!!Con 2021 - Dithers of the Error-Diffusion Kind! by Daniel Temkin

Dithers of the Error-Diffusion Kind! by Daniel Temkin Error-diffusion dithering is perhaps the fundamental algorithm of computer graphics. When an image is displayed in a reduced palette (such as black and white), a cloud of pixels return some detail to an image that otherwise would look washed out. Developed in the 1970s and 80s, they have been mostly stagnant since then. This talk will revisit these algorithms and see what happens when we mess with these coeffients, leading to images where the dithers become inextricable from the content of the images! From there, we’ll imagine how dithering might work in an alternate computer history, where our screens looked very different from the ones we use today. Daniel Temkin is an artist and writer who is skeptical that human beings can understand logic or really write working code at all! They created the FatFinger dialect of JavaScript, which allows you to run typo-ridden JS, and the Entropy language, where all data decays the longer your program runs. They also design dither patterns for an alternate computer history where our screens are hexagonal, triangular, or other shapes.