What this is

A printmaking translator that pulls open-access artwork from museum APIs and re-renders it through seven processes, each rooted in a real production technique:

• Dithering — Floyd-Steinberg error diffusion. The algorithm that made grayscale possible on 1-bit displays.
• ASCII / CMYK ASCII — character density as halftone, with channel separation borrowed from offset printing.
• Benday Dots — the overprinted dot screens Lichtenstein lifted from comics, lifted from newsprint.
• Comic Book — posterized fills with Sobel edge detection. The heavy-line aesthetic of mass-print comics.
• Risograph — the duplicator that spot-colors zines. Ink-laid-on-ink with intentional misregistration.
• ANSI Block — terminal-native pixel grids. Doubled vertical resolution via the half-block character.

Each mode trades fidelity for translation. The image becomes the print process becomes a new image.

Who Made This

Page by Hudson

Just a side project that takes advantage of the museum as an open archive, printmaking as a generative constraint, and the computer script as a way to think about what an image is - Here, replication is interesting because it forces a choice — what survives the translation?

More at hudsoncw.com.

How to use

Try the same painting through various modes. Not every mode flatters every image, some are artworks and others are sculptures, etc. You never now what you'll pull. Move the contrast and width sliders, swap modes, and save whatever you like to the guestbook.

Thanks for trying. Enjoy. Let me know what you think!

Credits

Built on open APIs from The Met, Art Institute of Chicago, Smithsonian, and NASA.

The ASCII and Floyd-Steinberg dither adapted from Christian Hill's implementation at scipython.com.