Our world is increasingly machine-built, and our experience of it is more mediated by computers and artificial intelligence, but HANDS is a digital image manually painted by volunteers standing next to each other.

No AI was used to make HANDS. The artists used custom code and standard algorithms for color-clustering and half-toning to translate their photograph into a four-color palette on a hexagonal grid. They also designed and code-generated maps for volunteers to translate the image onto the boards.

With these maps, a hex-grid stencil, and a little coaching, people who had never met before collaborated (co-labored) to quickly paint 34,517 dots into a 288 square-foot painting. Many described it as meditative, like a flow state. Almost none of them knew what the image was while they were painting it.

From 20 feet away the viewer sees a clearly resolved, photographic image: two hands reaching for each other. It looks machine-printed, but as the viewer approaches, they begin to see that the image is made of hand-painted dots, each bearing the signature of its maker – a swirl, a swish, lighter, darker – no two dots are identical.

HANDS explores a different balance of machine power and people power: one that invites strangers to work together, one that celebrates the human touch.

Daniel Bernier is drawn to art that invites the viewer into the process of its making. They have long wanted to make musical instruments that don’t require formal training and reward experimentation. They reach most for legible tools and techniques. Each of these is an outgrowth of their understanding that people should be supported in their love for making interesting things, that people love to play. 

Their partnership with Dan Gries has produced physical-pixel works that invite the viewer to notice how our eyes resolve an image from discrete points of color. To attend to how we see our screens, instead of what’s on them. 

Based in Cumberland, Rhode Island, they are a musician, a poet, a sometimes-generative artist. They are learning to tune and repair pianos. They are a step-parent, and nonbinary. Learn more here. 

Dan Gries crafts algorithms using computer code to generate images that take physical form as inkjet prints, pen plotter drawings, or installations. His work is not made with artificial intelligence; instead, each piece emerges from systems he builds himself, shaped by decisions about form, motion, and texture.

He is drawn to imperfection and unpredictability: rough edges, wandering curves, and shifts in color or flow. His visual language ranges from minimalist, meditative geometries that seek stability to more intricate expressions of grace or turmoil in motion.

Dan Gries lives and works in New Haven, CT, teaching mathematics and computer science at Hopkins School while maintaining an active practice in visual art. 

Rita Lombardi is a Rhode Island based artist and writer interested in the specificity of daily life and how it translates to the general expression of living intentionally. She works primarily in photography and poetry. Her photography is in private and public collections and she has self-published two books of poetry. This is her first public art installation.

Ball & Socket Arts’ 2025/2026 free Visual Arts Programming is funded with leadership support from Ion Bank Foundation.