Details from Michael Bell-Smith's video, Top of the World, at Foxy Production, in the group exhibition "GEO," which runs through February 8, 2005.

Michael Bell-Smith 3

The video begins with an aerial perspective looking down on a videogame landscape (sort of reminiscent of the old Intellivision tank battle terrain, but it could be a lot of things from that era). Directional arrows invade the middle ground and...


Michael Bell-Smith 2

...after passing over, under, and around each other they begin to dissolve into painterly sprays of pure pixelation--a gorgeous effect, but not too gorgeous. It looks like a specific set of commands to "break down" as opposed to a one-click Photoshop filter; don't know if any, or how much, custom programming was required and don't care particularly. Eventually the screen fills with a succulent allover abstraction that could be Monet's Water Lilies a la Bit-Rot.


Michael Bell-Smith

This detail showing the initial breakdown into pixels probably looks fuzzy in Safari--another browser is recommended to see this scaled up image super-sharp.



In the gallery, the video is displayed on an LCD screen directly from the computer. My only quibble is I miss seeing this type of imagery on the big clunky CRT picture tube, as a similar work of Bell-Smith's was displayed last summer in the Infinite Fill Group Show. Ideally when he has a solo exhibit we can see his work with a variety of formats and hardware. Also recommended is a music piece on Bell-Smith's blog that is a kind of marathon sequencer ditty--curious to see what happens with that if it reaches the projected 74 minutes.

- tom moody 1-28-2005 11:51 pm

pretty positive we are looking at the hills and dales of Dragon Warrior
- kevin (guest) 2-01-2005 1:41 pm