What this is

A printmaking translator. It pulls an open-access work from a museum API and re-renders it through eleven processes, each one a real way images have been put on paper or screen.

• Dithering — error diffusion. Floyd–Steinberg, Atkinson's Macintosh variant, or Jarvis.
• ANSI Block — quadrant or half blocks in the 16-color VGA palette. Each cell gets two inks, chosen by whichever pair leaves the least error.
• ASCII — character density standing in for halftone. Four ramps, from 70 glyphs down to two.
• CMYK ASCII — the same idea split into four type plates and overprinted. Any separation can be viewed alone.
• Benday Dots — rotated dot screens at 15°, 75°, 0° and 45°. Newsprint, by way of Lichtenstein.
• Comic Book — flat posterized color, Sobel line art, plates a hair out of register.
• Risograph — two spot inks on cheap paper, separated for the actual ink pair.
• Couture — red, yellow, blue and green plus a neutral pair. Regions consolidate into flat shapes and a keyline goes on last. Fashion-house graphic, not halftone.
• Ukiyo-e — key block and colour blocks. Stepped pigment, a wiped bokashi gradient, plank grain, and the registration a hair off.
• Engraving — intaglio. A deeper groove holds more ink and prints a wider line, so tone here is line width, not dot size.
• Cyanotype — Herschel's 1842 iron process. Prussian blue where the light struck, bare paper where it did not.

Every mode trades fidelity for translation. The question each one asks is the same: what survives?

Who made this

Page by Hudson.

A side project about three things at once: the museum as an open archive, printmaking as a generative constraint, and the script as a way to think about what an image is. Replication gets interesting when it is forced to choose.

More at hudsoncw.com.

How to use it

Pick a collection, press Fetch & render, then run the same piece through several processes. Not every process flatters every image — a nebula engraves beautifully and dithers into mud, and the reverse is just as true. You do not know what you will pull.

Contrast means the same thing everywhere: above zero it steepens the tone curve, below zero it flattens toward mid-gray. W is resolution, and each process reads it in its own units — characters across for ASCII, screen ruling for Benday and Riso, lines per plate for Engraving, region size for Couture.

Anything you like can go in the guestbook, which is public. Or take the PDF.

Credits

Open APIs from The Met, the Art Institute of Chicago, and NASA.

Floyd–Steinberg dithering adapted from Christian Hill's implementation at scipython.com. The engraving field follows the warped-line approach in Paul Rosin's Image-based Portrait Engraving. Cyanotype chemistry and toning after Mike Ware.