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1-Bit Hokusai's "The Great Wave" (2023)

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Re: 1-Bit Hokusai's "The Great Wave" (2023)

#71

Post by lioeters »

srean wrote: post #54
sph wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The wave/birds juxtaposition is very Escher-like

Indeed. Check this out https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1899550/1/11/ I don't know whether Escher was familiar with Hokusai's work but they shared a common interest in tilings and tesselations. Damned if I can find those Hokusai sketches on the web now.

Wow that is kind of mind-blowing. Looking through other pages, Hokusai is showing each "rule" (法) and its application (tessalation) that produces the pattern. It makes me wonder about what kind of cultural exchange was happening between Japan and Europe at the time.

Re: 1-Bit Hokusai's "The Great Wave" (2023)

#72

Post by srean »

lioeters wrote: post #71
srean wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. Check this out https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1899550/1/11/ I don't know whether Escher was familiar with Hokusai's work but they shared a common interest in tilings and tesselations. Damned if I can find those Hokusai sketches on the web now.

Wow that is kind of mind-blowing. Looking through other pages, Hokusai is showing each "rule" (法) and its application (tessalation) that produces the pattern. It makes me wonder about what kind of cultural exchange was happening between Japan and Europe at the time.

Escher would be generations younger. However, I am curious about whether Hokusai encountered any Islamic art. Tesselations and symmetry play a big role in that one. I submitted ed this link as a separate HN post.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47902993

Re: 1-Bit Hokusai's "The Great Wave" (2023)

#73

Post by reaperducer »

francoi8 wrote: post #69

For those wanting to explore automatically converting art pieces to 1-bit you can use 8Bit Photo Lab on iOS or Android. Select the black and white palette and choose resolution and dithering type. Play Store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ilixa.ebp&... App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/8bit-photo-lab/id6759910005

On macOS, there's a great piece of freeware called Retro Dither that does the job well: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/retro-dither-b-w-is-beautiful/...

/Not the author, just a satisfied user.

Re: 1-Bit Hokusai's "The Great Wave" (2023)

#74

Post by itsthecourier »

hnfong wrote: post #10
itsthecourier wrote: post #3

somebody explained me that the correct way to appreciate this painting is to invert it on horizontal axis. the reason is, japanese is read from right to left. once you invert it you can appreciate it better

... specifically, Japanese is traditionally written top to bottom, then right to left. (In contrast, English is written left to right, then top to bottom.) So, armed with that knowledge, are you going to rotate it as well?

it must be done, bro, for you, anything

Re: 1-Bit Hokusai's "The Great Wave" (2023)

#75

Post by bombcar »

IncreasePosts wrote: post #32
usermac wrote: post #31

Having seen this image since inception, I never noticed Mt. Fuji in the background.

Its gotta be in there - that print (and 35 others believe it or not) are from hokusai's collection: Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji

Up until today I thought it was a tsunami painting

Re: 1-Bit Hokusai's "The Great Wave" (2023)

#76

Post by afc »

saadn92 wrote: post #61

This is what keeps me coming back to HN. Someone spent years recreating woodcut prints pixel by pixel on a quadra 700 using aldus superpaint at 512x342. I feel like the constraint is what caused it to be. The 1-bit forces you to solve every gradient and texture with pure composition, which means you can't cheat with color or resolution. I forgot who said it, but constraints breed creativity.

You're probably thinking of Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus school.

Re: 1-Bit Hokusai's "The Great Wave" (2023)

#77

Post by rafabulsing »

wonnage wrote: post #59
itsthecourier wrote: post #3

somebody explained me that the correct way to appreciate this painting is to invert it on horizontal axis. the reason is, japanese is read from right to left. once you invert it you can appreciate it better

This is like saying westerners need to read mirrored manga to truly appreciate the artist’s intent. You can just start reading from the right…

I do think that there's some loss in translated manga, actually!

When the mangaka is creating the layout, they're conceptualizing the flow not only of the panels, but also of the text inside panels, to be RTL.

Translating the text into a LTR language without mirroring the image, makes it so that your eyes have to zig zag around a bit more, going RTL panel wise, but LTR text box wise.

Compared to the problems that mirroring the art brings, I still think that's best compromise of the options, but doesn't mean it's not an actual impact on the experience, even if a subtle one.

I have wondered before, though, about how had might it be to learn to read mirrored, RLT english. Might be a bit of a challenge at first, but would enable you to read translated manga RTL with no compromises (other than the inherent lossiness of language translation in general).

Re: 1-Bit Hokusai's "The Great Wave" (2023)

#78

Post by walrus01 »

wpm wrote: post #70
walrus01 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The portrait mode black and white layout of this is similar to the high resolution black and white displays which were in use with some more expensive Mac based "desktop publishing" setups in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This was before anyone could reasonably afford a 20" full color monitor, and it also would have been too expensive or I/O intensive on the video expansion card to be capable of driving a 1280x1024…

The "dot pitch" is a measure distance between two "reds" of the dots in the shadow mask or the width between two reds on an aperture grille (which is really only horizontal dot pitch). Since black and white monitors don't have either, they can get much much sharper because that layer just doesn't exist. It's limited only by the focus of the beam and bandwidth/ frequency of the signal. (As my layman understanding goes…

That is indeed something I had forgotten, having not had to think about CRTs in detail for a long time... Here's something from 2001 when CRTs were still in common use also with details on the differences between shadow mask vs. aperture grill CRTs.

https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/a-thg-primer,393-3.html

Re: 1-Bit Hokusai's "The Great Wave" (2023)

#79

Post by rafabulsing »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #6
itsthecourier wrote: post #3

somebody explained me that the correct way to appreciate this painting is to invert it on horizontal axis. the reason is, japanese is read from right to left. once you invert it you can appreciate it better

Doesn't this assume that people (in the west, at least) "perceive" paintings from left to right? That doesn't strike me as particularly true.

I thought I'd be unimpressed by the mirrored version, but I can say that for myself, it really did have a different feel to it.

I've always pictured the boats moving right, sliding down, as if surfing the wave.

The mirrored version makes it clear that, no, they're going against the wave, which makes it that much more of a scary situation!

Now, having noticed that, I see how the position of the rowers in the boat would be enough to deduce that. But still, it goes to show that (at least for me, personally, in this specific case) the mirroring really did bring a more intuitive feel for what the artist was trying to represent.

Re: 1-Bit Hokusai's "The Great Wave" (2023)

#80

Post by nielsbot »

reaperducer wrote: post #73
francoi8 wrote: post #69

For those wanting to explore automatically converting art pieces to 1-bit you can use 8Bit Photo Lab on iOS or Android. Select the black and white palette and choose resolution and dithering type. Play Store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ilixa.ebp&... App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/8bit-photo-lab/id6759910005

On macOS, there's a great piece of freeware called Retro Dither that does the job well: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/retro-dither-b-w-is-beautiful/... /Not the author, just a satisfied user.

One more for iOS: BitCam

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/bitcam/id1114990619

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