The two sculptures comprising Transition of Power (From Hope to Highrise Demagogy) are extruded favicons for political campaigns. A favicon (“favorite icon”) is a 16-pixel by 16-pixel logo that appears alongside the URL or inside the tab in most browsers.  Here, a block of wood represents each pixel of the favicon, with the height of that block determined by the pixel’s color’s luminance (perceived brightness). The darker the color of the pixel, the taller the block of wood.  The piece is made up of two sculptures:  one is the favicon for the Obama campaign in 2008 while the other is for the Trump campaign in 2016.  The Obama favicon was built in 2008 as part of Building a Better America (Two Plans).

The Trump favicon pictured in front of Proposed Design for a New Presidential Emblem at the Blocks exhibition in March of 2017.

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Two separate art fairs debuted in Houston in the fall of 2011. Houston Fine Art Fair happened in September, whileTexas Contemporary – the result of a disgruntled spinoff from the former – touched down in October, both at the same venue. Glasstire has a thorough article on the origin of these two fairs and the subsequent drama.

I wanted to have a bit of fun with these two entities and created a webpage that portrays the two fairs in a competitive manner. Each fair is represented by a floating construction of its site’s favicon logo atop a background of the Houston skyline. (Information on favicons and my sculptural rendering of them is provided below.) Clicking on each of these will allow you to “favify” the page, creating a swarm of smaller red and yellow icons, as show here:

About Favicons and Favify

Favicons are the 16×16 pixel icons that appear in the address bar or tabs of most browsers. Using Google’s Sketchup, I developed a process to extrude each pixel into a height, based on a its luminosity. In the examples below, for example, the black pixels are pulled to the tallest height, while the brighter pixels remain at a shallower depth.

Favify is a made-up term for allowing users to deploy multiple favicon renderings directly into their browser, as with this project. Use the red link in the sidebar to visit the project, then start clicking on either large favicon.

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