Computers do whatever you tell them to, even if you tell them to make a mistake.

There are some seemingly bad ideas behind Benjamin Berg’s exhibition I Can See the Pixels. For starters, everything is created using the 1980s-era GIF image format, which is hated by today’s computer programmers for its limited color palette and inefficient storage. Also, the source images are small and low-resolution. Worst of all, he forces his computer to use colors that are totally wrong, nowhere close to the ones it needs. What’s wrong with this picture?

Berg isn’t interested in doing things the “correct” way. He’s more curious about what happens when you do them incorrectly. He tries to misuse technology just enough to make it misbehave,
but not so much that it breaks down entirely. Finding the right amount of wrong is a delicate balance.

This GIF-based work requires countless screenshots and hours of sifting through those screenshots, cropping and resizing them, looking for the best mistakes, the most interesting failures.

Sometimes they don’t fail hard enough the first time and so he sends them back through for a second pass. Often only a small area is good enough and he crops everything else away. Finally, he takes his favorite failures and blows them up big. The pixels, once tiny and hard to spot, are now on display for all to see.

I Can See the Pixels features prints and large-scale projections of animated GIFs, accompanied by ambient plunderphonic music playing from two sets of speakers.

For more information, to stream/download music, or purchase art prints, visit animalswithinanimals.com/bent

 About the artist: Benjamin Berg is a multidisciplinary artist from Indianapolis. After making glitch music for several years, he started applying similar techniques to the visual arts in 2005, documenting his experiments on his blog. His writings from this period culminated in a series of highly influential and widely cited glitch art tutorials.

By making technologies misbehave, his work challenges the assumptions built into those technologies, assumptions which are often unstated and sometimes even unconscious.

He also releases music with his band Animals Within Animals, and solo under various names including stAllio! and Old Man Glitch.