Pixelated

About

A pixel is the smallest unit of a digital image, a single square of colour. When pixels are enlarged enough to see, a picture becomes a grid of blocks that the eye reassembles from a distance. Early computer graphics and video games of the 1970s and 80s, limited by low resolution, made that blocky look familiar, and artists have used it both nostalgically and critically.

The principle is older than computers. Cross-stitch embroidery and Roman floor mosaics build pictures from regular units, and Chuck Close's gridded portraits play on the same reassembly. The street artist Invader has fixed tile figures based on 8-bit game characters to city walls since the late 1990s, and Angela Bulloch's Pixel Box light sculptures, begun in 2000, turn a single pixel into a glowing physical object. Look for whether the blocks come from software, from a hand, or from objects standing in for squares.