Colors, 2005
Projection from digital source
Dimensions variable
Collection Andrew and Stephanie Hale

The departure point for this work is Dennis Hopper’s Colors, the 1988 film about violence between the Los Angeles street gangs the Crips and the Bloods. Arcangel wrote a computer program that plays the movie one horizontal line of pixels at a time, starting at the top of the screen and working its way down. Each line of colour is stretched to fill the screen, resulting in animated bands of colour. To run through every row of data, the two-hour movie must repeat 404 times. It takes more than thirty-three days to play from beginning to end.