diT͟Hər(ism) #38

…[O]ne of the earliest [applications] of dither came in World War II. Airplane bombers used mechanical computers to perform navigation and bomb trajectory calculations. Curiously, these computers (boxes filled with hundreds of gears and cogs) performed more accurately when flying on board the aircraft, and less well on ground. Engineers realized that the vibration from the aircraft reduced the error from sticky moving parts. Instead of moving in short jerks, they moved more continuously. Small vibrating motors were built into the computers, and their vibration was called dither from the Middle English verb "didderen," meaning "to tremble." Today, when you tap a mechanical meter to increase its accuracy, you are applying dither, and modern dictionaries define dither as a highly nervous, confused, or agitated state. In minute quantities, dither successfully makes a digitization system a little more analog in the good sense of the word.

— Ken Pohlmann, Principles of Digital Audio

In this collection of mine, I focused on textures created repeatedly by dither, ASCII, and glitch effects in a random flow. The random pauses in the flow and the subsequent motion wiping each texture and recreating it result in a unique animation.

*Dither Texture: Mouse Move
*Horizontal Stretch: Left Click
*Vertical Stretch: Right Click
*Start and stop animation: press ‘P’
*Save image: press 'S' to save the current image as a PNG.

diT͟Hər(ism) © 2023 by NUBPLUS is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.