Why engravings still glow

Invert a Dürer woodcut and what was black turns to light; every line becomes a bright cut in the dark. It was the first thing I decided for this site.

Engraving was always about light. Where the knife cut away is white; what it left is black. Inverted, every stroke of the knife becomes a line of light, and a gesture made more than five hundred years ago lights up again on a screen.

The technique isn’t complicated. The shader reads how much ink is in each pixel, and the more ink, the brighter it draws, in bone white rather than pure white. The hard part is judgement. A woodcut is one-bit: a line is either there or not, and magnified, its edges blur, so past a certain zoom the shader redraws the edges sharp from the ink’s gradient. Copper engravings and photographs have greys, and inverted as they are, the paper turns into a fog, so the paper is pushed to pure black first.

So every picture on this site has two sides: on the page, the inverted negative; in the crystal ball, the original. The screenshots of the works too: on the wall a bone-white negative, under the crystal their real colours. Move the mouse and you go back and forth between the two.