Berners-Lee Research Facility
Mixed Media Project (2005)

I was bored one day, so I scanned my hand into my computer. Not a big deal. I'm sure everyone does it, but something happened. I don't know what I thought I'd do with it, but I got kind of obsessed with it, just kept opening the file up and looking at it. Zooming in. Watching something that was recognisably me turn into pixels. Then I'd zoom back out again, reassured to see myself return.

Sometimes I'd just make the whole screen one pixel and stare at it for hours. I kept doing this over and over again, but was never quite satisfied. Could never find exactly the right pixel. There was something wrong with the hue, the saturation, the value...

Then one day I realised I'd found it, the perfect pixel, just by accident, I'd paused while scrolling around to change my grip and it was right there in front of me. I can't explain how I knew, it was just as if the colour sent a coded message to my cells that I wasn't able to decipher, only respond as if triggered.

I cropped it and saved it carefully, not daring to breathe in case I lost it somehow. I made back-ups on CD, hid them around the house, posted them to trusted friends. I printed it out, but it was never the same, it needed the phosphorescence of the screen to give it life.

It was enough for a while, to know I had access to this wonder, I'd meditate on it endlessly, empty headed, while the screen bathed me in a holy light. But soon it wasn't enough, I needed more, I felt dirty, imperfect next to it. The pixel had become my ideal, myself honed into a transcendental form. I had to become one with it. Hopefully I pushed my head up against the screen, harder and harder until my forehead bruised. To my disappointment the barrier remained. I was not going to achieve union thinking like this.

I tried hundreds of methods to understand the problem: I played around with the talismanic image, splitting it up into its component parts, looking at the light side and the dark side. I even started looking at the code behind it, learning the string of binary that made up the file, repeating it as a mantra as I stared at the screen. Then I realised that the problem wasn't the pixel, the problem was me. I had too many variables: I was messy, human. I needed to become digital myself, that's why I'm here...

(Text taken from transcript of an interview with Test Subject 404 from Ana's time in residence at the Berners-Lee Research Facility)