Pixel Gods. Taiwán digital

The basic unit of the digital image, the pixel, gained special prominence throughout the 20th century as a reference to an aesthetic shaped by technological limitations. With the support of Taiwan's Ministry of Culture and the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Spain, L.E.V. Matadero presents the exhibition PIXEL GODS. Digital Taiwan in Nave 0, a selection of works by three Taiwanese artists that reimagine the pixel from the perspective of the reverence and worship culture that our post-digital societies exhibit towards the digital image, its resolution, and the definition of photos and videos, as well as their 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 audience to reflect on their current relationship with the environment 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 weather weapons combined with the dark minds of global conspiracy theorists; and the "god of rumors," personified in digital idols and influencers who become dangerous opinion leaders by spreading denialist narratives about climate change.

The video installation How To Improve Photo Quality by AI | Noise Reduction, Super-resolution Tutorial by the artistic collective Simple Noodle Art tells the story of a specific pixel: the blue pixel that represented planet Earth in the famous photo Pale Blue Dot, taken in 1990 by the Voyager 1 probe from a distance of 6 billion kilometers. That pixel, deified for representing Earth in its entirety, disappears when a digital image enhancement system, using Artificial Intelligence processes, applies its algorithms and deems it visual noise, a statistically irrelevant pixel of dubious interest in the global perspective of the photograph. A poetic piece that shows how humanity is capable of erasing all meaning from the existence of our planet.

The exhibition concludes with the video game Words Game by the creative studio Team9, an interactive project in which each visual element is composed of giant pixels representing traditional Chinese characters. The pixel thus becomes the constitutive element of communication, surpassing written language. In this piece, images transform into texts and texts into images through a new concept of visual unit that represents multiple layers at once, embodying a world in itself, inheriting the symbolism, tradition, and history of the universe of Chinese writing used on the island of Taiwan.