Pixel Stress

On the 18th of April 2013, Anouk Kruithof and two assistants went to Wall Street in New York City and built a temporary installation of 14 framed prints of different sizes on the edge of the city’s pavement. The prints looked like pixelated monochromes, but were in fact illustrations blown up to a maximum size (3200% in Photoshop) of images found by using Google, searching the word “stress”. Anouk Kruithof asked pedestrians to look at the installation and then had conversations about the pixelated monochromes, the meaning of this project and the potential interpretations of the work. Kruithof asked the people involved if they would like to buy a print, both engaging a commercial gesture and condemning the scarcity of the city dwellers encounterings. She sold 8 of the 14 prints bought by 7 participants when the day’s rain warded off further efforts. Kruithof is not allowed to conduct monetary transactions, so that once a participant told her a price for the print, she actually gave it away for free, thus creating an imaginary sale.