Printmaker and conceptual artist Ted Ollier is always finding new ways to visualize interesting data, from voting results to the relative sizes of the moons of Jupiter. Working from home during the quarantine without access to his printing press inspired Ollier to experiment with a new medium - needlepoint. Read Ollier’s statement about his latest conceptual series below, and shop his work here.
CGA Cross-Stitch Sampler is an editioned needlepoint work blending two major forms of pixel-based rendering. It is stitched in 16 colors of cotton floss on squares of aida material approximately 3 1/2” x 3 1/2”.
The Computer Graphics Adapter was IBM’s de facto first standard for rendering color digitally. It had a palette of 16 RGB colors, with an extended graphics mode utilizing all 16 colors in a resolution of 160 x 100 pixels. It revolutionized the display of graphics on home computers in the early 1980s.
Textiles and needlework are a form of pixel-based representation that have existed for millennia. Computer-based image manipulation has existed for at most a few decades. To compare and contrast the different applications of these forms of pixelation, I have rendered this palette in a cross-stitch sampler of sixteen 4 x 4 blocks, using floss colors that are as close to the RGB specification as I can procure.
The edition is limited to 16, the same as the number of colors in the CGA palette. In keeping with the digital nature of the subject, the edition numbers have been converted to hexadecimal and start with 0 and end with the letter F. This keeps each unit a single digit and is in line with the numbering conventions of several programming languages.