LEGO VS. PIXELS

Lego bricks


Eboy


Invader

Invader, who prefers to remain anonymous, always appears masked in public to hide his identity. He is known to be ‘responsible for perhaps the most recognizable street art stunt of the last decades.’ (Lazarides, Artist - Invader, 2009)
He chose to use the pixelated aliens from Toshiro Nishikado’s infamous 1978 arcade game, Space Invaders. He started his invasion in Paris in 1998 by gluing the aliens made up of small coloured square tiles up on walls. These tiles represent pixels and his invasion has spread across 35 other cities around the world. One of the more prominent places where the tiles have been installed is on the Hollywood Sign. The first was placed on the letter D on December 31, 1999 and Invader has placed mosaics on other letters of the sign during his further trips to Los Angeles

This new form of street art is interesting to look at because it combines urban street culture and geek culture; the graffiti aspect of the urban culture and pixelated video game aspect of geek culture. During the email interview I conducted on 05 May 2010, when asked the reason why he chose Space Invaders as the main character of the project he answered: ‘I see them as a symbol of our era and the birth of modern technology, with video games, computers, the internet, mobile phones, hackers and viruses.’ (Invader, 05 May 2009)

Pixel art is something that emerged to the surface quite recently and is a great example to look at as it has a strong connection with geeks and technological revolution we experienced in past decades.
As the internet has entered our lives, many designers turned their vision to pixel graphics due to their fast-loading performance for overcoming bandwidth and web browser problems. (Lam, F., 2003)
A pixel is defined as a minute area of illumination on a computer screen, one of many from which an image is composed. (Compact Oxford English Dictionary, 1991) This smallest unit of geekiness is now used in pop art by artists such as Eboy. Eboy uses pixels to create his world designed for computer screen. He has collaborated with Adidas, Arena magazine, The Guardian, DKNY, MTV, Levi's Honda, etc. (Eboy, About, http://hello.eboy.com/eboy/about/)
Today’s pixel graphic not only caters for low-resolution desktop icons and low-bandwidth internet connections. It has become a new form of art. It is often used to illustrate clean, playful and impressive images as well as giving a certain kind of minimalistic expression…They are no longer framed inside digital boundaries and will extend to tangible media with a three-dimensional form in the near future. (Lam, 2003, p.6)

And I think i'll be interesting and fun to bring pixel's characteristics into real life, possibly into the fashion world because fashion is about visual presentation, and without pixels there won't be any images.