A Field Guide to Modern Pixel Art
Nostalgia, revision, meta and noise: the four moves by which a new generation of pixel artists is pushing the form past 8-bit pastiche.
Every medium has a mythical past it draws on from time to time. Film, theater, painting, sculpture; their golden ages are filled with canonical masterpieces whose reputation persists on nostalgia and the borrowed pathos of history. For games, that shorthand is pixel art: both the stock image of the medium and the most efficient producer of warming nostalgia. Our continued obsession with it might seem retrograde, built on a desire to see childhood interests eternally fed back to us. Yet pixel art is essential to games, reinforcing their digital materiality as well as their more expressionistic tendencies. It resists the cult of fidelity, that dulling push towards photoreal fantasies. It is quick to build, flexible to work with, and aesthetically bold. Over the past five years pixel art has become an artistic decision, and the pixel itself a symbol codified with imagined pasts, potential futures, and the artistic artifice of digital worlds.
Nostalgia is an emotion so often looked down on. Perhaps because it is an easy button to push, a simple trick. But true nostalgia is not evoked by the casual cuing of the past or a pastiche of dead styles. To truly trigger nostalgia in its most powerful form, the distance between our current selves and past experiences must be taken into account, and the soothing melancholy of lost time has to be recognised.
