Dissolving Our Perception Of Digital Reality With Fragments of RGB

The digital world surrounds and infuses the environments that we inhabit, punctuating our lives with its liquid crystal adverts and vibrating phones. And while it may interrupt our daydreams, it has become something we can’t help but take for granted. Most aspects of our lives have been invaded by technology and because of this, after the initial awe that comes with every new addition, as the new becomes familiar that awe slips into indifference. We accommodate and adapt it into our lives, the digital realities become integrated into our routines, the virtual illusion of the real becomes tangled in the real, and the curse of the commonplace sets in. Until the next advancement and the cycle begins anew.

Disrupting this sense of apathy towards the familiar is one of the purposes of art—to jolt us out of our daily trance, forcing us to look at things from a fresh perspective. And this, along with our neutrality towards the illusion of virtual realities, is what’s explored in a new installation from generative design studio onformative called Fragments of RGB. It uses distortion to create a reaction in the viewer and remind them that what they’re viewing is a digitally created entity, separate from the real.

Using the RGB color model commonly found in LED monitors, where layers of illuminated red, green, and blue light are added over each other to form new colors, the piece captures an image of the user, then deconstructs this illusion pixel by pixel. The image shatters into dots and shards, the virtual portrait disintegrates before their eyes, and the digital trick is revealed.

onformative say:

The classic LED screen as a medium was simulated and disintegrated by the creation of a pixel-like optic using simple projection rather than the entire image’s being comprised of individual points of light.

The interactive installation bends and refracts to pull the image apart, reacting to the viewer’s movements—disorientating and alienating to create an unsettling experience. It simultaneously destroys both the illusion of the real that the virtual creates while also destroying the viewer’s perception of themselves; breaking it down, atomizing it, forcing the viewer to reflect on the experience while also turning their doors of perception into a digital funhouse—confronting our fascination with our own image, questioning our own subjectivity.

In addition to the interactive experience that can be viewed in the videos above, the project was also conceived as a photographic series, mocking the standard portrait photograph with an image that’s detached and fragmented. We hate to wax poetic here, but it rather reminds us of that famous line from WB Yeat’s “The Second Coming” where “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold”. As the image verges on chaos, exploding, schizophrenic; the unifying color scheme of red, blue, and green are the only things that remain unchanged.

Photos courtesy of onformative