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Posted by stephen-hill 3 days ago

1-Bit Hokusai's "The Great Wave" (2023)(www.hypertalking.com)
533 points | 88 comments
noisy_boy 10 hours ago|
Hokusai's work is amazing prima facie. But then when you download the archive.org pdf files (see links in comment from @abetusk) and start to zoom in, the mastery of the strokes just blows your mind. The skill is ridiculous. The stylization, the capturing of the essence of a bird turning its neck by basically the minimum possible strokes while maintaining the feel of dynamism and suspended motion, it is just too much. Nothing makes me more emotional and romantically sentimental of beautiful japan from an era, which in my logical head, I know had lots of hardships and difficult life. He still manages to put that aside by the sheer power of the infusion of tranquillity in his paintings. It makes me long for a time and place which I would never see and probably was a lot harsher than I can see through the mind of his brushstrokes.

Hokusai has long been my favourite artist but I still keep finding more nuances in his work. He lived an 88-year long life dedicated to art. What an unbelievable genius master of a bygone era.

harveynick 7 hours ago||
You probably already know about this video series, in just in case you don’t: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLK-Wicsj5rAasS2g7e-Z9eFUd...

One of the most joyful things I’ve seen on YouTube.

_kulang 1 hour ago||
Perhaps you are unaware, but the great wave is a wood block print. That’s not to say that the strokes aren’t amazing, but they didn’t need to be created in one pass
eru 1 hour ago||
And as far as I am aware, there are many prints. This was sold as an early mass market item. It was very popular.

I'm not sure if he had multiple print runs from fresh carvings, or whether he only carved it once?

KaiserPro 14 hours ago||
I really like the layout and style of the site. I never had a mac growing up so its not a nostalgia thing, I just appreciate the compactness with contrast

The art is also very good. Its hard to get that level of "colour" with limited resolution

walrus01 11 hours ago|
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+ monitor at 256 colors or better. I think also something related to being a crisper image with early 1990s tech level of CRT monitor re: dot pitch if the image was entirely black and white?

For instance:

https://www.reddit.com/r/retrocomputing/comments/1oim0m6/hol...

https://www.reddit.com/r/retrobattlestations/comments/707q70...

wpm 9 hours ago|||
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)

Monochrome CRTs are delicious to look at. A feast for the eyes. I love them. Compact Macs are often the cheapest way to get them, especially for their wonderful paper white phosphor, though I'm a sucker for amber phosphor.

walrus01 8 hours ago||
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

vardump 7 hours ago|||
Crispiness has a lot to do with DAC quality. That’s why Matrox display adapters were so popular in the nineties. Crispy, high quality DAC.
saadn92 10 hours ago||
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.
afc 8 hours ago|
You're probably thinking of Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus school.
etothet 11 hours ago||
I love this. In a world that is increasingly driven by AI, to me this highlights how important and mandatory human creation is in art.
srean 10 hours ago||
I have been moaning about this n the comments below about not being able to find Hokusai's study on tesselations and patterns. Finally found it.

https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1899550/1/11/

Have submitted as a post

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

srean 12 hours ago||
I am having a surprisingly hard time finding Hokusai's exercises on tesselations.

Has search become really this bad !

Anyway wanted to show his sketch of a bird behind chicken wire fence/cage. Similar birds here

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47901702

kevin_thibedeau 11 hours ago||
The dead web makes things hard to find:

https://www.rawpixel.com/image/7660768/image-art-vintage-pub...

srean 10 hours ago||
Oh nice. I had not seen this before but it fits the description very well -- birds and tiling patterns.

The art work that I had in my had a swallow or a sparrow swooping down, looked at through chicken wire grid.

abetusk 11 hours ago|||
The best I could find were these:

https://archive.org/details/hokusaiimayoyhi00kats/page/5/mod...

https://archive.org/details/imayoykushikisev1kats/page/19/mo...

Are you sure you're remembering right?

Here's archive's list of Hokusai books:

https://archive.org/search?query=creator%3A%22Katsushika%2C+...

srean 10 hours ago||
Thanks for the links. There are one or two in common with what I had in mind. I suppose those weren't his 'published' works but personal studies in geometry and tiling.
usermac 12 hours ago||
Having seen this image since inception, I never noticed Mt. Fuji in the background.
dvh 12 hours ago||
I didn't notice the boats
vharuck 10 hours ago||
A lot of Ukiyo-e wood prints have small details that mean a lot to locals. I enjoy learning about them on the NHK's English channel.

In this case, the boats are fast (each has a bunch of crewmen) and were used to catch valuable fish. And the boats on the right have two people not at work (barely discernable in TFA's recreation). Those people were on break, getting ready to replace tired oarsmen. That way, the boat could be moving at all times.

IncreasePosts 12 hours ago||
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
bombcar 8 hours ago||
Up until today I thought it was a tsunami painting
usrnm 14 hours ago||
It's insane, how far our industry has come in less than a single human lifetime. I wish I could see what will become of it in a few centuries.
walrus01 11 hours ago|
It's also kind of insane how rapid the capabilities and tech grew in just a short 10-year span in an earlier period. The B&W mid 80s Mac art style of this reminded me of approximately the same era...

For example right now if you had a $3000 desktop PC (sans cost of monitor) that was built in 2016 it would probably still be a fairly capable Linux workstation.

If you went from 1986 --> 1996 the tech jump in equivalent cost would be something like a 12 MHz 286 with EGA video card, a few MB of RAM, a MS-DOS CLI environment to in 1996 being a Pentium 66 MHz+ or AMD equivalent with significantly more RAM, a SVGA video card, tons more I/O, PCI slots, running Windows 95 or an early Linux distro, and just a whole world more capability. The 286 would be quite obsolete and barely useful for anything.

TacticalCoder 11 hours ago||
> ... or example right now if you had a $3000 desktop PC (sans cost of monitor) that was built in 2016 it would probably still be a fairly capable Linux workstation.

Oh totally. I've got an actual workstation, with ECC mem, from 2015 and a Xeon with 14 cores / 28 threads (tbh I think that CPU alone was worth more than $2 K back then) and it's still plenty quick. I use that old workstation a server though and my "workstation" is a much more modern AMD 7700X (not the latest or quickest CPU by any mean but it's already quite beasty).

neomantra 4 hours ago||
Just yesterday I was looking for a free-as-in-freedom image to embed in my repo, and this gem popped up again!

I'm adding a BubbleTea Picture widget to ntcharts. So the example is a (retro art of (retro art redone on retro tech)) done on (a redo of retro tech) ...

I've added it, but it's still on a feature branch :

https://github.com/NimbleMarkets/ntcharts/tree/picture/examp...

msephton 10 hours ago|
Impressions of The Great Wave Off Kanagawa 神奈川沖浪裏 are currently on view at a record 7 places around the world. https://greatwavetoday.com

Each one of the remaining originals is subtly different due to the woodblock printing process, and must be stored for the majority of the time due to being susceptible to fading in light.

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