RESOLUTION magazine #0: The Pixel

This issue of RESOLUTION looks at the most elementary building block of a digital image. It is nerdy, utterly unsexy, but nevertheless has remained enigmatic. This issue looks at pixel from a technical, ethical, artistic, and and economic viewpoint.

list of contributors: Jonas Beerts, Doris Boerman, Caszimir Cleutjens, David Denil, Elias Heuninck, Kyveli Lignou-Tsamantani,
Lev Manovich, Giacomo Mercuriali, William J. Mitchell, Alvy Ray Smith

Essays:

• Giacomo Mercuriali discusses how computer-generated pictures, such as appeared to defame Jamel Kashoggi, rely on the same ideas of veracity as in traditional photography.
• Kyveli Lignou-Tsamantani looks at the relationship between pixelisation, atrocity images and spectatorship through the work what remains by belit sağ, offering an ethical reading of the use of pixels.
• Alvy Ray Smith, co-founder of Pixar Studios, has given permission to republish his memo that technically lays out what a pixel is. He is currently working on the Biography of the Pixel, which is now seven years in the making.
• The section “Devices” enters the discussion about the pixel from the viewpoint of a camera, the Digital Bolex. Caszimir Cleutjens discusses this spastically anachronistic device with filmmaker Tanguy De Donder, who used the camera for his film Je suis un Monstre.
• The section “Debates” restages a timely debate. Caszimir Cleutjens has put Lev Manovich and William J. Mitchell in a direct confrontation regarding the question if digital images are fundamentally different from traditional photography.

Artist’s contributions:

• The Unregistered Image by David Denil consists of screenshots of images that the artists’ iPhone automatically registered. Blurry as they are, these images stand for the opposite of what would be considered a “powerful” image in the traditional sense of “conventional” social documentary photography.
• In Paper Trails by Jonas Beerts, we see excerpts from a single edition book in which the artist dissects the architecture of digital imagery in general and specifically the pixel from within the confines of his bedroom.
• The project Lightkeeping by Elias Heuninck is made with rudimentary digital camera, with a resolution of only one pixel. It shoots a pulse of laser light to determine the distance from the camera to the scene. As Heuninck says: “Whereas the conventional camera is a darkroom that captures light, this camera is more like a lighthouse.”
• Visual artist Doris Boerman has created the multiple Screen 08, which is sold with the issue in an edition of 50.