Painting with Pixels, Re-sensualizing New Media
When one speaks of new media in art, it is often in terms of code, digital interfaces, interactivity, VR or generative systems. But in the work of Pipilotti Rist, new media is not reduced to a technological gadget. It becomes an experiential, sensuous, corporeal language, an exploration of how the moving image, color, sound, and space can transform into a living canvas.
Rist’s work lies at the intersection of the biological and the electronic, of nature and technology, of desire and vulnerability. Her oeuvre shows how new media art can be existential, tactile, emotional, never merely coldly futuristic or computational.
From Single-Channel Video to Immersive Environments
Born in 1962 in Grabs, Switzerland, Rist studied at Basel’s Schule für Gestaltung. In her early years she worked with single-channel video, often with radical gestures: slowed bodies, distortions, close-ups. One of her first widely discussed works is I’m Not The Girl Who Misses Much (1986), where she disrupts her own performance of Happiness Is a Warm Gun. The piece already foreshadows her way of bending sound, image and identity into something destabilizing yet playful.
.jpg "Still image of the film I'm Not the Girl Who Misses Much of Pipilotti Rist") |
| Pipilotti Rist, I'm Not the Girl Who Misses Much (Film Still) |
By the mid-1990s she expanded into environmental projections. With Sip My Ocean (1996) she broke out of the monitor, projecting onto two walls and enveloping viewers in fluid color and sound. This marked a turning point in video art, no longer confined to a screen, but fully integrated into architecture and space.
Key Works and Experiments
Pickelporno (1992) plays with extreme close-ups of bodies, eyes and skin, intercut with nature, disrupting voyeurism and reshaping desire through an intimate, roaming camera. The piece replaces objectifying distance with sensorial nearness.
.jpg "Still of the film Pickelporno of Pipilotti Rist")
Ever Is Over All (1997) remains iconic: a woman walks down the street, smiling as she smashes car windows with a long flower, on the adjacent wall, magnified botanical images bloom. The juxtaposition is both gentle and transgressive, rupture as liberation, reminding us that beauty and violence can coexist in a single gesture.
TV-Lüster (1993) transforms a chandelier into a constellation of glowing eyes on CRT monitors. Ornament becomes surveillance and self-reflection, and the viewer becomes the viewed, caught inside a circuitry of gazes.
Pixelwald / Pixel Forest (2016) suspends thousands of LED nodes to form a luminous digital grove. The viewer wanders through image-light as if pixels themselves had liquefied into atmosphere, collapsing boundaries between screen, sculpture and environment.
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| Pipilotti Rist, Pixel Forest |
Large-scale installations such as Pour Your Body Out (7354 Cubic Meters) (MoMA atrium) invite visitors to recline and bathe in chromatic projections and soundscapes. The body becomes atmospheric, perception becomes synesthetic, the museum becomes a sensorium.
Themes and Conceptual Threads
Rist continually returns to the body, fragmented, magnified, playful, inviting a re-sensualization of vision. She stages conversations between organic matter and digital light, merging flora, water and skin with pixels and projection. She embraces rupture, glitches, shattered glass, over-saturation, as a way to expose the medium’s seams and keep perception alive. Above all, she cultivates immersion, transforming spectators into participants inside chromatic, sonic universes that feel intimate rather than alienating.
Why Pipilotti Rist Matters
Within the genealogy of new media art, Rist functions as a bridge from early video pioneers to contemporary immersive installation. Her practice demonstrates how technology can serve sensitivity rather than spectacle, and how screens can become porous, tender, humane. Her influence is evident in artists who integrate projection, light and architecture while keeping emotion, humor and vulnerability at the center.
Reflections for the Digital Age
In a culture saturated with devices and feeds, Rist’s work proposes another horizon for media, soft, tactile, intimate. Her forests of LEDs and oceans of color do not ask us to escape the digital, they ask us to feel through it. They invite an ethics of attention, where technology can be a medium for empathy and play rather than monotony and control.
Conclusion
Pipilotti Rist stands as one of the most significant artists to expand the boundaries of new media. By merging video, sound, space and the body into immersive sensorial environments, she transformed how audiences experience art. Even in a hyper-digital world, her work remains luminous, fragile and profoundly human.
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