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.