The pixel, the dot

A growing discussion has risen like a tide in recent years—especially in the last two. It may not be the most urgent debate on the planet right now, but it will be sooner than most people realize. I’m talking about AI, and the light-speed permanence of its iteration toward horizons we barely suspect.

I won’t extend this reflection to every human activity; as usual, I’ll restrain it to the visual arts. In that field, AI has erupted into cinema, “painting,” digital art, photography, advertising—an extension of art, if you ask me—and into the art + science frontier: immersive works, VR, interactive experiences, music, and sound design bound to them.

Every second, thousands of expressions and finished artworks are released into the wild through social media and the internet.

Super Mario Bros, Nintendo, 1985

AI platforms iterate almost weekly, releasing new versions and increasingly complex tools, expanding both outcomes and perception itself.

All this brings me to a single, resulting question—one I don’t intend to answer, only to release into the void: are video games also part of visual art expression?

Let us not forget that art, like many other human practices, begins at the smallest possible departure point: a pencil dot.

Its equivalent in the digital and virtual realm is the pixel.

Food for thought!

The pixel, the dot