ColophonCredits, licensing and disclosureConcept site

Colophon

The Institute for Image Studies does not exist, and neither does this exhibition. Both are invented for a design exercise — as are the opening dates, the room texts, the events programme and the curator's essay.

The eleven works are real, and so are their attributions. Every one is in the public domain or has been released CC0 by the institution holding it. Nothing on this site requires a licence, and none of the plate captions makes a claim about a real artwork that is not true of it.

Plates
11, dithered in-browser
Algorithms
Threshold, Bayer 8×8,
Atkinson, Floyd–Steinberg
Build step
None. Static HTML/CSS/JS.
Dependencies
None, beyond three webfonts

The works

All public domain or CC0 · sourced via Wikimedia Commons

PL.01 Portrait of a Man (Il Condottiere)
Antonello da Messina · 1475 Oil on panel
Musée du Louvre, Paris public domain
PL.02 Portrait of a Young Man
Bronzino · 1530s Oil on wood
The Metropolitan Museum of Art public domain
PL.03 Marble bust of Herodotos
Roman, after a Greek original · 2nd century AD Marble
The Metropolitan Museum of Art public domain
PL.04 Melencolia I
Albrecht Dürer · 1514 Engraving
— public domain
PL.05 Knight, Death and the Devil
Albrecht Dürer · 1513 Engraving
National Gallery of Art, Washington public domain
PL.06 Saint Jerome in His Study
Albrecht Dürer · 1514 Engraving
National Gallery of Art, Washington public domain
PL.07 The Vitruvian Man
Leonardo da Vinci · c. 1490 Pen and ink on paper
Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice public domain
PL.08 Portrait bust of the emperor Gaius, known as Caligula
Roman · AD 37–41 Marble
The Metropolitan Museum of Art public domain
PL.09 Battle scene (detail), from the Legend of the True Cross
Piero della Francesca · c. 1452–66 Fresco
Basilica of San Francesco, Arezzo public domain
PL.10 Portrait bust of a woman
Roman · 1st century AD Marble
The Metropolitan Museum of Art public domain
PL.11 Portrait of a Young Man (detail of the face)
Bronzino · 1530s Oil on wood
The Metropolitan Museum of Art public domain

Photographs of the Metropolitan Museum of Art objects are released CC0 by the museum. The Dürer engravings from the National Gallery of Art, Washington are likewise open access. The remaining works are photographs of objects far out of copyright.

Type

EB Garamond Octavio Pardo, after Claude Garamont's punches of the 1540s. Display, wall labels and body. OFL
IBM Plex Mono Every piece of machine-written text: catalogue numbers, metadata, controls. OFL
Silkscreen Jason Kottke. A bitmap face, used only for plate numbers — the smallest, most machine-like mark on the page. OFL

Method

Every plate is dithered on your machine, at the moment you scroll to it, at the size your screen asked for. The reduction runs at cell resolution — a few hundred pixels across — and the browser scales the result up with image-rendering: pixelated, which is what keeps the dots square.

The source photograph stays in the page as an <img> and is only hidden once a canvas has successfully replaced it, so a visitor without JavaScript sees the eleven works undithered rather than eleven empty boxes.