Fish Scales V Series 1 - 1/2 Limited Edition of 2

A scaly fish swims across the page. Upon a closer look, the fish is composed of hundreds of smaller fish. Then it is apparent that the larger fish is surrounded by other large fish too. Are the large fish part of an even larger fish?

The fish are a tessellation that perform the role as pixels for the next scale of fish. While there could be just a black fish and a white fish, which would be a simpler system, there is a scaling issue in terms of the viewer – the scale between the large fish and the small fish have to be near enough so that by going back or forward a few steps, both scales can be seen and enjoyed.

Additionally, the idea was that the smaller fish themselves were quite similar in scale to an actual fishscale on the bigger fish.

Nobody likes scaling fish in real life, and in this artwork it was similarly a bit of an ordeal!

When the resolution was working well for the big fish, the small fish were too tiny, and when the small fish were a good size, the big fish was too lacking in detail. In the end the solution was to make the fish higher resolution – each fish had to function as four pixels. Because of this, there had to be sixteen fish (4 quadrants, each of which can be black or white, so it the number of combinations is 2 to the power of 4). So, despite the big fish being made from 29 x 29 = 841 smaller fish (fixels) the resolution is actually 58 x 58 = 3,364 pixels. The next step in this series is to find an installation for the next level of scale, using the large composite fishes to make huge fish. This would be made from 841 x 841 = 707,281 small fish.