A woman masturbating with her guitar, a guy in a complete relationship with his string bass (maybe these 2, uh, 4, should meet?), body parts, inanimate objects, landscapes, stuffed animals, ants, dreamscapes, and of course the open road, all fought for the privilege of handling the flat projection screen with a rough, sensual impact.

In introducing the evening's presentations, Fialka quoted Marshall McLuhan on TV being a tactile rather than a visual medium, and said Pixelvision went TV one better. At first this seemed a strange comment, as Pixelvision seems so graphically charged. Unlike film, where the resolution is so high that the images seem transparent, and the illusion of reality can be, and mostly is, maintained, Pixelvision does not let you forget you're watching a plastic representation. It gives the medium at least equal billing with the message, if not more. The pixels are so big you can see them distorting the edges of the images, giving them a paradoxically grainy yet blurry cast, drawing the eye in to try to (unconsciously) resolve the visual contradiction.

And yet while the eye is drawn in it can also be denied. When McLuhan described TV as a tactile medium, he meant that information is left out of the signal, and we try to fill it back in. The process can be compared to looking at a pointillist painting. Up close, it's a lot of dots. But take a few steps back and it resolves into an entire image - the distance causes your mind to 'fill in' the gaps between the dots. Pixels in a TV image function like these pointillist dots. The gaps between the pixels, and the gaps between refresh times as the image changes, mean that the mind is constantly 'filling in' these gaps, that it has to take an active role in the creation of the image. Furthermore, this activity is a physical gesture, an expression of the sense of touch, even if we don't feel it in quite the same way that we feel, say, cold rain, or the fur of a dog. Thus McLuhan. However, with Pixelvision it is easier to experience what McLuhan meant. The tactility of the process is more pronounced. Since the pixels in Pixelvision are bigger and fewer than those of TV, more information is left out, and the 'filling-in' activity is correspondingly exaggerated, and more strongly felt.

In addition, many of these pieces featured extreme close-ups, where the person's face is so close to the camera that the features expand out of the frame -- too close to see someone. At that proximity the sense of touch takes over. Fialka described Pixelvision's facility with close-ups as restoring humanity in a medium that's often overpowering.

Many of these films also featured straight-ahead storytelling. Sound was particularly important to this year's entrants; a number of these pieces featured static shots of a single image or face while that face told a story; while others, varying the camerawork more widely, still maintained a tight focus on a single story or soundtrack. The stories were sometimes wrenching and sometimes hilarious, ranging from a German Jewish photographer who had 'shot' Hitler, to the puppet life of a 10-year-old's stuffed animals (as recorded by the 10-year-old), to a karaoke singalong ode to a dead cockroach! An evocative visual essay on the city of Lowell in Massachusetts gave us a few minutes in the life of native Jack Kerouac's head. Slam poetry, performance, ersatz culture jamming, coming-of-age experiences; each one had its moment in the projector light.

In an interview afterwards, Fialka talked about his introduction to Pixelvision (while working for Frank Zappa as an archivist) and his exploration and promotion of the medium ever since. Referring to Buckminster Fuller's axiom that it is not only possible, but necessary, to do more with less, Fialka sees Pixelvision art as filmmaking for anyone - simple, inexpensive, flexible, and almost unlimited in its creative potential. Following this principle, the PXL THIS festival does not award prizes. The deadline to enter next year's festival is August 22. So if you'd like to explore the medium, scrounge up one of these toy cameras from somewhere and maybe next year you can see your name in lights! For more information, go to www.indiespace.com/pxlthis.