Visual Artist

Jurgen
Ostarhild

Berlin-based visual artist who uses light and code as his primary media.

Based Berlin
Active 1980 — present

Work

"Uses light and code as primary media — photography, installation, digital art."

Jurgen Ostarhild is a German artist and photographer based in Berlin.

BasedBerlin
Active1980 — present
Projects81
MediaPhotography, Installation, Digital
Contactjostarhild(ät)gmail.com
archive

PCX-DICE

A Throw of the Dice, in Light

On PCX-DICE. Essay by Jurgen Ostarhild, New York 2026

PCX-DICE by Jurgen Ostarhild: 64 × 32 LED panel, a gradient broken into stripes by digital dice

PCX-DICE, 2026. LED panel, 64 × 32 points. A gradient broken into stripes by throws of digital dice.

Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard.
A throw of the dice will never abolish chance.

In 1897 Stéphane Mallarmé published a poem that broke apart on the page. Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard spreads its words across double pages, in different sizes and weights, with wide fields of white between them. The reader no longer follows a line. The page becomes a space in which meaning is thrown and has to be gathered again. The title sentence runs through the whole poem in large capitals, broken up by everything that happens between its parts.

Art history has kept coming back to this poem. It stands at the start of a line of modern work that hands part of the decision to chance: Marcel Duchamp dropping threads of one metre to fix new units of length, Hans Arp letting paper fall “according to the laws of chance”, John Cage composing with the I Ching. In 1969 Marcel Broodthaers republished the poem with every line blacked out, leaving only its layout. The poem had become pure arrangement, an image.

Mallarmé’s sentence is not a celebration of chance, and not a complaint about it. It says something plainer: no single act, however carefully made, gets rid of chance. The dice can be thrown again and again, and nothing is used up.

Meets the colour field

PCX-DICE puts this sentence next to a very different tradition: American colour field painting. In the late 1940s and 1950s Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman and Clyfford Still gave up the depicted object and confronted the viewer with large areas of colour. Later painters such as Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland and Gene Davis turned the field into stripes and bands. The picture no longer showed something. It was colour, at a scale that surrounds the body.

Every cycle of PCX-DICE begins as such a field: a vertical gradient from one colour to its complement, calm and without event. Then the dice are written into it. Each throw is inserted into the compressed file, and the decoder reads the foreign bytes as if they belonged there. The field breaks into stripes. These stripes are not composed. They come from the way an old file format counts, repeats and shifts its bytes. The bands the colour field painters laid down by hand appear here as the trace of a mistake.

PCX-DICE, throw 5 of 8: the LED panel and the 32 dice of the throw

Throw 5 of 8. Thirty-two dice with 256 sides each; the first four choose where the file is cut.

The disappearing object

The title promises dice, but there are none. There is no cube, no table, no sound of a throw. The dice in PCX-DICE are electrical noise inside a chip, turned into thirty-two numbers between 0 and 255. The object has disappeared, and only its function is left: an outcome that nobody chose.

This disappearance is what interests me. I keep coming back to the moment when a physical thing turns into data: when a die becomes a byte, a colour becomes a hexadecimal number, a picture becomes a file that can be damaged. The thing is gone, but something of it goes on working. Chance survives the loss of the dice.

PCX-DICE: a throw written into the PCX file, with the inserted bytes highlighted

The throw written into the PCX file: 64 foreign bytes (magenta) in the middle of the compressed image.

Light that is not depicted

A painting shows light. Its colour reflects the light of the room, and the painter works to make it seem to glow from within. Rothko wanted his paintings hung low and in dim light, so that their colour would appear to come out of the canvas.

An LED does not show light. It is light. Each of the 2,048 points on the panel is three small diodes, red, green and blue, emitting their colour directly into the room. Nothing is depicted and nothing is reflected. The colour field is no longer a surface that holds light, but a source.

This changes how the image is seen. Up close the panel falls apart into separate points. From a distance the points close into fields and stripes. The eye does the mixing, the way it once mixed the colours of a painted surface. Only now it looks into the light itself.

PCX-DICE: one cycle of eight throws, from clean gradient to stripes

One cycle: eight throws, two minutes and forty seconds, from the clean gradient to stripes.

Again and again

Every twenty seconds the chip throws again. Eight throws make one cycle, and then the field returns, clean, in a new colour, ready to be broken once more. Mallarmé’s sentence becomes a rhythm here. No image is final, and no throw abolishes chance. The panel goes on throwing.

Watch PCX-DICE throw live →

PCX-DICE, 2026. ESP32-S3 microcontroller with hardware random-number generator, HUB75 LED panel, P4, 64 × 32, 5 V power supply. A throw every 20 seconds, eight throws per cycle.

The PCX file. PCX is an image format from 1985, made by ZSoft for the DOS program PC Paintbrush, and widely used until GIF, JPEG and PNG replaced it. It saves space with run-length encoding: instead of storing the same colour many times, it stores a count and the colour once. Any byte from C0 upward is read as such a count. That is why foreign bytes break the image so easily: one wrong byte becomes a repeat, and everything after it shifts.