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People love to leave their mark. Even the most timid of souls, has a graffiti artist inside them waiting to get out. PixelBoard empowers people to do this kind of doodling from the comfort of their smart phones and have it reflected back in heroic scale via video projection in public space… without the worry of being arrested for vandalism!
PixelBoard requires no drawing ability. This means anyone can and will do it. The limitations seem to encourage people, who can work collaboratively, competitively individually or in a group to participate in a shared creative spectacle stripped down the the most basic black and white pixels.
What is PixelBoard?
PixelBoard is a binary feedback application that empowers the “art viewer” to instead become an “art participant”. The German conceptualist Joseph Beuys said “Everyone is an Artist”. PixelBoard puts this into practice by facilitating the creative impulse of a person who might be in any physical location using their web enabled phone, tablet or computer. When a participant clicks one square of the 12 x 12 grid displayed on their device, this square changes from white to black or vice vesa, reflecting this change in real time on any device viewing PixelBoard on the web.
The formal historical aspect of PixelBoard is that of an exploded 1bit icon. In the early days of computing, icons were created by lighting or darkening single pixels that when grouped together created the illusion of an image. In fact all video displays still work on this principle. PixelBoard is displayed at an exaggerated scale for ironic effect and to increase the satisfaction of the participant. The gigantic size of the display removes PixelBoard from the scale of all things computer and locates the work in the material world at human scale, in human space.
PixelBoard has one foot in virtual space and one foot in physical space, taking best advantage of the conditions in each. People interacting with PixelBoard do so in hybrid space, in a place that employs technology to translate human agency collaboratively or competitively, individually or in a group.
Part artwork, part social sculpture and part software application, PixelBoard foregrounds and reflects back the ideas of the community of user-participants.