Drawing inspiration from the simplest of pixel aesthetics, Shinji Murakami’s solo exhibition “2600” opens at New York’s NowHere. Down the Atari 2600 rabbithole since 2021, Murakami makes and mods 2600 games; at NowHere the Japanese artist builds bridges between his hobby and his art practice. The show presents recent acrylic paintings rendered in the 8-bit style (image: Pattern (Pizza Boy), 2024), and some are accompanied by a QR code for viewers to scan, and then play Murakami’s retro videogame creations.

Software engineer and electronics hacker Ian Hanschen shares his vast bitmap font collection that he pulled from various demoscene archives over the years. The catalog includes hundreds of glorious pixel letterform sheets created on the Commodore 64, Atari, and Amiga home computers in the late 1980s and early ’90s. “I don’t remember where much of this collection came from,” Hanschen writes about the missing metadata. “I just thought after finding a few of these [archives] had died that I should make it available.”