Travess Smalley: Pixel Rugs, From Minecraft Floors to Hand Knotted Wool
Travess Smalley's Pixel Rugs began as Appalachian style patterns for his houses in Minecraft. From November 13, Galerie Met in Berlin shows the project as Tezos works, animations, prints, woven rugs and a new monograph.
The first Pixel Rugs were never meant to be rugs. In 2018 or 2019, Travess Smalley was designing Shaker and Appalachian inspired patterns in Photoshop to bring into Minecraft and furnish his houses there. He liked the images enough to post them on Twitter, and when hic et nunc started on Tezos he saw how much was left to explore in pattern and quantization. "Very early on I found that layering pixel patterns with tiny tweaks became generative on its own, the way moiré appears when two sets of lines overlap," he tells curator Kika Nicolela. "Everything grew from there."
Each rug starts from a small grid and a few rules. Smalley uses Photoshop as a generative tool, with scripts and custom image editing routines that scale, rotate, layer and distort the grid until it tips towards order, chance or breakdown. Individual pieces have been minted on Tezos over the years, so the chain doubles as a record of how the project developed. He credits Derek Yu's pixel art tutorials, John F. Simon Jr.'s Every Icon and a painting and digital printmaking class at VCU that introduced him to Cory Arcangel and the net artists of the 90s.
The textile link came later, through research. Smalley found the watercolors Frances Louisa Goodrich made of Appalachian weaving, each with the numerical notation for its pattern: "scripts, manifests for how to make a pattern." He recognised them from home in West Virginia, and from his great grandmother, who gave her whole living room over to a large quilting table.
Pixel Rugs opens at Galerie Met, Mariannenstrasse 33 in Berlin, on November 13 from 6 to 9 PM and runs November 14 to December 5, curated by Nicolela in collaboration with objkt. It gathers digital works, process animations, prints, hand knotted wool rugs and the Pixel Rugs monograph from Vetro Editions. Smalley, born in Huntington, West Virginia in 1986, teaches Print Media at the University of Rhode Island, and his work is held by the Bibliothèque Kandinsky at the Centre Pompidou, ZKM and the MoMA Library.
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