Why Dots?  It’s a simple question, with a complicated answer. It begins with Roy Lichtenstein and ends with the Cosmos.

 

Much to the dismay of my comic book loving brethren, I love Lichtenstein's work. I really click with the sensibilities of pop art, and Lichtenstein took my favorite low art and made it his high art. One thing in particular fascinated me. The dots. I won't get in to any appropriation or attribution debate here, but in many ways Lichtenstein's chief stylistic component was not lifted from Russ Heath or Irv Novick, but rather from the poor unnamed stat camera operators that did the halftone screens in those comics. The CMYK (cyan magenta, yellow and black) dots that filled the comics Lichtenstein referenced were a mechanical by-product of cheap printing on poor paper, Quality printing also used halftone screens but the weren't visible. In comics they were not only visible but inescapable. Lichtenstein doesn't mimic the dots overlaid in their natural CMYK colors, instead the uses much simpler screens of solid colors, transforming the dots from a mechanical necessity to a specific artistic unit. As Lichtenstein left behind painting comic panels, he kept the dots. Using them in a variety of other kinds of work, including largely abstract work, becoming to Lichtenstein, what paint splatters would be to Pollack (lots of dots in there too now that you mention it).

 

The fusion of low and high art, and it's specific expression in Lichtenstein, always resonated with me, so it was no wonder it would creep into my own work. As I found myself working on comic book related projects, it only seemed fitting to appropriate the dots for graphic design purposes. Dots would become my specific artistic unit too.

 

So when the time came to name a company, and ultimately a website to showcase my work, I decided to pay tribute to that specific artistic unit in name and logo. and so Dot Screen Studios was born.

 

At first it seemed like such a specific reference to print technology in an increasingly digital world may be a bad idea, but putting ink on paper will be around in some form for a while, and its an apt metaphor for digital technology as well. What you are seeing now is also a collection of dots called pixels. They are tiny dots of color next to each other giving the illusion of an image like pointillist painting. While those dots may be seem to be millions of color, but they are the product of mixing just 3 colors, RGB (red green & blue) our eyes operate in a similar manner. We see in RGB with rods and cones, more dots.

 

Dots are a single simple bit of information. When arranged in complex patterns, your mind connects them to create new information, new understanding.

 

The metaphor works throughout our lives. We are made of DNA, a large number of a very small variety of molecules, arranged in complex ways that ultimately form all life. Even matter itself is just 3 dots, electrons, protons and neutrons in very complex arrangements giving rise to everything. And they are just an arrangement of dots called quarks. Some insist there are more dots inside quarks.

 

Dots all the way down.

 

We are dots in a picture called humanity, which is a dot in the picture of life on earth, which is a dot in a solar system, then a dot in a galaxy, then a dot in a galactic cluster, a dot in a super-cluster, a dot in a universe, a dot in a multi-verse, a dot in a mega-verse, a dot in an omni-verse and beyond.

 

Dots all the way up too.

 

Dots are a wonderful vehicle for expressing a specific point of discrete information. Combine them in various increasingly complex structures and you can have anything. Keep going and you have everything.

 

And that's the very complicated answer to "Why dots?"