Looking at Pixelated Images: A Deal with the Devil?
Remembering the quality of quality.
Nuance is everything
This article explores the nuanced and often uneasy relationship between digital images and material reality. Rather than dismissing technological developments or romanticising the past, it investigates the ontological and aesthetic differences between painted and pixelated images. I honour embodied perception and unique human creativity, while remaining acutely aware of the seductive power and convenience of digitisation. The stakes are higher than mere preference – they touch on what it means to create, perceive, and remain truly awake in a world increasingly rendered in code.
The Past or the Real Future?
I am aware the following may seem a bit grumpy and even wedded to the past. I’ll have to risk that because this article suggests that computerised images are, like painted images, removed from their original material and direct “first” experience (for example, looking at a flower or a person’s face). But in the case of computerised images, they are even further removed from that original source and, through their essential technical nature, employ a kind of benevolent deception, beyond the level of our normal sight. But what I am mostly focusing on is that pixels and oil paint are powerfully different, not one better than the other, and that those differences have consequences for our consciousness.
So, look away now if you will get irritated with the view that pixel pictures are essentially illusions. Keep reading if you feel this to be true and would like to embrace that illusion in a more healthy and self-aware way.
Atoms, Illusions and Artistic Integrity
We can easily forget that atoms are not really little red and blue balls of finest size, joined together with minuscule match sticks. They are theoretical models, even metaphors for what is really there. Philosophers have battled down the ages about whether we can know the “thing in itself” that is “really out there” or whether the essence of things will always elude our subjective selves.
But no, an oil or watercolour painting under a microscope will not resolve itself into a series of tiny balls of colour, or little jigsaw pieces. An oil painting is not made up of a billion pixels, flashing on and off at the speed of wow.
Paint, Pixels and the Power of the Unique
When you plunge your brush into a pot of green acrylic and then dash it onto a canvas, you have made the world slightly differently from what it was before. There is no splash quite like yours. The “quality” of your particular quality will be utterly unique.
A Billion Pixels…
Not so with a billion pixels, even if the look to our physical eyes, unaided by magnifying technology, appears to be the same as paint.
This isn’t intended as a moral judgement (though there is a moral feel to it). It is just the way it is. Pixelation is a rendering of reality, painting is a creation of it. I’ll try to justify that outrageous statement in a moment.
Interestingly there is nothing you can do about it, even if you wanted to. Paint is always infinite in terms of its variability on the page. Pixelation is always finite to the number of pixels (though variation in light does add another intriguing dimension in both cases).
The Infinite Quality of Quality
When looking at a picture rendered in paint, we are staring at infinity. Even if our senses on the surface are fooled by a copied picture, I believe we have a deeper sense experience going on that does “know” the different qualities of the finite and the infinite. We encounter something that is unique at a fundamental level. When looking at a picture rendered in pixels, we stare at the finite and the sense of infinity is illusory. We are either being kidded, or kidding ourselves.
One way of staying conscious when looking at pixelated images is to know this, and hold it awake within us. These pictures may be beautiful, may look utterly real, may make us laugh or cry, and they will have enormous value as artistic expressions, or as attempts to “capture” reality, but they are, at core, finite. They have much quality, but little or no “quality” to their quality in terms of being creations of infinite possibility. They are creations of finite possibility. When I look at a pixelated photo I encounter a simplification that has exchanged infinity for the finite.
In the finite, no matter how complex, I no longer enter the realm of mystery, for there are no things in-between the one and the zero, the on and the off, the dots or the squares, not even empty spaces. The binary possibility can multiply to such an extent that it fools the senses into a perception of “reality” – a reality so real that it is a bit like entering another world, a realm so similar to our own that it hardly matters to us. It is a virtual but seemingly real and highly compelling world. Why split hairs over the difference?
Yet what if the difference between the multiplied finite and the elusive infinite, though apparently sensually identical, were all and everything to who we are?
One Step Removed…
A painting of a field of poppies is not only one step removed from the original, it is also a new reality in its own right – a kind of species of one. A pixelated photograph of the same field is also removed and has unique qualities, but it is not a species of one; each pixel is a generic building block. It is about as unique as a jigsaw puzzle, replicable in its entirety, and at heart, unoriginal, unable to transform the infinite possibility that lies there, waiting to emerge. It is a kind of simplified record of what is there, a summary, a gloriously complex spreadsheet. But there are no spaces in between the ones and zeros, indeed no space for mystery.
Try This…
When you look at a computerised picture, look away for a moment, perhaps close your eyes, and imagine what you feel and think the picture might look like if it had just been painted, the paint itself still wet on the canvas. Or imagine (if it is a scene) the spaces in between that the picture cannot capture – just a hint, even at a micro level, a wisp of colour, an accidental slip of the brush, even a stain of a salted tear of the artist. Then look back, enjoy both images, value them both for what they are, but do not confuse their essential truth with each other.
Or try this: Look at a digitised photo. Then turn away and look at something physical, perhaps the sky or your hand. Say this to yourself: this hand cannot be resolved to ones and zeros, there’s something essentially different about it. This picture is an illusion; I can enjoy it for what it is, but I shouldn’t confuse it with the infinite possibility of what I see with my eyes when looking at my hand. For the price of this simplicity is that I fall asleep to the quality of quality!
Or even try this. If you’ve been looking at pictures on a computer for an hour or more, go out and take a fifteen-minute walk. Stop here and there and look at things in the physical world. Look for a minute or two at a leaf, a cloud in the sky, or even the paint marking a parking space. Just look, observe, let the image impress itself upon you. And be aware it isn’t made up of a million dots. It is different. Just different.
Technical Wizardry
Digitised pictures are not “bad”. The technical wizardry they present is as breathtaking as a master painter who can create stunning copies of original paintings. And we can use computer software to create compelling and fabulous art. But the building blocks, we should never forget, are finite ones. The pixel is a departure from infinite possibility into a world where we trade that infinity for near copies. We get easy access, remarkable abilities to create, render, manipulate and recreate. As the technology develops, the number of pixels tries to fool us ever more (and succeeds if we let it) by claiming to come closer and closer to infinity, to complexity so high that it is as if infinity no longer matters.
But just hold this as a possibility at least: true infinity is transcendent, and it’s also where the human soul really lives. Give it up and you’ll be confusing your clothes for your skin.
When AI Makes It Worse: The Rise of Agentic Illusion
What happens when not just images but choices, emotions, and perceptions are filtered through an agentic AI – an artificial system that not only renders the world but acts on our behalf within it? The illusion becomes not just visual but existential. Agentic AI doesn’t merely replicate; it decides. It doesn’t only simulate infinity – it asserts authority over it. And that is a peril worth naming.
The digital picture may deceive the eye, but the agentic system deceives the will. It presents the finite as if it were the infinite – not just mimicking a brushstroke, but performing a decision, a mood, a gesture, and making it feel ours. When AI becomes creative agent, not just tool, the risk deepens. We are seduced into a version of uniqueness that is statistically derived. The infinite variability of the human gesture becomes a dataset. The raw wonder of chance becomes calculated elegance. And with each interaction, each preference it refines, it narrows possibility, even as it expands capability.
True creativity requires space for the unknown, the unrepeatable, the flawed, the holy accident. A brush slipping is not a glitch. It is an opening. Will AI ever understand that? Can it know what it is to smear a canvas and feel the soul lurch forward? Or will it just offer the perfect smudge and call it yours?
So …
Pixelated images, impressive as they are, lull us into a trade-off between the infinite and the finite, between mystery and mimicry. This is not a technophobic retreat on my part, but a cautionary meditation: to see the rendered world for what it is – a simulation of genuine substance. It is a reminder that creation, in its truest form, is not replication but revelation. And that, perhaps, the more powerful our illusions become, the more awake we must be to hold onto that depth, our perception, even our core humanity.
A few questions I am pondering…
What does it mean to perceive infinity through a finite medium?
How does knowing the technical origin of an image affect your emotional connection to it?
Can a digital artwork ever truly carry the authentic presence of its maker? (I don’t think so).
What happens to our sense of uniqueness when AI begins to generate images that feel original?
In what ways might your creative practice be altered by becoming more conscious of these distinctions?
Suggested further reading…
Berardi, F. (2015) Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide. London: Verso.
Benjamin, W. (2008) The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. London: Penguin.
Borgmann, A. (2010) Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life: A Philosophical Inquiry. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Chayka, K. (2020) The Longing for Less: Living with Minimalism. New York: Bloomsbury.
Crawford, M.B. (2015) The World Beyond Your Head: How to Flourish in an Age of Distraction. London: Penguin.
Flusser, V. (2011) Into the Universe of Technical Images. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Ihde, D. (1990) Technology and the Lifeworld: From Garden to Earth. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Pirsig, R.M. (2006) Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values. London: Vintage.
Shanken, E.A. (2014) Art and Electronic Media. London: Phaidon.
Turkle, S. (2011) Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. New York: Basic Books.