In November 1973 Leon Harmon of Bell Labs wrote an article in ScientiÞc American entitled,
"The Recognition of Faces."
The article contained this portrait of Mr. Lincoln.

Harmon's Lincoln portrait more than any other artist or work is responsible for my developing MagnaDott.
Of course Harmon didn't consider himself an "Artist," he called himself a "Cyberneticist."
The 1973 article which I read decades later was about what made some faces more recognizable than others.
But for me the image has always been about the excess and redundancy of information in the visual realm.

The continuous visual world is fractal -
that is as you get ever closer new levels of detail are revealed.
This provides for a marvelously textured universe,
but also for disturbingly large databases!

But what if you decided on a given viewing distance and then threw out the excess visual data?
Sure would make transmitting data down a phone line easier, wouldn't it?!
What Harmon has done here is to allow for a wide range of Densities, but to restrict the Area of the image.
In MagnaDott I allow for a wide range of Areas, but restrict the Density.

Constant Area is convenient if you want to pipe a raster image down a throughput limited data line.
Constant Density is convenient if you want to print a continuous tone image on a press with less than 16.7G inking stations.






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