PIXEL GODS. Taiwán digital
Kuang-Yi Ku, Simple Noodle Art & Team9

Throughout the twentieth century, the basic unit in digital image, the pixel, has gained prominence as a reference in an aesthetic derived from technological limitation. Supported by Taiwan’s Ministry of Culture and the Economic and Taipei’s Trade Office in Spain, L.E.V. Matadero opens the exhibition PIXEL GODS. Taiwán digital at Nave 0, a selection of works by Taiwanese artists who reformulate the pixel concept from the culture of adoration and reverence our postdigital societies shows towards digital image, resolution and definition in pictures and videos, as well as its implications in contemporary creation.

In the piece Gods of Water, artist Kuang-Yi Ku explores human transformations, our desires and emotions, in the context of technological progress and the climate crisis, inviting the public to reflect on their current relationship with their surroundings through speculative future scenarios. The project is composed of three distinct gods: the ‘God of Technology’, who uses his power as a supercomputer to dominate, enslave and control society; the ‘God of Weapons’, created by the overwhelming combat capabilities of meteorological weapons coupled with the dark minds of global conspiracy theorists; and the ‘God of Rumours’, personified in digital idols and influencers who become dangerous opinion leaders by spreading climate change denialist discourses.

The video installation How To Improve Photo Quality by AI | Noise Reduction, Super-resolution Tutorial by the art collective Simple Noodle Art tells the story of a specific pixel: the blue pixel that represented the planet earth in the famous photo A Pale Blue Dot, taken in 1990 by the Voyager 1 probe from a distance of 6 billion kilometers. That pixel, turned into a god for representing the planet earth in its entirety, vanishes when a digital image enhancement system by means of Artificial Intelligence processes applies its algorithms and considers it visual noise, a statistically inopportune pixel, of dubious interest in the global perspective of the photograph. A poetic piece to show that the human species is capable of erasing all meaning from the existence of our planet.

The exhibition is completed with the video game Words Game by creative studio Team9, an interactive project in which each visual element is made up of giant pixels representing traditional Chinese characters. The pixel becomes therefore the constituent element of communication, ahead of written language. In the piece, images are transformed into texts and texts into images through a new concept of visual unity that represents multiple layers at the same time and is a world in itself, as it inherits the symbolism, tradition and history of the universe of Chinese writing used on the island of Taiwan.