Rubikcubism is a site that includes a collection of icons, paintings, and photographs redone in pixels. However the pixels are made from the individual squares of a Rubik’s cube. The process starts with the original painting or icon transferred digitally into pixels. Then the artist incorporates this into a collection of Rubik’s cubes. The works range from replications of high art such as Edouard Manet’s “Luncheon on the grass” and Ingres’ “La Grande Odalisque,” to popular culture icons such as Pacman, Mario and Clockwork Orange.
In the translation of paintings to pixels, the image becomes abstracted. This is an extreme example of how the quality of work is dependent on the pixels. Many of the pictures are undecipherable up close but easy to recognize in their thumbnails. In this era, pixels are almost synonymous with digital media. A pixel on a computer screen or bitmap image can be very allusive but the Rubik cube gives the object tangibility. The works on this site are not digital but I believe that they have such a strong relationship to the digital format because of their use of pixels that it is almost the same as a bitmap image printed to physical form. However, in this case the image is constantly going back and forth between the digital and traditional media.
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