They Never Kneel

They Never Kneel is a digital triptych inspired by the Hellenistic sculptures commissioned by the kings of Pergamon to commemorate their victories over the Galatians, the Celtic tribes who settled in Anatolia in the third century BC. The originals, believed to be bronze, are lost; we know them through Roman marble copies, among them the Dying Gaul in the Capitoline Museums and the Ludovisi Gaul, in which a warrior takes his own life after killing his wife rather than submit to capture. What makes these works remarkable is their point of view. They were made to celebrate a victory, yet they portray the defeated with pathos and dignity: wounded, exhausted, and unbowed. The enemy is shown as foreign and fierce, but never as small. The three panels follow that thread: the wounded warrior holding himself upright on his shield, the couple at the edge of capture, the fallen figure at rest on the ground. The figures are rebuilt in thin lines and solid forms, then deliberately corrupted with a Haar-wavelet compression glitch (wzip). The image breaks the way compressed data breaks, in blocks and bands, yet the forms survive the damage. More than two thousand years on, they are still legible. Resolution: 1280 × 720 px Format: GIF Frame rate: 5 FPS File size: 23,7 MB Software: Created with a custom drawing application built in Processing