I'm in the middle of muddling through an article.
I will open the discussion with some thoughts about George Seurat and his pointillist method of painting. By today's software applications, these points are large, but in the context of the 19th century painting, they were discrete objects composed of solid pigment instead of painted lines of pigment. Dots instead of strokes to represent captured light.
With today's technology, we have far smaller objects -- or pieces of light -- the pixel. But even with an image composed of pixels, we perceive a blurred line. Upon magnification, at 700%, we can begin to discern the pixels. Yes, this is difficult to see on this blog, but when I publish the article it should be markedly improved. Okay, you will need to trust me on this observation.
At 3200%, we can barely tell the blurred area; we see pixels. The blurred area are simply pixels with hues that are the same or similar over an area composed of multiple pixels.
Depending on one's distance from the image and the 'objects' (pigmented dots or pixel light), we perceive the intended representation -- which is the edge of the officer's hand and which was somewhat blurred in the 'painted' image to give a more natural appearance. But, this understandable edge of the hand decomposes into pixels -- or, in the older tradition of neo-impressionism, into points of pigment. For a more detailed exploration of digital art, comparing pigment to pixels, see On the Uniqueness of Digital Art by JD Jarvis.
Rather than creating a new blog entry, here is an addendum. One important difference between pointillism and art created with digital media is the following: Pointillism has the objective of seeking an optical effect such that colors will appear to interact at a given viewing distance (such as shimmer) while art in digital media has the objective, when printed, of creating continuity in the appearance of line, form, color (that is, a non-pixelated result).
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