PIXEL STRESS

• Soft cover, stapled

• 20 x 32 cm

• 100 pages

• 52 color photographs & photo-montages

• Concept, text and images by Anouk Kruithof

• Design by Anouk Kruithof and Remi Faucheux

• Publisher: RVB-books Paris

• English, 2013

• Edition 1000

• ISBN: 979-10-90306-21-9

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 was not allowed to conduct monetary transactions, so that once a participant told her a price for the print, she actually gave it for free, thus creating an imaginary sale transaction.