Director Simon Cottee has just released a new 11-minute documentary about pixel art entitled, fittingly, Pixels. What’s fun about this documentary is both its brevity (did I mention it’s eleven minutes long?) and its clear, straightforward discussion of a topic most people know very well — pixels. You’re looking at them right now.

The director notes: “A few incorrect dates shown. Obviously Mona Lisa isn’t 1956… 1506. My favorite sequence? Around 8 minutes in, the comparison of pixel-based games to classical and modern art (including Dig Dug re-done as a Rothko).

Recommended for: people who played video games in the 70′s, 80′s, or 90′s, and have at least a mild interest in art. Representative quote: “I don’t know what the standard definition of an antique is. Some people say it’s 25 years, because after that amount of time, pretty much any object becomes interesting in its own right, even if it was totally trivial and totally discardable when it was created.”

The first game discussed is Jason Rohrer’s five-minute Passage, a free download for the desktop or a
$0.99 iPhone app.

(Via Waxy.org.)