I <3 Geek Art!

Geek Art is Art where science, technology, or video games were the primary source of inspiration (please do not quote me on that definition). Anyone who was at the MoMA, and saw Design and the Elastic Mind, knows that Geek Art is slowly penetrating the mass and evolving in the most creative ways.

Coming back to the subject of this post - post-its Note Art fits right in the Geek Art category. There is a lot of images floating out there on this subject matter. One emerging trend, I noticed recently, involves the use of iconic video games characters from the 8-bit and Atari days.

See Megaman’s creation step per step here

The connexion between Pixel Art and post-its Art should be made. Both genre use different mediums, but both use the common unit “the pixel”. Through ordered association of the pixels, the subject matter is revealed. Similar to many of you, I grew up in an analogue era, where video games were not anti-aliased or rendered but pixelated.

Post-its Art impacts the audience through the subject matter and the scale of the work. These art piece takes a lot of time, patience and post-its to produce. In the case of the Donkey Kong piece, engineering students over at the University of California Santa Cruz took time out of their busy academic life to create a larger-than-life work, where each pixel is matched by a Post-it Note.

The Donkey Kong installation took the team of ten people about five hours to complete, and used over 6,400 colored Post-it Notes (although they had to buy over 14,000 of the little sticky buggers to get all the colors they needed.)

This underground art trend was eventually picked up by marketing agencies in their own efforts to capitalize on such unique and powerful artform. For Instance, Nintendo marketing agency used post-its to create giant versions of Nintendo’s All Stars classic gaming iconic characters such as Mario, Donkey Kong, Zelda, etc.

Each individual post-its could be removed by passersby, revealing a small advertisement for the Wii’s virtual console. (coutesy of technabob.com)

I am only touching some basics here in regard to post-its Geek Art, I am sure there is a lot more to be said. If you like this piece, you should check out one of our earlier post on post-its Art.