Pixel Painting

In a world obsessed with capturing the perfect moment, we often forget what lies beneath: Pixels . These tiny fragments of light that create an illusion of reality. Algorithms curate and manipulate what we see, yet most of us remain unaware of what is happening behind the code. There’s always a new “hack,” a shortcut to outsmart the system, but the truth remains: the digital world is a distortion, a carefully constructed version of what may never have existed.

Light Paintings began as an experiment with a 32×32 LED matrix and a beginners course in MicroPython. The process was simple: break down portraits into their most basic elements: light and data. Over time, the project evolved. Using what we learned from visually deconstructing digital images, we now reassemble them through paint. The work still has its foundations in MicroPython and digital reduction, but it has expanded into our broader studio practice: translating code into hues tints, shades and above all data into something tactile and human. What begins as a sequence of pixels becomes a physical artwork, grounded in craft rather than computation.

In the early stages, the project explored how we see vulnerable people: how we can be too close to understand their full complexity or so distant that they become a stereotype. Today, the work also reflects on memory. The more we rely on digital images to document our lives, the more our real experiences fade. Photos are compressed, filtered, and optimised to save online sever space. Thus further reducing and eroding our lived experience. Everything is smoothed over and simplified to a degree of of pixilation. Light Paintings asks us to consider what gets lost between the moment lived, the moment captured, and the moment remembered.