Phonebox / Polish Flag Sequence

Basic Information

Title: Phonebox / Polish Flag Sequence
Artist(s): Brian Reffin Smith
Date Created: 1986
Unframed Dimensions: 8.25 x 11.75 in.
Medium: computer generated print on paper
Inventory ID: Smith-1986-01a, b, c, d, e, f, g

Description

signed and dated in graphite lower right
titled in graphite lower left

image titles:
Phonebox/99% Polish Flag (a)
Phonebox/85% Polish Flag (b)
Phonebox/71% Polish Flag (c)
Phonebox/57% Polish Flag (d)
Phonebox/43% Polish Flag (e)
Phonebox/29% Polish Flag (f)
Phonebox/0% Polish Flag (g)

In the following, seven-partwork, an image of a Polish flag is gradually transformed, pixel by pixel, into a false-colour image of an English phone box, outside the Royal college of Art Computer Studio, London, when Reffin Smith was working there.The flag image was constructed using computer graphics, the phonebox image captured using an early digitiser and a black and white video camera.Reffin Smith wrote software that would replace pixels of one image by those of another on a probabilistic basis. The pixles were then drawn using a pen plotter, again using an algorithm that Reffin Smith wrote, to represent each single (large) pixel by cross-hatched lines.detail