PIXELATOR

Craft & Design
PIXELATOR

Make 479
In NYC there are huge power hungry TV screens above subway entrances that play ads for reality TV shows, and well, other reality TV shows, 24 hours a day 7 days a week- they’re not used for public service or weather, word of the day, teaching people the metric system or to say things like the trains are delayed — but some are now being turned into art, the site shows you how to make your own too.

Pixelator is an unauthorized on-going video art performance collaboration with the New York City Metropolitan Transit Authority, Clear Channel Communications, and its selected artists.

Since 2003, the MTA has made available for exhibition purposes 80 LED screens located at subway entrances across New York City. Unfortunately, the high cost of exhibiting (an estimated $274,000 per month per screen) prevents most artists from having access to these facilities. While the MTA’s effort to create more opportunities for video art exhibition in public spaces is to be commended, selected works remain wholly fixated on commercial goods and media conglomerate events, a short-sighted curatorial choice that regrettably ignores the full potential of these promising exhibition spaces.

In an attempt to broaden the scope of MTA’s video art series, Pixelator takes video pieces currently on display and diffuses them into a pleasant array of 45 blinking, color-changing squares. Since the project is an anonymous collaboration, the resulting video is almost entirely unplanned and unanticipated, with the original artists helping to create new works of art without any knowledge of their participation.

(Translation: Pixelator turns those ugly, blinding video billboard ads into art.)

PIXELATOR – [via] Link.

Related:
Pixalator… Turn the TV into art – Link.

4 thoughts on “PIXELATOR

  1. chadvavra says:

    dang. $6.35 a minute.
    Too bad you can’t force a person to actually watch them.

  2. cheesy says:

    God I hate “artsy” writeups like that.

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