PIXEL EMBLEM

Pixel Emblem is a series of cross-stitched portraits of characters from Nintendo and Intelligent System’s Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn, a tactical role-playing game in the Fire Emblem series. Radiant Dawn was released for the Wii in 2008, but many of its characters have subsequently made their way to Fire Emblem: Heroes, a collection-based mobile gachapon game and Nintendo’s highest-grossing mobile application. In the context of a transmedia franchise where new versions of existing characters are continuously released, fans and collectors can only ever achieve the illusion of completing the collection, spurned to ever-greater acts of consumption through re-releases, downloadable content, and the migration of files to new formats.

This project performs an intervention in this fast-paced world of transmedia collection. Each cross-stitched piece takes approximately six months to complete from the initial design to blocking and framing the finished piece. As a result, this project is open-ended; I will never have enough time to create portraits of all 73 playable characters in Radiant Dawn, much less the 800+ characters from the entire series. Instead, my goal is to reintroduce slowness and contentedness with the incomplete into our relationships with video games. At the same time, I aim to reflect on the nostalgia that governs collection and to consider the gendered nature of both crafts and gaming.

Textile art and video games find common ground in the grid as a design tool. In her foundational 1979 essay, “Grids” Rosalind Krauss describes the modern grid as oppressive, noting that it abrogates natural object’s own self-order: “the grid announces, among other things, modern art’s will to silence, its hostility to literature, to narrative, to discourse.”¹ She goes on to note that the grid is absent from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, and that one must look back to Leonardo Da Vinci’s treatises on perspective to find other instances of the grid in art. While the grid can and certainly has been used as a masculinist tool, Krauss effectively effaces women’s textile arts, which have always relied on the grid to lend structure and form to their craft. The use of a grid in needlepoint reaches back thousands of years to the ancient Egyptians. Far from silencing, the grid often gave women a voice and a venue through which to express themselves creatively. Agnes Martin’s minimalist, meditative grids, for instance, certainly have much to say.

Since the publication of Krauss’ essay, the grid has come to take on another meaning: that which makes possible the existence of discrete digital pixels on a computational screen. In From Point to Pixel: A Genealogy of Digital Aesthetics, Meredith Hoy wonders “should we … suppose that the grid is a subsidiary property of, or coextensive with, digitization?”² While grid provides infrastructure for the construction of a digital picture, it is important again not to efface its history as a component of domestic handicrafts and textile arts. The grid facilitates digitization, just as it facilitates needlework. It is neither subsidiary of nor oppressive towards one group; rather, the grid is a tool that can serve various political, cultural, social, and playful purposes.

The grid is doubly present in the Fire Emblem video game series. Installments in the series play out somewhat like a game of chess, where allied and enemy units each occupy a tile on a grid-based map. Concurrently, the pixel grid constrains the game’s visual assets. Our fascination with the grid’s order has led to the fetishization of the 8-, 16- and 32-bit square pixel. Through the veneer of nostalgia, we imagine early video games as having been razor-sharp, when they never looked as clear as we remember them. In actuality, developers used the fuzzy edges to lend realism to otherwise simplistic images. This project, in turning “fuzzy” pixels into fuzzy cotton squares, reflects on the materiality of the pixel aesthetic.

My artistic practice is always indebted to the hardware and software with which I work, and this project is no exception. For all that the finished project is a material object, each piece begins in the realm of the digital; I may be the maker, but I am also the digital designer.

A variety of software packages assist me in accomplishing the translation from official character art to textile portrait. I begin by importing the image into Adobe Photoshop, where I adjust the brightness and levels to better suit those of the GBA rather than those of the Nintendo Wii or a smartphone. I then isolate a color palette by simplifying each area down to a mid-tone, a shadow, and one or two highlight colors.

The next step is to draw the pattern pixel by pixel. I use a 110 x 110 square grid, which, when stitched onto a sheet of aida fabric, measures approximately 8 x 8 inches. I use the RGB codes isolated in Photoshop to color the cells, and I add the black border characteristic of the GBA portraits. Although the border stands out in the pattern, the eye naturally blends it into the finished piece, just as it does when viewing characters in the game.

I use Excel rather than grid paper for two reasons. Firstly, since my goal was to preserve the digital elements of video game asset creation, it followed that I should use a digital platform for the design aspect of the project. Secondly, the software's fungibility makes it an unsung hero in pattern creation. Since Excel is a cross-platform program, I can access the pattern on both my phone and my computer, downloading and uploading alterations as necessary. And, since handicrafts are typically communal endeavours, I can equally share the pattern with others by simply sending them the link to the hosted file.

The final step before I begin stitching is to convert the RGB colors with which I designed the pattern into the nearest DMC embroidery floss color. To do so, I compare the values returned from two open web applications, which have translated the nearly-500 floss colors into their nearest RGB match. Although I make my final decision by visually appraising the colors (the accuracy of screen colors varies), these tools are invaluable, and my projects are indebted to the work of their designers.

Pixel Emblem combines both the digital grid – the pattern designed in MS Excel – and the material, woven grid – the finished textile piece produced by my repetitive machinic stitching motions. Each portrait takes approximately six months of stolen moments on public transportation, while spending time with friends or family, when winding down after a long day.

Although anyone can stitch these pieces from the patterns I’ve made, not everyone has the luxury. I am privileged to be able to work on this project, fortunate to have the time to dedicate to this craft and to have a body that allows me to perform such detailed and repetitive labour. Each hour I spend on this project is a reminder of my privilege; I can afford the slowness of this project, just as I and many others can afford to spend time playing video games in an economy that demands we must constantly be productive. Playing video games and cross stitching are both unproductive in their own way; both consume time with a ravenous appetite and both lead to a satisfaction independent of corporate productivity.

Notes

¹ Rosalind Krauss, “Grids,” October, vol. 9, Summer, 1979, pp. 50-64, 50.

² Meredith Hoy, From Point to Pixel: A Geneaology of Digital Aesthetics, New England: Dartmouth College Press, 2017, 113.