The Point of Pointillism

Pointillism was never just about painting.
It was, and is, about how we see.

In the late 19th century, Georges Seurat and Paul Signac introduced a radical idea: that a canvas could be built not with strokes or smears, but with pure points of color, carefully arranged, trusting the mind and the eye to assemble them into form. The painting no longer existed on the surface; it existed in the space between the dots — and in the space between the canvas and the viewer.

Marshall McLuhan’s later axiom, "the medium is the message," echoes here: the very structure of Pointillism foretold a future where content and construction would be inseparable.

Yet the story begins even earlier.
When Johannes Gutenberg separated letters into movable type, he gave birth to the modern mind. Tiny, isolated letters combined into words, then into arguments, histories, manifestos. He taught humanity that thought itself could be modular, recombined endlessly. Gutenberg’s revolution wasn’t mechanical — it was perceptual. Some printers were burned at stake for printing common language translations of the Bible.

In the 20th century, Guillaume Apollinaire arranged words into pictures in his Calligrammes, collapsing poetry and painting into a single act. And Bill Griffith’s Zippy the Pinhead wore Zipatone dot-screens like a second skin, laughing absurdly through fields of mechanical texture — a cartoon meditation on the mass-produced mind.

Meanwhile, the printing press evolved. Four-color process  used ordered grids of cyan, magenta, yellow, and black, but perfection was elusive. Misalignments birthed strange moiré patterns, hallucinated waves of false order. Later, stochastic printing embraced randomness itself: countless microdots, no two the same, forming smooth, almost invisible transitions. The closer technology came to perfection, the more it resembled the grain of nature.

Through all this, the psychology of sight remained unchanged.
The human eye is not a passive receiver; it guesses, invents, hallucinates meaning. It stitches dots into images, letters into ideas, fragments into wholes. We are the authors of what we perceive.

Artists like Chuck Close embraced this truth, constructing monumental faces from abstract cells. Andy Warhol multiplied celebrity faces until they lost individuality, drowning in a sea of identical impressions. Yoko Ono handed the brush to the audience, asking them to complete her broken poems and shredded paintings.

But not all visions of Pointillism are bright.

In the age of AI and pixelated realities, the same thousand points of light that dazzle us could scatter us.
Humanity, having learned to deconstruct everything into bits — into data, into atoms, into ideologies — now faces the danger of blowing itself apart, atom by atom, point by point. What we can assemble, we can just as easily disassemble.

Today’s AI, born from billions of data points, continues the Pointillist dream at terrifying scale. But in our rush to simulate intelligence, beauty, and meaning, we must remember: the dots only cohere because we choose to make them cohere. Without that choice, there is only noise. Only scatter. Only the echo of a scream across a broken sky.

The point of Pointillism is that meaning is never inherent — it is earned.
It is made dot by dot, choice by choice, vision by vision.

And we are left, as ever, standing beneath a thousand points of light, wondering which way to turn.