Quantization and Dithering

The work: Quantizer (2025), Verse SOLOS. Exhibition text: Quantizer — exhibition page.

Definitions

Quantization in image processing converts continuous values into a limited set. Applied to colour, it maps every pixel to the nearest entry of a palette and leaves an error at each pixel, the gap between the original value and the one available. Quantization is lossy by definition.

Dithering manages that loss. Mapping each pixel to its nearest colour produces visible bands; error diffusion instead passes each pixel's error on to neighbours not yet drawn, so the error becomes a fine grain that the eye blends into colours the palette does not contain. The oldest error-diffusion method is Floyd–Steinberg (1976); Quantizer uses it and ten others (→ Quantizer, under Dithering algorithms).

Quantization creates the error; dithering redistributes it. Together they made complex images possible on hardware that could show only a handful of colours.

Quantizer: the title as description

Half-circles and squares in orange-red, grey and black tile the frame; each surface is a dithered gradient, its grain visible at full size.

The title of Quantizer names its process. The Verse SOLOS exhibition text:

The title refers to quantization, an algorithmic process that converts continuous information into discrete units. In this series, the term functions doubly: as a technical descriptor of the generative logic at play, and as a poetic shorthand for the beauty of precision, the elegance of working within limits.

Each token fixes a palette and a dithering method at mint; each block hash seeds a new composition from the token's traits, with no memory from one block to the next (→ Quantizer for the mechanism, and for the distinction between that memorylessness and the Markov chain inside a composition).

Historical palettes as strata

A grid of squares in reds, pinks, olive and yellow, with a ring of small nested squares around the centre; the pinks and soft gradients are dithered from the palette's few colours.

The palettes come from the history of computing, among them IBM CGA, Apple II, Commodore VIC-20, Game Boy, MSX, RISC OS, Intellivision, Fairchild Channel F and the Macintosh's default 16 colours. The Verse text says they "recall the chromatic signatures of systems like the IBM CGA and ZX Spectrum".

The wiki reads them as strata rather than quotation: each palette carries the colour of one moment in display technology, when four or sixteen colours was a limit and not a choice, and Quantizer sets these moments side by side across its tokens without settling on any one of them. That reading is the wiki's, not the Verse text's. It belongs with Algorithmic Archaeology: earlier computational methods taken up and kept beside present ones.

Quantization of time

Quantizer applies the same operation to time. Duration is continuous; the Ethereum chain divides it into blocks, one about every twelve seconds. Each block is a discrete unit, and with each one the hash changes and a new composition replaces the last. The image is a function of where time is, measured in blocks; between blocks there is no in-between state.

In both rows the limit produces the work: without palette reduction there is no dithered grain, and without the block there is no rhythm and no shared moment. The Verse text's "shared viewing experience, identical in every location" follows from the second row. Everyone reads the same chain, so everyone is in the same block: a present tense counted in blocks rather than by the clock.

Dithering as aesthetic device and conceptual anchor

The Verse text calls dithering "both an aesthetic device and a conceptual anchor."

As a device, dithering is the grain of constrained digital images: neighbouring pixels alternating between two colours that the eye blends into a third, the quantization error made visible across the surface.

Nested squares on a saturated blue ground, with a green and red square at the centre and rows of small framed squares around it, all in the Spectrum's bright colours.

As an anchor, dithering is a technique invented under constraint. CGA graphics showed four colours at a time from fixed palettes; the ZX Spectrum had fifteen colours but only two per 8×8 cell. Dithering let complex images survive those limits. Using it in 2025, on screens that show millions of colours, reintroduces the limit by choice, a choice the practice makes elsewhere too (→ Randomness and Pattern, on the pixel as an interpolation device).

Note 3002: dithering in print and on screen

Note 3002, the artist's text on the Markov's Dream palette, is his most direct statement on dithering in the vault:

"The black to white gradient is so very easily rendered on a digital screen, but it needs dithering in printed matter. The palette is therefore very digital - aware of how it can and cannot be represented in printed matter using the CMYK colour space."

Here dithering marks the difference between media: a gradient is trivial on screen and needs dithering on paper. The palette is "very digital" because it is chosen with that difference in view. Quantizer's palettes are those of hardware with hard limits, and dithering remains the technique that works between the continuous and the discrete.

Impermanence and the refusal of a fixed image

The artist, in the Verse text: "The most interesting aspect of generative digital art is that it is inherently unstable and ever changing. This is a quality I want to retain, so I resist arriving at immutable outputs." Brian Droitcour, in "Beautiful Rules" (Outland, 2025), writes that Quantizer "lives as a single web page that can be collected but not fixed" and "frustrates the desire for return" (→ Protocol, Taste, and Systems). The Verse text sets this against the Tibetan sand mandala, made over days and swept away; the work's mandala references and its predecessor Anicca are on Quantizer and Mandala Q&A — Goro Murayama.

Bevelled nested squares in dithered blue, green and red, with white where the three meet: a palette of four colours producing a whole range of mixtures.

From screen to paper

The artist extended the Quantizer algorithm into plotter hatching for Nethermind, Nethermind Quilt and Anobium (2025); his are.na channel shows a hatched ink version a day after the first screenshots in July 2025. The drawings, their figures and the channel are on Quantizer, under Plotter drawings. On paper the palette's limit becomes a limit of pens, and the dithered grain becomes hatching.

See also

• Quantizer — the work: mechanism, traits, the eleven dithering methods, the palette catalogue, the plotter drawings
• Protocol, Taste, and Systems — Droitcour's reading of Quantizer
• Colour — hardware palettes and named palettes among the practice's modes of colour
• The Markov's Dream Palette — note 3002 and the palette chosen for the screen
• Algorithmic Archaeology — earlier computational methods taken up again
• Randomness and Pattern — the pixel as interpolation device; working within limits
• Mandala Q&A — Goro Murayama (2026) — the mandala references; Anicca; the plotter works