gämma is an exploration about the perception of the screen. An attempt to ignore the device as a representative source and to embrace it as a sensorial entity.
The blocks of color invite the viewer to examine pixels as a plain source of light, to try to see the screen in unity with the machine’s language. Software and hardware infused in one phenomena.
Code = light.
— p1xelfool
p1xelfool is a pseudonym as much as a project, one that developed out of the anonymous artist’s expressive understanding of pixels. Online, p1xelfool’s practice is intentionally dissociated from his personal life (though most everyone who knows his work knows he is from Brazil). The practice of identifying by an invented name online finds resonances in p1xelfool’s project, which is meant to be interpreted within closed, yet generative, computational universes. However, to understand his motivations for doing so, it’s helpful to see where he’s coming from. Through our friendship, he has shared (and agreed to me sharing here) that he is from São Paolo, where he studied painting; over the last decade, he has cultivated analog and code-based painting practices, while also working remotely for a major U.S. computer company (a job he was able to quit due to his success in the NFT space). As an artist from the Global South who is deeply familiar with the politics of screens and software, it is therefore unsurprising that his project is one of reappropriation — of pixels, of light and code.
In early 2021, p1xelfool suddenly, and spectacularly, appeared on Hic et Nunc, a platform that emerged out of the Brazilian CriptoArte scene and its cryptopunk ethos
1. Since then, p1xelfool’s works have been unified through a singular style: black background, high contrast 8-bit color, low resolution graphics, generative animations that often (seem to) endlessly loop. As Casey Reas
describes, p1xelfool’s work “vibrantly activates on the screen, but there’s more to it than just surface — with each piece, the aim is to connect the viewer to the work with complete
attention”
2 (emphasis my own).
Pixels are the smallest element that can be displayed on a digital screen, groupings of which comprise the billions of still and moving images in circulation today. Pixels are not dissimilar to gamma rays, the shortest yet most powerful of the rays in the electromagnetic spectrum. The difference between them would seem to do with perception: gamma rays are invisible, pixels are not. However, both require specifically designed environments to engender visibility, such as a scintillation detector or a computer with a digital display. Because of the relative ubiquity of the latter, the specificity — and necessity — of the computer environment may be easily overlooked, if not forgotten, when perceiving pixels. The seduction of the screen, with its pixel-based representations
3, obfuscates the fusion of software and hardware that illuminate content: code and cold cathode. As p1xelfool says, “Code = light.”
In gämma, p1xelfool fuses pixels with light, with code. With such an emphasis on these materials and their visual properties, the works may seem formalist. Indeed, the generative compositions are strikingly geometric and inorganic; for those familiar with p1xelfool’s larger body of work, those in gämma may come across as austere in comparison. Yet recollecting Reas’ words above, these works are deeper than their surface. p1xelfool’s approach is intent on reconnecting color and light with the computer environment to create engrossing sensorial experiences specific to it. Complete attention.
Light, compared to the content it illuminates, is among one of the underdeveloped phenomena of contemporary networked culture. If and when light is discussed, it usually has to do with too much exposure to screen-emitting blue light, wavelengths that disrupt diurnal rhythms and sleep patterns, or SAD (seasonal affective disorder) lamps that mimic sunlight (in some cases needed because of said blue light).
4 Blue light and its effects are visible reminders of Jonathan Crary’s theorization of a 24/7 world — one which never sleeps, where production, consumption, and circulation never cease. Light is crucial within his formulation thereof. Since his Suspensions of Perception (1999),
5 Crary has traced the Western development of normative attention, in which light is instrumental, and instrumentalized, to lengthen working hours and capture the gaze — both of which steal away time, exert control, and impair awareness. In his most recent Scorched Earth (2022), Crary considers the gamma ray, or rather, the rapid research developments from 1886 to 1914 that led to the discovery of the electromagnetic spectrum and its attendant “remaking of visibility.”
6 These research initiatives “coincided with the professionalization and specialization of science and with the demands of militarism, economic growth, and imperial expansion for new forms of energy, communication, and destruction”
7 — foundational, as it were, to the “internet complex,” a product of Cold War scientific research and technocracy. The perception of pixels (or lack thereof) is on this continuum.
The “remaking of visibility” to which Crary refers may be described as the separation of the perceptible from the senses (or embodiment). (It is not accidental that vision — the most privileged of senses within Western epistemologies — has increasingly been displaced to machines of scientific empiricism/imperialism.) Within the same chapter cited above, Crary describes the following: Human vision — its perception of light and color — is a sensorial experience, full of nuance and fallibility, meaning-making and spiritualism. Meanwhile, the light and color displayed on screens are largely prescriptive. Eye tracking software surveils our attention: what catches our eyes (“fixations”), how long we look (“gaze time”) before another object captures our gaze. Its analytics inform UX design to maximize profits and capitalize time. The result of all this (the separation of light from the body, prescriptive visual experiences) is a routinization of vision and impairment of awareness on the part of the viewing subject.
Dovetailing with the broader shortcoming of Crary’s corpus — namely, a Eurocentric understanding of the intertwined projects of modernity and global capitalism, inclusive of colonization and enslavement — is the oversight, or dismissal, of how technologies of control have necessarily, and effectively, been (re)appropriated by those of the global majority. (Not to mention the all-too-obvious fact that appropriation is an art historically vaunted and legitimated strategy of political resistance for the so-called Euro-American avant-garde.) As just one of countless examples, consider Krista Thompson’s Shine (2015). Thompson details how peoples of the African diaspora, particularly of the circum-Caribbean in her study, utilize the shining effects of cameras and HDTV screens to represent themselves in the public sphere and think of themselves as a transnational community.
8 Significantly, the subjects Thompson centers in Shine are having
fun (for Crary, artificial light is distinctly non-pleasurable, mind-numbing, homogenizing). There is a specific pleasure derived from posing for the camera and spotlight, of establishing self-representation on one’s own terms as much as for the community cultivated through these spectacular performances, of diverting light from technologies of surveillance and capture to refract and empower. Such diversion of light, of attention, exemplifies a kind of non-normative attention (if, following from Crary, technologies of vision are constitutive of the Western hegemony of normative attention).
p1xelfool’s mesmerizing compositions engender another kind of non-normative attention — of looking, perceiving, and being. Light is prescribed by his algorithms, to be sure. However, he uses Processing, an open-source, community-led software, rather than a privately authored, maintained, and distributed one. Algorithmic is not synonymous with prescriptive, especially here. The output of these works is unexpected, breaking the routinization of vision and expanding the potential of screen-based perception. Crucially, this entails recuperating the senses. Vibrant colors and their rhythmic flows are visceral rather than representational. Repetitive, yet differentiated, streams of colors and patterns heighten one’s awareness of them. The works ground the viewing experience in the materiality and (meta)physics of the computer. Like dancing in a club, enveloped in fluctuations of light and sound, p1xelfool’s works are sensual-sensory spaces of fun, pleasure, release, and community. By reconnecting light to its source (code), p1xelfool’s works recuperate the possibility of the screen as a space of becoming.
9
1. An NFT marketplace using the Tezos blockchain, Hic et Nunc (or H=N) became fully operational in March of 2021. In November of that same year, the site suddenly went down after its founder Rafael Lima "got overwhelmed and decided, overnight, to close the site." In those few short, fast-paced, months, a huge community had amassed on H=N for a few crucial reasons: 1) The Tezos blockchain, launched in 2018, is far more environmentally-conscious than chains like Ethereum; 2) In the NFT boom of the early 2020s, marketplaces like Foundation and SuperRare necessitated an invitation; those platforms also take bigger cuts than H=N; 3) The cost to participate on H=N was less to artists (lower gas fees and more of a profit margin); 4) Many of the NFTs posted were low price point, high edition number, engendering a culture of artists collecting each other's work. The aforementioned points stem from the platform's background and founding ethos. In the words of M Plummer-Fernández, "H=N comes not from the art establishment nor crypto-millionaires, but from a cryptopunk technologist in Brazil named Rafael Lima, and an emerging Brazilian CriptoArte scene," one comprising "illustrators, tattooists, animators, painters, and photographers" — differentiated from both the billionaire classes of the crypto scene as much as the so-called traditional art world. When Lima ostensibly pulled the plug on H=N, its community collaborated to save each other's work and keep the spirit of the site alive, migrating H=N's data to a new server. See: Anny Shaw, "Founder of Hic et Nunc pulls the plug on the leading digital art marketplace—but its half a million NFTs live on," The Art Newspaper, 16 November 2021, https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2021/11/16/founder-of-hic-et-nunc-pulls-the-plug-on-the-leading-digital-art-marketplacebut-its-half-a-million-nfts-live-on; and M Plummer-Fernández, "Not another JPEG," M_Plummer-Fernández (personal website), 4 September 2021, https://www.plummerfernandez.com/works/not-another-jpeg/.
2. Casey Reas, "The Medium is the Medium" (curator's note), p1X3L, curated by Casey Reas, Feral File, August 2021, https://feralfile.com/exhibitions/p1x3l-n36/note.
3. There were and are other kinds of digital displays; I am therefore referring to the corporate hegemony of the (white) GUI (graphical user interface). For a history of the black screen through the lens of blackness, see: American Artist, "Dark Gooey Universe," unbag, Winter 2018.
4. It's telling that Apple's software that emulates natural light (stolen from the open source f.lux) is called "night shift," implying shift work, or work that is broken up into shifts across 24-hours, so that work never ceases.
5. Crary's Techniques of the Observer foregrounds this work but is more concerned with the historical formation of the Western/modern "observer," and thus the human eye and its relationship to viewing devices, medicinal and spectacular. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 1992).
6. Crary, Scorched Earth: Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World (London and New York: Verso, 2022), 102.
7. Ibid.
8. Krista Thompson, Shine: The Visual Economy of Light in African Diasporic Aesthetic Practices (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2015).
9. I want to extend a huge thanks to Claire Bishop and the students of her Spring '22 seminar "Attention-Internet!" at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. For this particular subject matter, conversations with Casey Berner, George Kan, Suzanne Oppenheimer, and Sinclair Spratley were formative. Thank you for thinking about light, screens, and community with me.
