Traffic as Data #3

PIXEL GRAIN by Patrick Lichty is a collection of 128 photographs taken with a wristwatch camera. In the early 2000s, long before the iPhone, Patrick Lichty documented the world secretly with a low-resolution wristwatch camera, a Casio WQV-1. The photographs revealed a candid, often uncanny landscape of pixelated reality. Does the digital eye see more clearly than our own? Do these pixels remind us of film grain?

Lichty explores reality in the early digital age, from Ground Zero to eccentric oil wells decorated like butterflies.

"With PIXEL GRAIN, coming from a project called 8 BITS OR LESS, I had this little Casio WQV-1 wristwatch camera. I began thinking of a panoptic society in which surveillance and sous-veillance (grassroots observation). I also think of a quote by Paul Virilio: 'There are eyes everywhere/There is no blind spot left.' Before Androids and iPhones, I wondered what it meant to have eyes all over us, always watching. Also, what image would I get from my wrist instead of a more formal phone or conventional camera? Having the camera mounted on my wrist gave me a different perspective.

Additionally, the fact that the images were generated by the phone (120 x 120 pixels, 16 shades of gray, and highly compressed) meant that the images were crude. The formal nature of these images made me think about the desire for high resolution in digital images, and I wanted to resist this, as the pictures had a charm. Also, the compression had a formal quality that reminded me of film grain and was something I didn't want to correct.

Lastly, and I am recently more comfortable with this, is my lifelong battle with severe eye issues like cataracts, retinitis pigmentosa, and glaucoma. These have affected my vision throughout my life, and using the wristcam also reflected on this existential state."

– Patrick Lichty