Start Date
7-3-2014 11:30 AM
End Date
7-3-2014 1:00 PM
Description
In the beginning of the 20th century Kazimir Malevich, an important Russian avant-garde artist and thinker, created his iconic painting Black Square, which represented what he believed to be the basic unit of visual reality. Around the same time Wassily Kandinsky, another important Russian artist renown for his experiments in purely abstract art, discovered his own unit of representation – the point. This paper examines how the visual and philosophical aspects of contemporary digital reality, reflected in the aesthetic of the pixel, could have sprung from the early 20th century experiments in assembling the visible world from its basic units, the square and the point. Vitalist and Neo-vitalist ideas are investigated in relation to the proto-pixel works of Malevich and Kandinsky and to their digital descendant.
The Proto-Pixel Art of Malevich and Kandinsky: Black Square, Its Digital Descendant and Neo- Vitalist Impulse
In the beginning of the 20th century Kazimir Malevich, an important Russian avant-garde artist and thinker, created his iconic painting Black Square, which represented what he believed to be the basic unit of visual reality. Around the same time Wassily Kandinsky, another important Russian artist renown for his experiments in purely abstract art, discovered his own unit of representation – the point. This paper examines how the visual and philosophical aspects of contemporary digital reality, reflected in the aesthetic of the pixel, could have sprung from the early 20th century experiments in assembling the visible world from its basic units, the square and the point. Vitalist and Neo-vitalist ideas are investigated in relation to the proto-pixel works of Malevich and Kandinsky and to their digital descendant.
