Homage to the pixel: Cave

Name: Ragnar Digital, LLC
Price range: $

Tom White

2022

NFT/Digital

Description

Tom White’s Homage to the Pixel asks a simple but revealing question: if an AI could paint a word, what colors would it choose? Each piece in the series begins with a single keyword that a neural network interprets and translates into color. Instead of producing recognizable images, the system responds with six concentric squares, each a different hue—an abstract portrait of how the machine “understands” language.

In Homage to the Pixel: Cave, deep greens and smoky yellows evoke the glow of firelight against stone. In Homage to the Pixel: Feeling, subtle blues shift toward violet and end in a burst of magenta, as if the AI were reaching for an emotion it can almost but not quite name.

Through these simple forms, White turns machine learning into a kind of visual poetry. The works invite us to imagine the inner world of an algorithm—how meaning might look when filtered through code rather than consciousness.