Blog
People and Pixels
Written by Jimmy
First, the music. This is about Pixels so we’ll play the Pixies. A stretch, but you can’t go wrong with the Pixies:
So this all started by looking for great photographs of 2012. Here’s a link. Quite lovely photos but I was particularly struck by the ‘people pixels’, most notably this photo of Breakfast at Tiffany’s era Audrey Hepburn:
Really lovely. Went to find more on it to discover this is all the work of Craig Alan. Here’s more photos and a nice little article. More about Craig and his photos can be found here. But that let to the whole ‘people as pixels’ thing, which led to North Korea and all their work. Here’s a great blog and a couple photos: click here.
How quickly you move from the lovely and freewheeling expression of Craig’s work (the people almost look like that coincidentally arrived at Hepburn’s image like the proverbial monkeys finally typing out Shakespeare) to the totalitarian use of people as pixels of the North Korea work.
So I investigate further. If you search on ‘pixel people’ you get two wildly different sets of images. The first is the people done as pixels, which is very similar to the work we cited a few months back on cartoon characters done as lego bricks (in fact there is a lot of repeat). You know the drill:
Which is pretty much like our Lego blog we did awhile back:
Or you search and find all the totalitarian stuff of big bad Asian (always Asian since the Soviet Union collapsed) using people as pixels to create elaborate statements in support of the regime. North Korea above or even Beijing below (remember how insignificant our little double decker bus looked in 2008?
So People and Pixels gets you cut little needlepoint/lego drawings of cartoon animals or leads you to a massive online discussion of totalitarian states. What other phrases do this? Well, a search for Bush Bloopers leads to some pretty heavy discussions about the Iraq War (or some pretty awful porn), but it also leads you to this (time to turn off the Pixes now):
Kind of a needlepoint/lego cartoon? I like to think so.
Jimmy