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

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sstephen-hill 3 days ago 43 commentsRead Article on hypertalking.com

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Discussion (43 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

etothet•36 minutes 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.

KaiserPro•about 3 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•about 1 hour 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...

srean•about 2 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

abetusk•about 1 hour 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+...

kevin_thibedeau•about 1 hour ago

The dead web makes things hard to find:

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

usermac•about 1 hour ago

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

dvh•about 1 hour ago

I didn't notice the boats

IncreasePosts•about 1 hour 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

usrnm•about 4 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•22 minutes 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•14 minutes 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).

SomeHacker44•about 2 hours ago

Curious about the "no derivatives" license. Surely anything derivative would be of the original now public domain art and not this. I do not see how this could as a practical matter be enforced. IANAL though.

teraflop•about 2 hours ago

Public domain isn't "viral" like copyleft.

If I take something in the public domain and make a derivative work, the original remains in the public domain, and I retain ownership of whatever additions or modifications I created. So I can attach whatever conditions I want to the copying of those additions.

For instance, Disney's "Sleeping Beauty" was protected by copyright when it was released, even though it was based on a centuries-old fairy tale that was in the public domain.

jszymborski•about 2 hours ago

Well not if I take this 1 bit image and add my logo or remove his...

TacticalCoder•18 minutes ago

By default for me site's font renders using severe sub-pixel anti-aliasing so it looks all colorful instead of good old Mac black and white. And it's very noticeable.

Dig the wave though, upvoted.

EDIT: and I think there's actually an issue... Somehow there are kinda vertical "bands" where the sub-pixel anti-aliasing shifts. Like I've got a few characters looking too green (on the entire vertical), then a band of pixels looking too red. Very strange. Firefox / Linux but others sites don't do that. First time I see those "bands" with a font using sub-pixel AA.

2nd EDIT: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35866283 In that thread from 2023 on the same site, people are noticing the same weird rainbow/banding fx so it's not just my setup ; )

srean•about 2 hours ago

Previously discussed here

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35866283

72 comments

cubefox•about 2 hours ago

More 1-bit pixel art:

> MacPaint Art From The Mid-80s Still Looks Great Today - https://blog.decryption.net.au/posts/macpaint.html

Previously discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44540402

This masterpiece by an unknown artist might be the best work of hi-res pixel art I have ever seen: https://blog.decryption.net.au/images/macpaint/lesson3d.png

dietrichepp•31 minutes ago

I also run some accounts on BlueSky and Twitter that focus on 1-bit art:

https://bsky.app/profile/1bitdreams.bsky.social

https://x.com/1BitDreams

I see maybe 10 or 15 new pieces of 1-bit art posted on those platforms each week. A couple recent ones:

https://bsky.app/profile/ncesium.bsky.social/post/3miwkrqev5...

https://bsky.app/profile/oddbones.bsky.social/post/3mi7pedpn...

the_af•about 3 hours ago

I love pixel art and specifically monochrome pixel art like this.

It's a pity this blog was so short lived, I can only see 7 entries and only 2 Hokusai prints. Oh well, my own blogs usually don't fare much better.

itsthecourier•about 3 hours ago

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

srean•about 2 hours ago

You mean like this

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Great_Wave_off_Kanagawa_-...

His "Big Wave" has that right left position

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8d/Th...

Love the birds in this one, especially the way it mirrors the wave crest fingers. Hokusai seems to have lunch ved these birds. They figure in his caged Bird pieces.

lioeters•about 1 hour ago

That "Big Wave" variation with birds flying over the waves is strikingly beautiful. So dynamic and raw compared to the famous one. And how poetic the shapes of birds rhyme with the shape of waves. I'm gonna have to set aside some time to appreciate Hokusai's works again. Lovely.

sph•about 1 hour ago

The wave/birds juxtaposition is very Escher-like

andsoitis•about 3 hours ago

Yes. Several references argue for that:

- Art Institute of Chicago (https://www.artic.edu/articles/1139/10-things-to-know-about-...)

- Daily Art Magazine (https://www.dailyartmagazine.com/great-wave-hokusai/#:~:text...)

- Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Wave_off_Kanagawa#Re...)

pavel_lishin•about 3 hours ago

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.

lioeters•about 1 hour ago

This is taught in graphic design, how people typically scan information from left to right and top to bottom, in cultures where the written language flows in that direction. However, a counter argument could be made that people perceive paintings differently from the way they read written text. There have been studies about how the Japanese perceive images and sounds with the same area of the brain that processes language, in contrast to other cultures where they're processed separately. [citaion needed]

ggsp•about 3 hours ago

Look up “spatial agency bias” and “glance curve”

recj•about 3 hours ago

Doesn't strike me as particularly true either.

hnfong•about 3 hours ago

... 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?

filoleg•about 2 hours ago

If you are talking about page order or panel order (in something like manga), those go right to left. More specifically, manga panels follow the usual western comic book panel order, except with left and right flipped.

However, when it comes to the actual text (regardless of the medium), it is always written either top to bottom or left to right. There is no right to left text writing in japanese. This isn't arabic, where text is indeed written right to left.

mitthrowaway2•about 2 hours ago

When written top to bottom, the columns are read from right to left. This is the most common format for printed text, especially in Hokusai's time.

Also, when text was horizontal, it was frequently written right to left until the mid-1940s.[1]

[1] https://www.mutantfrog.com/2009/08/08/the-history-of-japanes...

recj•about 3 hours ago

Japanese characters are actually written left to right, but sometimes the page order is right to left. Writing that you might find on a website, e-mails, and scientific writing is typically actually written left to right. While these kinds of texts may have pages that are ordered from right to left, the text on the pages is typically written from left to right. It is typically only when text is written vertically (yokogaki) that it is written in columns going from right to left, and in that case, the characters are read top to bottom.

Sources: [1] https://www.lingocommand.com/japanese/writing-systems-explai... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_and_vertical_writin... [3] I studied Japanese in college lol

Isamu•about 2 hours ago

When written horizontally it is now left to right but earlier you would see horizontal right to left. But vertical was preferred especially in the past.

You can see horizontal train stop signs written right to left in “In This Corner of the World” anime. Today all signage seems to be left to right.

[edit] The history section in Wikipedia explains that this was a postwar script reform. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_writing_system

kdheiwns•about 2 hours ago

In the time this art was made, top to bottom, right to left was the standard. It's pretty apparent when looking at any document from the Edo era. It's all top to bottom, right to left. Remnants of it are also clear in temples where the signs above doorways are written right to left, not even top to bottom. Plus every Japanese novel and manga today is still written top to bottom right to left.

hnfong•about 3 hours ago

You are right, but it can be argued that during the time the painting was made, vertical writing was the predominant form, and I don't know whether horizontal writing was a thing at the time in Japan...

That said, as I implied in my other reply, the whole idea is a bit silly...

akihitot•about 2 hours ago

Japanese is currently read and written from left to right. However, until about 80 years ago (before World War II), it was read and written from right to left—though this applied only to horizontal writing. Vertical writing is read from right to left, and this convention continues today; for example, Japanese comics (manga) are still read from right to left.

redsocksfan45•about 3 hours ago

Very nice work. I've always loved the aesthetic of hand crafted monochrome pixel art.

joe_mamba•about 3 hours ago

FYI, Hokusai also drew Hentai.

tecleandor•about 2 hours ago

Sorry for the "actually", but Hentai didn't exist yet as a genre. It was "shunga", that is, erotic "ukiyo-e", a popular style at that time.

Popular shunga works by Hokusai are "Two lovers" or the wrongly translated "The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife" (the original Japanese title is "female diver and octopus")

joe_mamba•18 minutes ago

Please NO need to apologize, I don't mind being corrected by men of culture when I'm wrong.

sph•about 1 hour ago

So? Go play the morality police elsewhere.

joe_mamba•18 minutes ago

Excuse me but can you read? Where did you see me bringing up anything related to morality in my statement? Get bent please.