Artwork with more colors than printers can print

Chris Majors is an artist with an unusual mission: He produces digital artworks that contain such high resolution and such a large number of colors that normal printers — which can handle 16 million possible colors — cannot print them. Apparently he’s written his own program to generate the images, and if you order at the largest possible print size — 8 feet by 4 feet — it’ll take him 10 days to render the image, using a 2.2 GHz computer. As he notes:

The resolution of the images: With a minimum of 2,8 billion calculated points (at 34x34 in.) the finest details can be fully appreciated, even with a magnifying glass. Because these drawings exist only in very large sizes with extremely detailed subjects, a profusion of views appears as one approaches them.

Extremely cool! But unfortunately, also extremely ugly. Man, why is neato conceptual art always so totally hideous? This stuff looks like the side of a van.

(Thanks to Ted Rainer for this one!)


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Bio:

I'm Clive Thompson, a writer on science, technology, and culture. This blog collects bits of offbeat research I'm running into, and musings thereon.

Currently, I'm a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a columnist for Wired magazine. I also write for Fast Company and Wired magazine's web site, among other places. Email or AOL IM me (pomeranian99) to say hi or send in something strange!

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Recent Entries

A long German word for “noticing when ads are being customized based on your surfing history”

Gay squid sex

“El Ajedrecista” — an analog chess-playing computer from 1912

Hacking the Model T

“How did you find my site?” and Vannevar Bush’s memex

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a bunch of stuff

May 20, 2011 » 02:28 PM

From Christopher Kennedy’s very droll book “Neitzsche’s Horse”.

July 28, 2010 » 07:35 AM
“Wr” - S

July 06, 2010 » 10:05 AM

My Xbox broke, and I was trying to Google some possible technical solutions, when I noticed that Google appears to be encouraging me to make a typo. I suppose it’s possible that Google’s algorithms know that typing “wont” instead of “won’t” would produce better results.

June 29, 2010 » 05:00 PM

On the other hand, when I tried the test for multitasking, I was pretty abysmal. I performed worse than people who identify themselves as heavy multitaskers, and those who identify as low multitaskers.

June 29, 2010 » 04:58 PM

I finally got around to trying out the interactive “test your distractability and multitasking” page at the New York Times, which they put up alongside their story earlier this month about how computer distractions are eroding our lives. 

According to the test, I guess I have good focus — I’m not very distractable! 

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Collision Detection: A Blog by Clive Thompson