Solange Adum Abdala

Picture Element is a practice-based artistic research in which the pixel is made evident, through the intentional synthesis of the image, in order to question the relationship between quantity and quality in the market of digital photography technologies.

By drastically decreasing the resolution and interpolating toward reduction, the pixel, an acronym for Pixel x Element, shifts the viewer’s attention from the photographed referent to the entity that constitutes the photograph. In the images and the video, its most elemental composition is revealed, a grid of squares of the same size, each with a solid colour, celebrating the pixel as the minimal cell of the digital medium and as a carrier of colour capable of intrinsically conveying sensations. This decision critiques the current logic of consumption that associates definition and quality with high numerical values that exceed our mental capacity to account for them and to relate to colour from a quantitative standpoint. As Flusser notes, “photography is an apparatus programmed to produce numerical combinations,” yet from the arts there is an intention to generate tension within that programming. By nullifying its numerical density, the work detaches technical photography from its conventional figurative and denotative function, placing it within the territories of the abstract and the non-figurative. This operation demonstrates that photography, even as a medium historically associated with mimesis, can be reconfigured as an autonomous field of perception.

The pixel also participates in the construction of a collective memory through the internet and virtual platforms. Picture Element is situated at this threshold, restoring to the digital image its sensory and collective character, questioning current criteria of quality in the technical image that are tied to technological consumption, where more numerical information is equated with greater aesthetic value.