This began as more of a “Hey! You can do this in JavaScript now?!” project.

That said, the idea came while looking at my friend’s collection of vintage black and white concert posters, and thinking about my blog site’s new “analog” styling, requiring all the images to be filtered in grayscale.

Also, image editing software is usually horrifically expensive, and I thought it might be fun to see what could be done in less than 2kb in a modern browser. There’s no “save” or anything (I suppose you could take a screenshot), so this is by definition “exploratory.” A one-off. A playground. I like that aspect of it.

The text is more or less after a quote by David Hockney: “Photoshop came out of painting, and now it’s going back to painting.” The development cycle for this little app was very “try one thing, try again” and so I was thinking about cycles as such, how things begin as one thing, become something else, then perhaps later return to their source(s).