Minimal – Pixel art, slow art, Geoff Davis, 1984
Pixel Art appeared for the first time in Minimal (1984). The program drew a single pixel onscreen, to create a white block, but very slowly. This was an antidote to 1980s obsessions with speed and realism (SIGGRAPH, CGI, games).
This was the first time the individual PIXEL had been addressed as an art event in itself.
8-bit art was ‘state of the art’ for micro computers at the time, and the genre of “pixel art” and the term “pixelated” appeared in the 1990s as a nostalgic or naive style.
Minimal was also an early example of deliberatley slow art.
“There is no well known tradition of pixel art that differentiated between the deliberate placement of pixels or the aestheticization of individual pixels in contrast to other forms of digital painting or digital art. For this reason, one could argue that pixel art was not a recognized medium or artform…” Wikipedia.
After drawing one pixel, the program waits over 21 minutes. To fill the screen and complete the art takes nearly 2 years.
The pause is 65536 (longest pause on the micro computer graphics) divided by the frame rate (about 50.8 Hz) is 21.5 minutes. There are 256 x 176 pixels for a screen, so 45,056 pixel stages. Time is 45,056 x 21.5 minutes = 673 days, nearly 2 years (1.87 years).
First ever Pixel Art, as no one else was addressing the humble pixel. It doesn’t all have to be game imagery or maths-based patterns. Although there was an example of Math Art on the MA2 collection, called Carry On Computing.
Also first Slow Art – 2 years to finish pixelating the screen – “the initial slow food movement, and Carlo Petrini’s protest against the opening of a McDonald’s restaurant in the Piazza di Spagna, Rome, in 1986” – this was two years earlier.
40th Anniversary edition
There is a new version of this for modern computers. This has an additional HD version which fills the ‘standard’ 2025 screen of 1920×1080 (2,073,360 pixels). This takes 30,956 days or 85 years (84.812) to complete.