Tabitha Beresford-Webb
Grieving with Pixelated Bodies

I am an artist and researcher working in London, UK. I have just finished studying for an MRes in Fine Arts & Humanities at Royal College of Art and hold a BA (Hons) from Camberwell College of Arts in Fine Art Photography (2019).

The pixelation of the body by the small, handheld, light-filled, digital screen of my iPhone is a concern central to my artistic research. I seek to understand the effects of digital light on the body and explore my emotional and sensory connection to digitally pixelated bodies.

A peculiar photo provides transparency embodied in You. 2022 (cross-stitch embroidery on tracing paper)

Introduction

The intense mediation of my tangible connection to others by my digital light-filled device (my iPhone) urges me to find ways of understanding how I feel and connect to my loved ones, from whom I am physically distant yet connected through light. This research project is a textile on digital technology. It weaves together emotional, idiosyncratic, scientific, archaeological, historical, tactile, hand-made, autotheoretical, and artistic attempts to explore my central question:

How do I understand the iPhone as a tomb containing bodies I am distant from yet connected to through light?

Throughout my life, despite taking many digital images, I have been wary of photographing people. I often frame my photos in a way that prevents capturing people within the image. I rarely feel compelled to capture images of those I love. Today I sit here and wonder why I so often avoid photographing people. I feel as though I am afraid of what the digital light does to the body of the person I love. I fear what happens when their/my pixelated body falls through the camera aperture into the light-filled tomb I hold in my hand. With this research, I am concerned with the images I did not take but nevertheless, hold dear. I am concerned with the photographs of people I love, their digital cremains, and their pixelated bodies. The digital camera captures and pixelates the fleshy body, transforming it into a disintegrated state formed of light. In its pixelated state, I can hold a body in the palm of my hand, in my iPhone, my handheld tomb.

I developed this project due to my emotional need to find ways of grieving with pixelated bodies and unpack my difficulties in understanding bodily relations in this digital, light-filled world in which I find myself. I believe the slow, manual, iterative, and meditative nature of cross-stitching will enable me to work towards a more emotional, embodied and autotheoretical understanding of digital grief.[1] I am foregrounding the use of my hands and their connection to my nan’s (the cross-stitcher’s) hands in artmaking to help understand emotionally and sensorily the incongruous experience of holding a pixelated body in my iPhone.

The references, visuals and practical methods of artmaking and research that form this project come together in a collage-like, patchworked, idiosyncratic form. The selection of the varied elements is guided by what Roland Barthes described as punctum.[2] Emotion drives selection. Moyra Davey’s Index Cards influenced the format of the text.[3] Like Davey, I draw together anecdotes, stories, descriptions, quotes, artworks, and images to create a weaving of feeling to explore in my project the incongruous experience of holding a pixelated body in the palm of my hand. Agustín Fernández Mallo’s (AFM) Pixel Flesh guided my intertwining scientific, theoretical, and historical references with deeply personal subject matter. In Pixel Flesh, AFM explores ideas of touch, technology, and love through mixing highly scientific and personal descriptions and ideas.[4]

The thesis consists of a series of events, points of poignancy, and processes of experimentation that work to find ways to grieve with pixelated bodies.

[1] Digital grief refers to the grieving process of losing people with whom, in the time leading up to their death, I had digital, physically distant relationships.

[2] Barthes, Roland, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. by Richard Howard, Vintage Classics (London: Vintage Books, 2000)

[3] Davey, Moyra, Index Cards, ed. by Nicolas Linnert (London: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2020)

[4] Fernández Mallo, Agustín, Pixel flesh, trans. by Zachary Rockwell Ludington (United States of America: Cardboard House Press, 2020)

a substitution of shadows for substance 2021 (digital image)

My grandad, M J Whillock, between two sections of a split boulder in Torridon, Scotland, 1979 2020 (digital scan of a photograph)