This project is a continuation of a Digital Art exhibition I did in 2001 at the Klaus Steinmetz gallery in San Jose, Costa Rica and Art Basel Miami. It originates from the start of my digital beginnings as the first digital art and design tutor at the University of Cape Town in 1992, creating digital art in Amsterdam in the early 90’s and becoming eArtist in 1997.
The direction of 2001 show in Costa Rica was to “Glorify the Pixel”. An introduction to digital art.
Back in those days when you mentioned digital art people could barely grasp even a lengthily explanation. This was the beginning of the time when as artists we had a new brush, when Pointillism became “Pixellism”.
Instead of Seurat’s many dots and subtleties I wanted to focus on the individual pixel and give the pixel its own meaning, its own life. The show wasn’t an in your face arrival on the scene “pixel” but rather encouraging the square like color points out of the works thereby still showing recognizable imagery to eager art lovers that they could relate to. It was the birthing an idea that the digital world is a world built on blocks or squares of different colors.
Still with all the coaxing and explaining it was a hard to relay in words the exciting new revelation which us early pioneers of the digital visual realm thought was a forward thinking tool of art revolution.
There were certainly some forward thinkers who became patrons and hold some early large format digital pieces that I produced. I nod my cap to you.
Covid has certainly allowed us all time to work on projects gathering cobwebs in the draw and now that technology and humanity has caught up after two decades and entered a new digital realm with a computer in every hand I feel that it is time to launch the next chapter of the visual art journey of the pixel.
I introduce: “Pixel”.
Following on the vein of Seurat, “De Stijl”, Mondrian and Albers (some others of course) I am unearthing the raw pixel and taking it solely for what it is. “It is, therefore it is”. This time however I am immortalizing each pixel in the realm of digital art and in the plastic arts by birthing it on the blockchain. Each pixel will exist in its own right.
I am taking each of the 24 bit “true color pixels” of which there are 16,777,217 and creating a digital artwork of a few chosen colors in the form of an NFT (Non-fungible token) and further am creating a physical artwork for them.
The NFT’s token ID is “PXEL” and are minted as ERC721 tokens on the Ethereum blockchain.
The physical plastic artworks for now are Oil on Canvas and ink on paper.
There are no editions. There is only one of each. 1/1. A digital token and a physical artwork.
The naming of the artworks is a long and thought provoking process and at the same time is the most fun I have had in a long time. I cannot name 16.7 millions colors so have setup a “Color suggestion” button for colors that do not have names and have not been minted.
So it up to you to find your favorite color, and name it. If your name is accepted then you can own it!
All of the accepted colors will be minted as a tokens, this will be your token and your color. You could be given the option of purchasing that token with an attached asset in the form of an original artwork, of which the choices could be a painting or print. This is an option you can choose when making the final purchase.
You can trade your token whenever you want by selling it to someone else but if you do sell it the new owner will be the person who has the option of the art asset attached to that token which is really your color that you chose and named, so please decide very carefully when selling a token as there is only one of that color.
I look forward to your input, support and involvement on this journey into the Pixel.
Have a colorful day!
eArtist