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Following this sudden shift to the frigid zone of the stars and the night, but also the black and white forensically reworked Other Portraits, came the sparklingly colorful War in Heaven titled Nudes. The series amounts to artistic failure, albeit one that was highly successful on the art market and that takes up a conspicuous amount of space in the Haus der Kunst. This is not due to the motif, the raw material of which is pornography, but to the way in which Ruff appears to elevate it to the status of nude. In the final analysis, Nudes (since 1999) is only interesting in terms of the way that Ruff encounters the digital image and its smallest element, the pixel, in the Internet. "I looked at how the pixels are put together," he explained, "how the enlargement functioned, and I realized that when you shift the pixels slightly and then blow it up, the image takes on a more beautiful structure." He only had to apply this procedure of pixel shifting to one of the thumbnails the porno industry uses to lure visitors into spending money, "and then I had my first nude. It was quite amazing, because on the one hand the image was very beautiful, and on the other it looked a bit nasty." Yet Ruffs experiments with the pixels could also be regarded as a false move. Not only in the case of the Nudes, where the pixels transform sex workers in the process of being penetrated in the oddest of ways into cozy, soft-skinned sex dolls in inappropriate poses; in similar manner, the first thought that comes to mind with the series jpeg (since 2004) is whether or not the work is actually an inquiry into the topic of kitsch and photography. The "beautiful structure" Ruff obtains at a higher rate of compression and a smaller number of pixels in the overall enlargement is as brash and overly clear as the motif of buildings collapsing, whether from earthquakes, tsunamis, or the attacks of September 11 in New York.
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