Megapixel
This concept was born out of my Belfast Harbour Proposal. Since conceiving the project several months ago I have been experimenting with low resolution videography. I am intrigued by the subject, the magnification, macro-pixelation; the brilliant, shifting of colours within an individual pixel in a digital imaging device is an arresting phenomenon, especially when one considers the huge amounts of mathmetical data being processed and transferred in order that that pixel should display that hue, intensity and luminosity, at that moment.
We live in an era where the vast majority, of the first world, completely take for granted that their camera, or mobile phone, can take 5, 10 or 15 mega pixel photos and video, or that television and internet video is piped in HD, and a high percentage of households have at least one flat screen monitor/TV. This sculpture attempts to arrest this ingratitude for luxuriant imaging technology; I would like to encourage people to consider the meaning of the word “Megapixel” and the mathematical implications that this quantity of data holds for the processing and display of digital video and photography.
The danger for aesthetics in visual arts, and particularly in digital visualisation is that the “heterogeneous sensible” is everywhere. “The prose of everyday life becomes a huge, fantastic poem. Any object can cross the border and repopulate the realm of aesthetic experience.” So contrary to the belief that everything might become prosaic, the visual artist is confronted with the predicament that everything in the quotidian exchange rises to the level of art—”that the process of exchange, of crossing the border reaches a point where the border becomes completely blurred, where nothing, however prosaic, escapes the domain of art.” [Jacques Ranciere, The Aesthetic Revolution and its Outcomes.]
The screen will be made up of an array of RGB (fully adjustable colour) light-box panels. Each lightbox is an oversized pixel. The lightbox panels will be made from sandblasted, toughened glass. The sandblasting will disperse the light evenly over the whole panel and the toughened glass will make the sculpture vandal proof—an unfortunate but necessary measure for the city of Dublin.