Pixel Rugs
by Travess Smalley
THIS IS A PRE-SALE PAGE, THE BOOK WILL BE PUBLISHED AT THE END OF 2025
Combining early pixel-art aesthetics, glitch culture, and the optical warp and weft of woven carpets, Travess Smalley builds “rugs” from thousands of coloured pixels. Subjected to layering, tiling, and compression, these compositions become a distortion of colours and textures, familiar patterns broken down into something luminous and hypnotic.
Rooted in the generative pieces he released on the Tezos platform hic et nunc during the explosive spring of 2021, and continues to release on Teia, the book follows the project’s evolution through studio sketches, code snippets, and essays that situate Pixel Rugs beside Harold Cohen’s plotter drawings, the procedural maps of early roguelike games, and the optical dynamism of Op Art. The result is a body of work that feels at once hand-knotted and digitally generated – a meditation on how images travel from loom to bitmap and back again.
The book also includes essays by Casey Reas, artist and Processing co-creator, and Anika Meier, curator and writer.
Pixel Rugs is printed using Quadrifluox, an experimental fluorescent-ink printing technique that imbues each page with vivid luminosity and chromatic depth. The pages are reactive under UV light, creating a unique, collectable publication.
Smalley (b. 1986, USA) works in Rhode Island. His practice spans algorithmic drawing, scanner-based collage, and generative publishing; his work has been shown at institutions including Kunsthal Rotterdam and International Center of Photography, New York City, and his art is in the collections of High Museum of Art, MoMA Library, and the Bibliothèque Kandinsky - Centre Pompidou in Paris. Pixel Rugs is his first full monograph.
Book specifications
Format: 20 × 25 cm (vertical), 192 pp
Printing: 5-colour Quadrifluox offset (4 fluorescent PMS + Pantone 812 C), delivering a vivid neon palette that standard CMYK cannot achieve
Paper: 135 g matte coated throughout
Binding: sewn hardcover with gloss-laminated printed boards, square spine, coloured head & tail bands
ISBN 978-3-912006-01-8
Pixel Rugs is produced by Vetro Editions with support of the Tezos Foundation and will launch in late 2025.
Pre-order now and secure one of the first-edition copies printed with the Quadrifluox process – bringing Smalley’s fluorescent pixels from the screen to the page.
THIS IS A PRE-SALE PAGE, THE BOOK WILL BE PUBLISHED AT THE END OF 2025
