Computer screens have come a long, long way in the past decade and a half. With all these retina-grade, impossible-to-decern-the-pixels resolutions floating around, it’s hard to believe we used to deal with displays as low as 640×480 back in the day. This is what all that resolution evolution looks like all in one place.
In this minimal piece called “Graphic Arrays,” artist Aram Bartholl took fifteen years of gradual resolution growth and stacked all the incremental steps on top of each other to show of our collective progress. It’s pretty staggering.
On the right you can see the IBM standard VGA display of 640×480 from 1987 all the way up to today’s fairly common 2560×1600 resolution. On the left, there’s the meager 240×320 resolution of ancient mobile phones, up to the 1536×2048 of today’s retina iPad. And all rendered in that oldest blank “screen,” paper.
Here’s a full list of the resolutions on display:
240×320, 240×400, 320×480, 480×640, 480×800, 540×960, 600×960, 600×1024, 640×960, 768×1024, 720×1280, 1366×768, 800×1280, 1080×1920, 1536×2048
640×480, 768×576, 800×600, 1024×600, 1024×768, 1152×720, 1280×720, 1280×768, 1280×800, 1152×864, 1280×960, 1280×1024, 1360×768, 1366×768, 1440×900, 1600×900, 1400×1050, 1680×1050, 1600×1200, 1920×1080, 2048×1152, 1920×1200, 1920×1440, 2560×1440, 2560×1600
But in plain old white, they all look pretty decent. [Aram Bartholl via Co.Design]