Pixels to the Max

My thesis studies the urban potential of pixels in digital content, which are quite literally the building blocks of our media-consumption and thus our hyperrealities. The project utilizes cellular automata as 3D representations of these pixels, where each cellular block embodies an individual image or piece of content. These automata, by nature, exhibit emergent complexity, randomness, and mass expansion—mirroring the algorithms and graphics fundamental to the internet and how we absorb massive amounts of information. I see this infinite growth as a kind of maximalism that can encapsulate everything: all forms of media– from high art and serious topics to utilitarian, low-budget advertisements and memes. Through this maximalism, we can examine how digital excess could become a kind of repetitive urbanism, or simply a user interface.