Minimal – Pixel art, slow art, Geoff Davis
The program draws a single pixel onscreen, to create a white block, very slowly. This was an antidote to 1980s obsessions with speed and realism (SIGGRAPH, CGI, games). It takes nearly 2 years to fill the screen with individual pixels.
Pixel Art appeared for the first time in Minimal (1984) – a single pixel is the focus of attention.
LIVE
It is now running for the full 1.87 year term, to fill the entire screen at the slowest rate on the micro I was using (ZX Spectrum 48k). Shown below the recoded version running on a dedicated tablet, doing the full 2 years, starting at the Drivers exhibition, CAS, London in 2025. The 1984 original was absolutely minimal, just the pixels, with no explanatory text. The original screens are shown further down the page.
This is on dedicated hardware at British Computer Society’s BCS office in Moorgate London, in the Computer Arts Society CAS exhibition ‘Drivers’. Minimal will fill the screen in late 2027. It runs for 672.7 days drawing 45,056 pixels.
The running program will be at half way at pixel 22523 on day 336.35 which is 19th August 2026 at 21.41 GMT.
Minimal was in the collection of art programs (with a menu) in MA2 Various Unusual Events (Geoff Davis 1984).
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Minimal started with one pixel on 17 September 2025 at noon UTC and will finish around 2 years later in late 2027, after drawing all 45,056 pixels of the original micro computer screen. The new display on dedicated hardware at CAS at British Computer Society Moorgate is below.
Drivers exhibition, Computer Arts Society, London.
This was the first time drawing an 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.
“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.
Minimal was also an early example of deliberately slow art.
After drawing one pixel, the program waits over 21 minutes. The pause is 65536 cycles (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).
It doesn’t all have to be game imagery or maths-based patterns. There was an example of glitch art on the MA2 collection, called Carry On Computing.
Slow Art: “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.