Description
Pixel Mother: Xanthopsia 166:
Conceptual & Philosophical Synthesis of the Work
"Pixel Mother" is part of a subrealist and unconventional reinterpretation of Van Gogh's Portrait of the Artist's Mother, merging ancestral pictorial gestures with digital regeneration. This hybrid piece—acrylic, marble dust on wood, photographed and reanimated through frame-by-frame animated sequences—doesn't simply reinterpret: it symbolically reactivates the maternal figure as an archetype of genesis, transposed into the digital age.
1. The Mother as Original Matrix & First Pixel
The title "Pixel Mother" creates a profound semantic shift: the mother is no longer just Van Gogh's mother, but becomes a metaphysical and technological entity, a digital Pacha Mama whose fundamental generative unit is the pixel.
- The pixel as the primitive cell of the digitally visible, the starting point of all digital representation.
- Marble dust evokes terrestrial minerality, opposed and fused with virtuality—a reminder that the digital also has its energetic and algorithmic materiality.
- The mother thus becomes a dual principle: biological origin and data source, flesh and code, human memory and artificial memory.
2. Xanthopsia & Altered Perception: A Digital Utopia in the Dark
The Xanthopsia collection—yellow vision—serves here as a conceptual and perceptive filter. Van Gogh himself saw the world through chromatic disturbances; here, yellow becomes a metaphor for digital light, that of screens, interfaces, rendering layers.
- "Altered vision" is not pathological, but augmented vision, capable of discerning in the darkness (the opacity of reality? existentialist angst?) a positive glow: that of digital recreation.
- The duality is no longer simply color/shadow, but flesh/pixel, human gaze/machine vision.
3. Subrealism & Hybridization of Media: Rereading as Regeneration
My approach—photographed physical painting + minimalist digital animation—is a powerful cultural act, aiming to create semantic bridges between traditional and digital art:
- Photography captures gesture, texture, accident—traces of the human.
- Digital animation and digital errors (glitch) introduce algorithmic movement, a resumption of control by the machine, a looped rereading, like a code that constantly recompiles itself.
- This oscillation between fixity and movement, between human and technology, echoes Van Gogh's tensions: stability/madness, order/disorder, nature/rupture.
4. Philosophy of the "First Pixel" & New Digital Humanism
"Mother Pixel" summons a digital ontology where:
- The pixel is established as a philosophical principle: a minimal unit of meaning, an atom of representation, a tipping point between the real and the virtual. - The mother becomes an allegory of Data: a matrix that gives birth to digital identities.
- We find echoes of resistance theory (Deleuze), the quantification of the self (Sadin), and the idea that the digital is a new regime of visibility and being.
- It is a post-medium practice (Krauss) where painting becomes data, and data becomes a contemplative experience.
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Conclusion: A Digital Archaeology of the Gaze
"Mother Pixel" is a metaphysical proposition on how the digital reconfigures our archetypes. The mother is no longer a portrait, but a generative principle, an original interface between the biological and the technological. By reactivating Van Gogh through the digital lens, I don't just celebrate his modernity—I update it in a post-digital condition, where yellow vision becomes a symbol of a new lucidity: seeing the world and oneself through the prism of the machine, without losing the sensory power of the human gesture.
This work is a laboratory—as painting was for Van Gogh—where the permanent recomposition of the visible and the sensible is at play in the age of algorithms and screens.
Tribute to Van Gogh : « Portrait of the artist's mother »
Original in : Norton Simon Museum
Digital art version :
3840 x 2160 px / 4K MP4 / 266 Mo / 15 fps / 1/1 édition