By Chiara Elwood Sorensen

---

What happens when the pixelated visual language of video games leaves the screen and enters the 

landscape? 

This year, Utah State University’s Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art will invite visitors to explore that question with a campus-wide exhibition that brings the aesthetics of the digital world into conversation with the natural one.

Installed across the university’s Logan campus, as well as select USU Statewide locations, the Pixelated: Mike Whiting exhibition will feature artist Mike Whiting’s large-scale steel sculptures inspired by the blocky graphics of early video games. Brightly colored animals and objects will appear among gardens, pathways, and outdoor spaces, transforming familiar surroundings into something simultaneously retro and entirely new.

But Pixelated is about more than digital gaming. In an era where so much of life is experienced through screens, the exhibition invites viewers to step outside and reconsider how technology shapes the way we experience the actual world around us.

Born in Provo, Utah, Whiting’s work has been exhibited around the world. His work draws from two distinct visual styles — the 8-bit graphics of early video games and the geometric forms of minimalist art. He has long been fascinated by how the opposite intents of these two artistic approaches arrived at similar visual outcomes by entirely different means.

Early video games like Pac-Man and Space Invaders relied on simplified graphics because the limited processing power and memory of the day’s technology meant designers were required to communicate as much information as possible using a small number of pixels. Minimalist artists of the 1960s intentionally stripped away detail in pursuit of what they viewed as the essential qualities of art.

“Video gaming and Minimalism arrived at the same visual conclusion through different means and by opposite intentions,” Whiting writes in his artist statement, an observation that became the foundation of his artistic practice.

With welded half-inch steel and automotive paint, Whiting transforms digital imagery into objects with weight, scale, and both visual and physical presence. Deer, birds, sailboats, and other recognizable forms emerge from a vocabulary of squares and geometric surfaces. The use of material is central to his message, with intentionally scuffed paint and exposed patches of metal reminding viewers that these forms are not virtual images, but hefty objects anchored to the landscape and that the “invisible” electronic world is real and consequential. 

The works occupy a space between abstract and representational art, technology and nature, playfulness and serious artistic study. 

An important moment in Whiting’s development came while he was studying sculpture at the Pratt Institute in New York. During a visit to the Museum of Modern Art, he encountered Piet Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie (1943) and was struck by how much it resembled the visuals of early arcade games.

For Whiting, the painting and the video game seemed to speak the same language.

Yet as his pixelated sculptures became more ambitious, he realized they required something more than the traditional white walls of a gallery. The work belonged outdoors. Its scale and subject matter called for parks, gardens, streets, plazas, and public spaces. A pixelated deer seemed more at home on a patch of grass than on a museum pedestal, and a brightly colored bird could merge with the landscape itself.

That realization led Whiting toward public art. Over the past two decades, his increasingly monumental sculptures have appeared in cities and communities throughout the country. He has installed them anywhere from skate parks and pedestrian districts to rail corridors and nature trails. Placed directly within the environments they reference, the works take on a life of their own, blending the digital world many people increasingly inhabit with the physical landscapes beneath their feet.

Pixelated — the first instance of Whiting’s work being installed across an entire college campus — will continue to explore this conversation between digital and physical worlds within the USU community.

“Gardens are in their own way virtual spaces — carefully created environments,” Whiting says. “The contrast of the sculptures’ geometric and manmade materials can seem at odds with the gardens, but they are connected in the dialogue about the re-presentation of nature.”

A garden may feel natural, but it is typically a carefully designed space. Paths are mapped, soil is tested, plants selected, and views intentionally created. Like a digital environment, it is a constructed experience. By placing pixel-inspired sculptures in a crafted outdoor setting, Whiting encourages viewers to think about the ways humans shape both physical and virtual worlds.

The exhibition arrives at a moment when questions about technology and wellbeing have become increasingly relevant — especially in a university setting. Much of modern life now unfolds online and our work, education, communication, and entertainment are often experienced through digital devices.

Rather than completely rejecting technology, Whiting’s sculptures invite viewers to reflect on its influence. Video games traditionally translate the real world into pixels. Whiting reverses the process, taking digital forms and returning them to the landscape through steel, color, and scale. Visitors encounter the works not through a screen but through movement by walking around them, seeing them in changing light, and experiencing them within the landscape.

The artist’s emphasis on place makes Utah State University a fitting setting for the exhibition. The university has long celebrated the outdoors as both a classroom and a source of recreation, utilizing its proximity to Logan Canyon and Cache Valley to benefit students’ education. The outdoors, as the exhibition suggests, can be a place not only for recreation but also for artistic discovery and imagination.