The genesis of this work traces back to the project *Silver Moon, Blue Planet, Blue Note*, in which data transmitted from the International Space Station became sonic and visual material. While working on the visualization system, the artist developed his own image generation algorithm, based on real-time pixel brightness analysis. “CRT Hix” develops this idea, evoking the aesthetics of old analog gauges and CRT screens, but without stylization – through precise computational control. The miniature balances between the worlds of art and science, treating technology not as a tool, but as a performative partner in the creative process.

The history of this miniature dates back to 2014 and work on another project titled “Silver Moon, Blue Planet, Blue Note,” a concert/performance in which real-time data streams transmitted from the International Space Station (ISS) were used as the building block for the work’s audio and visual fabric (“Silver Moon, Blue Planet, Blue Note,” in turn, is a work born from an even earlier collaboration with the Foundation for Arts and Technology and NASA, concerning a commissioned musical piece in which the only audio material was a recording of the famous phrase “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” uttered by Commander Neil A. Armstrong during the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969).

Part of the equipment I used for this project was a digital meter built using an algorithm developed by R. Luke DuBois — a histogram generator, or more precisely, a collection of histograms representing the brightness distribution of pixels in columns of a video image. These histograms, when combined, created a characteristic “oscilloscopic” image resembling what one sees on the display of a meter measuring similar values ​​in the analog domain and typically equipped with a CRT screen.

At some point, the digital meter’s software stopped working properly, and I was forced to write my own implementation of the DuBois algorithm. While my version performed neither better nor worse than the original, I began to painfully experience the algorithm’s limitations, especially when rebuilding the entire “Silver Moon, Blue Planet, Blue Note” infrastructure to meet higher resolutions and image quality standards. Due to the very nature of digital color and brightness description (in particular, the widespread use of 8-bit encoding of color components), the image obtained with the “book” DuBois algorithm encountered qualitative barriers to resolution and artifacts that hindered scaling. This prompted me to develop my own algorithm that would circumvent these limitations, not by stylizing, filtering, or otherwise “stretching” the results, but by conducting the calculations in a way that avoided these limitations. The result was an algorithm that allowed me to freely manipulate resolution while simultaneously obtaining — surprising even myself — some image characteristics I observed with analog meters but attributed to (pleasing to the eye) imperfections of CRT displays. Although the algorithm I developed for “CRT Hix” is fully functional and, as I mentioned, doesn’t “trick” the eye with stylization, I approach its technical prowess and potential “scientificity” (even if considered solely within the “art and science” category) with a bit of skepticism, even though it was intended to be an algorithm that would produce real, not imaginary, effects — belonging more to the world of performance art than staged art. On the other hand, the idea of ​​using scientific or parascientific research devices in art, divorced from their original applications, invariably seems inspiring to me.

Paweł Janicki