This week I was again struck by how much pixels have in common with the pointillist dots in paintings: small, atomic bits that together create an image through optical mixing: that is, the dots merge with distance to form an apparent continuity.
In DV all you have to work with are pixels, but in processing these dots, all sorts of things can happen that reveal their microscopic relation to the whole.
Compression artifacts are a hazard when working with any kind of digital feedback (just as with analog video) your signal can quickly degrade into a grid of blocks, related to the pixels they contain, and at the same time strangely independent of them. Suggesting a kind of blocky relationship between the minute (the pixel) and the shape of the screen itself.
This seems to be a way to get the real world outside the digital medium to play some role in the imaging produced through purely digital methods.
More on this later....
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