Mikhael SubotzkyPixel Interface, 2013
Pixel Interface magnifies and combines a single line of pixels from three video plinths, each playing a different source:
(a) documentation of the 1967 Hubel and Wiesel neuroscience experiment that first mapped how individual neurons in the eye respond to the direction of movement;
(b) a downloaded animation censored by accumulating white lines that progressively obscure the instruments of violence shown; and
(C) a reworked version of Subotzky's own earlier stop-motion piece Don't Even Think of It (2012), similarly censored until its visual and narrative coherence dissolves.
Custom-built microscopes on each plinth feed into HD cameras and projectors, throwing the three magnified pixel streams onto a single rear-projection screen with a 33% overlap, so that red, green and blue mix in real time to produce shifting, flickering fields of colour. The effect is close to stained glass.
The work is in part a tribute to Paul Sharitz's Shutter Interface (1975)and poses questions as to whether abstraction can adequately represent violence, or whether reducing it to pure colour and flicker only deepens the problem of complicity between the image maker and what the image contains.
Included in All the World's Futures, the 56th Venice Biennale (2015), curated by Okwui Enwezor.
