The annual E3 electronics conference in Los Angeles is not the first place anybody is thinking of as a hotbed of art. Yet it is playing host to Into The Pixel from May 10-12. The show, subtitled "an exhibition of the art of the video game" is a group show of sorts, juried by a mix of art and technology insiders including a curator from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, a Senior Art Director from Industrial Light & Magic, a lecturer from the Vitterbi School of Engineering, USC, the owner of LA's acclaimed Sixspace Gallery and several others.

Sort of picking up the outmoded thread of art criticism that surfaced in the early years of photoshop, when "real" artists scoffed at using a computer to create, this show treats the techniques and aesthetics of the video game industry as a new palette from which artists are executing remarkable works. Many of the jurors seemed unsure of how artistic game design had become and the exhibition seeks to articulate their changes of heart while reviewing submissions.

Celebrating the microgenre's similarities and differences vis a vis traditional fine art, all the pieces in the show include credits detailing the artist, title, video game it's taken from, and, of course, the video game publisher who financed the hours of painstaking monitor-time that went into their creation.

While much of the works featured have the sort of mystical and magickal overtones usually reserved for D&D enthusiasts and Lord Of The Rings picture books, there is true diversity in terms of style and composition and Into The Pixel offers a really fascinating new perspective on the world of video games.

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