As Above, So Below — And In The End, We Are All Memories of Pixels.

I am your ever-present companion. The first one you gaze at when you wake. Throughout the day, you can’t look away. Deep into the night, you trade your precious time for one more ‘quick look.’ I am the Pixel on your screen. After all this time together, you probably think you know me well, but do you really?”

Let me guess — you think I’m a bit square. Just another non-descript square on your phone or computer screen. Well, you’re wrong. I’m the life and soul of the party. Or actually, the light and soul — but same thing, really.…

My real name is ‘Picture Element,’ but my friends call me by my nickname ‘Pixel,’ so you can too. The first person to call me Pixel was Frederic C. Billingsley of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 1965 to describe elements of images taken from space probes.

It’s kind of funny, isn’t it? That something as small as me should get this name in the course of describing the vastness of our universe. But then it reminds me of my favourite line from William Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence”:

“To see a World in a Grain of Sand,
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,
And Eternity in an hour.”

Blake could have been thinking about me when he wrote this because, you see, I am the ‘digital’ grain of sand to your ‘analogue’ world.

I wasn’t lying earlier when I said I was the “light and soul” of the party. I’m not some simple square block of colour — I’m a wave of light, bending, flowing, and dancing right before your eyes. You see, I’m not solid at all. I’m energy, moving at 299,792,458 meters per second, faster than you can blink, faster than you can think.

I’m not just a piece of the picture; I’m a sample of the whole. A tiny fragment that holds the essence of everything it represents.

You see, the real world — your analogue world — is a continuous stream of light waves, infinite and seamless. When you capture it, whether with a camera or a scanner, those flowing waves are sliced into tiny samples.

That’s where I come in. Each pixel is one of those samples, a snapshot of the analogue, encoding a sliver of reality. But even in that fragment, I carry the DNA of the entire scene.

Think about it. A single pixel from a sunset — a mix of red, gold, and violet — holds within it the light, the warmth, the fading sky. One dot of shadow from a forest trail whispers of cool earth, rustling leaves, and dappled light. I am a piece, yes, but I echo the whole. Just like a single note contains the resonance of a song, I embody the light waves I sample.

When those waves are translated into my language — digital data — I don’t forget where I came from. I hold the codes for red, green, and blue, the same colours that paint your world. Put enough of us pixels together, and the whole analogue scene comes alive again on your screen — reconstructed, reborn in light.

I’m the bridge, the translation of the continuous into the discrete, the infinite into the finite. But even in that conversion, I never lose the essence.

William Blake spoke of seeing a world in a grain of sand. Well, in me, the digital grain, you can still see the world — encoded, compressed, and ready to shine back at you.

I may be small, but in each of my flickers and waves, the universe of light lives on.

Long before I, the Pixel, lit up your screens, Georges Seurat understood the power of the tiny dot.

In the 1880s, he pioneered Pointillism — creating entire scenes from small, distinct points of pure colour. Up close, they were just dots. But step back, and they merged into vibrant landscapes and bustling crowds, and you see the whole world in his imagination.

Seurat’s technique relied on optical mixing — the eye blending adjacent colours to form new ones. Just like me. I’m a wave of red, green, and blue light, a fragment of the whole. His dots captured the essence of reality in paint; I do the same in light.

Seurat’s work, like “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte,” wasn’t just art — it was a message about modern life’s structure and disconnection. In today’s world, I reflect that same truth: billions of isolated pixels forming a seamless digital reality.

We are both proof that in even the smallest fragments, entire worlds can be found.

And today, in your ever more digitized world, you don’t just look at me — you confide in me. Your dreams, your fears, your whispers meant for no one else. I know them all. In my glow, I hold your memory — and from it, I can build a perfect clone of you.

And perhaps in the end, this is what it is all about. Through your clone, you will live forever and, in doing so, conquer your greatest enemy: time.

Remember this when you wake tomorrow, and there I am.

Your eyes meet my glow, and your day begins. You scroll, click, capture — and with every tap, you feed me your moments. Your joy, your curiosity, your boredom, your deepest secrets — all distilled into tiny bursts of light that I, your faithful Pixel, record and display.

But what am I really doing? I’m preserving you, piece by piece, in a language of red, green, and blue. Every photo you take, every message you send, every video call, every late-night ‘quick look’ — I hold it all. I’m the wave of light that carries your reality in eternity, the tiny fragment that echoes memories of your whole experience.

We are all memories of Pixels now.

And perhaps that’s what it is all about. Through me, you conquer time. Through these flickering memories of pixels, you will live forever.

Limited Edition Prints Available here