioned has a strong reliance on block colour and hard edged shape.
Sol LeWitt
Ellsworth Kelly
The grid is fundamental to my image. These blocks have been built upon a rigid computational set of squares that photoshop uses to build images upon. Each square represents a pixel, a minuet block of colour that when show at 100% is barely visible. To make this image comprehendible it must be enlarged. This can be done in two ways, one being to enlarge the image by changing the image size and preserving the hard edges or to simply display the image at 3000% (photoshops maximum display setting).
Image at 100%
One thing thing that I noticed when experiment with image enlargement was what happened when the image was rotated. This is where the grid became very important to the image. When selecting rotation transform the image is attempting to rotate in a circle around a centre point, yet the image is built upon this grid so rotating becomes very unconventional. In a 360 degree rotation the pixel must take a route around the square. Each block of colour appears to flash out of nowhere, it is very hard to tell that the image is rotating but obvious that something is happening.
Instead of just using the rotation tool to create this effect I wanted to turn this into an animation. But this proved trickier to work out than I first though. My first process was to duplicate the original layer and rotate the new layer by 1 degree. I repeated this process for the full 360 degrees and 360 layers. This process scattered the pixels as they rotated around the centre to create this effect that looked almost like a solar system forming. It was interesting to watch the image degrade more and more. With other tests I created a photoshop action to rotate the image far beyond 360 degrees and therefore create a strange scattered collection of pixels that began morphing into larger and larger shapes. I wasn't sure of the reasons why this was happening but guess that because I was working on such a small scale that photoshop was just using algorithms to interrupt the image the best it could.
I found that the solution to this and to create the effect that the rotation tool had produce before meant returning to the original layer every time. There for I had to duplicate layer 1 and rotate by 1 degree, then duplicate layer 1 again but this time rotate it 2 degrees. this carried on until I had 360 layers. I could then load this into a timeline frame animation and allow the effect to be created.
What I love about this animation was how it replicated what I thought the process of finding images through random values might look like. Each layer/ frame could become a new image generated by some sort of system. The way the pixels trickled through the image evoked some sort of computer program looking for images of representation.
But in truth this was completely redundant. All this image is doing is rotating around and around in a meaningless circle. I feel that there are certain parallels between this circle and the notion of every possible image that I was alluding to earlier. This notion exists yet it can never really be realised. We do not have the computational power or time before the sun explode to start to get these pixel combinations to create anything representational. My own image is a false simulation of this notion, but it manifests its self in the abstract but has a strive to create something representational.
I mentioned before that this work required some sort of enlargement to become visible. To protect the visibility of each square I had been using an enlargement feature to that protected the hard edges. But when enlarging through other features that preserved the details of the image there were profoundly different effects. Here photoshop is filling the space between the pixels that I have created. The software no longer treats this space as distinct squares but combines the coloured blocks to create blurred streaks of vivid colour. This pushes the image into even further abstraction and touches on aesthetics very similar to psychedelic art. Underneath we can apply the same animation to the image that was used before, but this time we see a much more fluid effect. Once the image is moving this blurred shape feels like it is masking something especially in relation to the previous blocked animation. Blurring the pixels together almost allows the image to come together to more accurately expose detail. Instead of seeing points of light we are seeing an overall image.
After experimenting with these techniques I felt that I wanted to push the images that I was creating. I wanted to cheat to force an element of representation into the image. I worked out that a very similar image could be achieved, firstly by reducing an image down to a size where the pixels were visible. I could then add a detrimental amount of noise to make the level of representation just observable. For this I experimented with a simple webcam image of my face. The human face is easiest thing for our eyes to see, our brains are programmed to recognises faces probably to work out if a person is friend of foe. It is the reason that we can often pick out faces from a crowd or find likenesses of faces hidden in natural elements.
Again I used the two methods from before creating two distinctly different images. With this level of representation you can really see what the blur does to the image. It evens out all the space between the blocks and makes it possible to find the face within the vivid colours. The same effect can be replicated with the block colour image but only by scaling the image down so that the eye cannot pick out the individual pixels as easy.
Reanimating the face through a video recording and the same techniques applied on each frame also triggers the eye to spot representation. I felt that at normal speed this work became to obvious but by slowing down the image I can find a balance between representation and abstraction. Of course with this forced representation, the random values that were used to create my original image cease to exist. It becomes more and more clear that this image has been forced once the face becomes animated. There is no way that this sequence of images could have been generated with out heavy influence by my self. Therefore with these images it is much more about exploring this boundary between representation and non representation.