Life Inside a Pixel - Expo 13th of October

KochxBos Gallery 13th of October - 3rd of November

Reality still has more pixels than the screen of your iPhone.

We live in an increasingly technological reality. A reality, which gets experienced more and more not through observing the world around us through our own eyes, but instead through the screens of our smartphones. Reality is becoming a collection of data and pixels, nicely fitting inside a data-driven box. And all those reality-boxes are getting isolated, since technological algorithms want us to stay inside our own box - the so called filter bubble. Or is it a box bubble? It seems the perfect time to come out of the box!

Every journey of a thousand realities starts with a single pixel.

I did come out of the box. I literally had my coming out when I left the big black box that was my entire reality during Burning Man a year ago. For the whole week of the Solipmission project I was locked up inside a big black box in the scorching desert heat. Our small Solipmission crew of three attempted to depict the outside world based purely upon what visitors told us, without ever seeing it with our own eyes: literally experiencing reality through the eyes of hundreds of others.

The missing pixel of Reality.

It was probably my most intense experience ever: a Solipmission Impossible. Living inside the box felt like living inside a missing pixel of reality - a glitch in the Matrix. (take the Red Pixel or the Blue Pixel). After returning to Amsterdam Reality I crashed, closed the curtains, and did not open them for an entire week. I needed to lock myself up in my own reality to process all that had happened. Like a space traveller or a deep-sea diver need to decompress, adjusting to another reality was definitely a process. 

Survival of the box-fittest - those who fit best inside the box.

As part of the recovery process I started to paint: a way of exploring and digesting everything that had happened inside the box, but could not be expressed in words. I painted boxes. Small ones. Big ones. Sometimes filled with colorful, surreal life-forms living within the strict box boundaries. Sometimes filled with people, often naked and vulnerable. Grey totalitarian box worlds with no escape. Colorful worlds made out of boxes with an occasional box instead of the sun rising over the horizon. 

How will Reality look like if everything and everyone will be fitted inside a box? Is it possible to climb out of our reality box? Or do we just end up in another one surrounding us after freeing ourselves from the current box? And another one after that? Like an endless matryoshka of realities.

What will happen to us when boxes and pixels become the dominant lifeforms of our planet?

How does Life inside a pixel look like?