EXCALIBUR 🪩

Scientific American in 1973: "...the computer divides the picture into nXn squares of uniform size & averages the brightness values ...viewed from close up, these 'block portraits' appear to be merely an assemblage of squares." Below: George Washington by Leon D. Harmon, 1970s

1973: "SYSTEM FOR MAKING BLOCK PORTRAITS uses a flying-spot scanner, a device similar to a television camera. The image, usually in the form of a 35-millimeter photographic transparency, is scanned in a raster pattern of 1,024 lines. In the analogue-to-digital converter each line is sampled at 1,024 points and the brightness of each point is assigned one of 1,024 values. Using this information stored on magnetic tape, the central processing unit divides the image into n × n squares and averages the brightness values of all the points within each square. The number of permissible brightness values is then reduced to eight or 16. The resulting image is displayed on a video terminal (a television screen) and photographed. The computer can also be made to operate a facsimile printer, which produces a finished picture directly. Most of the portraits used in these experiments were made by the latter process." From The Recognition of Faces by Leon D. Harmon in Scientific American, Nov. 1973. Below example of Abraham Lincoln (1971) is from the Ragnar Digital Collection.

日本版エプスタイン島といわれる 人身売買が行われたと噂の島へ。 カフェに行ったらアミューズが経営してた。