Materiality of pixels
Juan Colombo
Antwerp
About
i'm a visual designer and artist, i like digital artifacts and getting lost in the keyboard shortcuts of blender. In 2020 I co-founded Borlottee, a chaotic art collective. Among the things we do, we designed cloth labels for trees and the new and updated edition of briscola playing cards. Now we are busy mixing from the roof of a '98 sharan.
In 2025 I enrolled in the master of Visual Arts in Sint-Lucas Antwerpen, where I've been busy exploring different way to relate with the non-human, in a journey between gardening and cyberspace.
Project
Materiality of pixels focuses on the dialectical relationship between the digital image and the hardware that displays it. Uncovering the inner complexity of the monitor breaks the clear boundary of the object, it expose the assemblage of interconnected systems that interact with each other.
The monitor-object is an illusion held together by a fragile ecosystem of matter, supply chains, manufacturing, protocols and standards. The monitor-object then comes together both by the physical and chemical properties of matter that is constructed with and by human engineering and designing, nudging matter to follow the strict protocols necessary to display an image for the human gaze.
But monitors and displays are not neutral, they shape us as much as we shape them. Deconstructing the monitor, freeing it from its plastic enclosure, the technological-object it's challenged. The boundaries of the monitor are blurred, we cannot point to a finite object anymore, but only to a bunch of interconnected components, second guessing where the systems start or end.