Object #2 | 738 × 925 | Dancers Practising in the Foyer

Object #2 is a 738 × 925 pixel digital zoom of a 200-micrometer-sized pigment fragment physically extracted from Edgar Degas’ painting Dancers Practising in the Foyer  by researchers at the Getty Conservation Institute in Los Angeles.

Object #2 references an essay, also part of the Wrong Biennale, titled Degas’ Obsession, Derrida, and the Artificiality of Art.

The dimensions of 738 × 925 pixels are not arbitrary; they precisely mirror the dimensions in centimeters of the original painting (73.8 × 92.5 cm), which is currently exhibited at Glyptoteket in Copenhagen, Denmark, as part of the exhibition ‘Degas’ Obsession’.

This mapping of digital resolution onto physical size constitutes an attempt to reimagine what an image is, and how reality is produced, compressed and enlarged, digitally and algorithmically, rather than merely represented.

Where Object #1, a glass plate simulation of the physical fragment extracted from the painting, isolates a microscopic pigment grain, Object #2 extrapolates that fragment into an image field, scaled to suggest a full painting, yet derived from a minute detail.

In a sense, Object #2 performs the original painting, not unlike how machine learning generates outputs from statistical inferences.