Random Pixel Order

Random Pixel Order was a collective doing digital art and self-made books.

I co-founded Random Pixel Order in 2015 with Jay Cartis (external link) when I was an undergraduate in Bordeaux. The aim of the collective was to bring together the DIY worlds of fanzines and computer science and understand how they could mutually cross-pollinate. We wanted to promote the work of digital artists exploring experimental techniques of visual creation by offering them a tangible space for distribution away from the screen: print. We also wanted to encourage encounters between artists from the DIY and craft worlds of experimental digital creation and micro-publishing. This is how, from 2015 to 2019, we published several editions of fanzines and prints, and took part in various exhibitions, while experimenting with digital and interactive creations. We also developed two major projects with the collective: Screenshot and The Archive.

Screenshot

Screenshot review was a participative fanzine aimed at promoting different techniques of experimental and contemporary digital creation. The review gave total freedom to digital creators, with no constraints, no themes, just a space of blank pages for artists to express themselves freely. For each issue, Jay and I set out to create a beautiful object using various printing techniques: laser, serigraphy, risography, and experimental digital design techniques. It was an opportunity for me to apply the things I was learning at school to a visual and stimulating project by designing all the covers for each edition. Thanks to Jay’s talent for printing techniques and finishing, we produced 4 beautiful books.

Starting with the third edition of the fanzine, we began organizing launch parties in Paris and Bordeaux, the aim of which was to enable the various artists to meet each other and promote their work live. We invited artists to perform and collaborate with each other on their sound and visual productions. We organized ‘Screenshot Party’ evenings in Paris Nogozon in 2018 (external link) for the release of Screenshot__002, in Bordeaux Novo Local (external link) and Paris L’International (external link) in 2019 for the release of Screenshot_003, also celebrating the end of the Random Pixel Order collective.

The Archive

The Archive was a collection of digital art zines that we had selected for their creative histories, or for the particular techniques they used (sometimes more than one). We took this archive on the road and exhibited it at various venues and festivals. The collection was open to digital art in general and contained a multitude of techniques: glitch (sonification, 3D glitches, pixel sorting, etc.), creative coding, images found on the web, bitmap and MS Paint drawings, scanner movements, digital collage, etc. Different printing techniques were also called for - some were entirely digital, others were silkscreens or risographs, and others mixed printing techniques.