the site is two colours

there are no greys on this page. there are two values, and an 8×8 bayer matrix deciding which of the two each pixel gets to be. every shade you think you see is a pattern.

dither is the trick you use when you do not have enough bits for the thing you are trying to show. not enough colours, not enough bit depth, not enough resolution. instead of giving up on the gradient you scatter the error around until the eye does the averaging for you. the result is technically wrong everywhere and correct overall.

it shows up twice in my work without me planning it. in images it is what turned a photo into something a 1984 macintosh could display. in audio it is the noise you deliberately add when you drop a 24-bit master down to 16, because the noise is less ugly than the truncation.

the opening scene is the same idea running in real time. the word is not 3d text — it is drawn as real type, and what animates is how much of each letter is being drawn at all. a letter at thirty percent is a letter made of grain. so the transition and the material are the same thing: a word condenses out of the noise, and dissolves back into it.

so the letterforms come from the font, the motion comes from the threshold, and the image comes from throwing away almost all of the information.