Fairest in four colours

There's an old story about the Ship of Theseus. It teaches us that two meanings can share one word. So too does every single page in the dictionary.

Dithering

Do you ever think about the early days of digital imagery? Back when our display technology was more constrained we needed all kinds of clever work to make an image look good. When your working resolution was in the realm of 320x200, when phosphor glow and scan lines were the norm, every dot was important.

One of the techniques used to make the most of a limited display is dithering. Dithering an image uses pixellation and subtle noise patterns to preserve the effect of detail on a limited canvas. The technique is used in everything from print to computer graphics to laser engraving. I usually love the look. It elicits enough desire to fill in the blanks that it makes an image more engaging to my eye. Or maybe I just have rose tinted lenses on.

Dithered graphics remind me of old school Adobe Illustrator, a program we had at my old school. Illustrator was oriented towards the art of scalable graphic design, but the splash screens in the early versions used a rasterized photo of Botticelli's "The Birth of Venus". For whatever reason, this is what stood out to me most about the software. The goddess of beauty was usually there in some form, at least back before the incorrectly named "Creative Suite."

The image I created above was inspired by those early splash screens. Nostaliga for a skill I never learned, software I have never used, constraints I'll never have to accept. Those images of Venus were the classiest kind of advertising. The kind that made me feel envy towards those who understood the best technqiues. Kallisti.

For my variant of Venus, I simply ran a public domain closeup of Venus through an online CGA image converter. As before, I am struck by the realization that I prefer it this way. Detail has been lost, refactored, and replaced. And I prefer it to the original.

Have you ever noticed that most of the changes we use to make food taste better are ways of protecting it? Cooking, smoking, brining, curing, dry-aging, salting, pickling, distillation, candying, encrusting, spicing, even fermenting all (usually) make food taste better, and all are oriented around preservation of the food and the person eating it.

I apologise for dithering.