The Rasterists and the Vectorists

Keith Wiley

2025

It all started with a mild argument over the merits of rasters and vectors, but it would eventually consume the universe.

"See how hopeless your splotches of paint are? Render a painting at two feet square and can you blow it up later? Expand it across the table and delve into its depths?"

"That's absurd," the retort. "The painting was made at precisely the right size in the first place. To alter it in any way is an affront to the vision of the artist."

Ignoring the response, the slender vectorist continued, while tugging his sleeves down tightly and rolling the cuffs with suavity. "Our venerable patrons call for ever-greater renderings, by which to out-glorify one another. Expand a portrait ten-fold, and the tiniest dollop of white, which had so ingeniously captured the glint of the eye, grows into a gross splash on the canvas. Expand it ten again, a mural it is now, and that titanium glint is an unidentifiable spill that offers no improved detail, and in fact loses the luster that gave it power to begin with."

"Enough of this." The rasterist huffed such that his bangs swam briefly. "The artist added precisely as much detail as the work called for. A mural should have been commissioned if that was the desire."

But the vectorist pressed on. "Can you explore the subject's skin in greater detail? Delve into her dimples? Walk along the fine threads of her glorious individual hairs?"

"In-div-idual hairs?!" the rasterist balked. "Why would you want to do that? It's a portrait, a person, a soul frozen in time. What importance is there in a single hair?"

Eventually, this argument would move into the computers. Everything is consumed by computers, eventually, for all of reality is computation.

"Not the mind!" declared a particularly vociferous school of philosophers. "No computer will cage its angelic virtue. You speak of capturing the soul with goop piled on stretched sheets, but the true soul is the mind and that is not computable!"

"Posh! Leave that argument for another day, please," the vectorists implored. "Stay on topic, would you?"

And so, to the computers they went. No need for paint. Pixels will carry the hue, and they are truly innumerous—right? "There," declared the rasterists with finality. "Have all the damn pixels you want. Belabor us not with your tedious complaints of scaling. Pixels upon pixels. Pixels within pixels. We will call them subpixels! They will descend to the Planck and encompass continents. Nothing can stop us now."

But the vectorists smugly chomped their pipes, for now they really had the rasterists in a corner.

"Here again," said one. "The perfect glint of our patron's perfect eye, the reflection of the light coming in over our shoulder, reduced to an indiscernible spot. Place it slightly to the side, or above, and the subject's gaze is steered thusly, altering the — is it a painting when in the computer — altering the painting's feeling entirely. Even worse, place the two glints of the pair of eyes in even the tiniest misalignment and the picture is wrecked! So perfect those glints must be, but when done thusly, a person, a being, a human—"

"—Yes yes, a soul, we get it already."

"Is captured," finished one vectorist. "Captured perfectly. Immortally."

"Your point?" a rasterist with round cheeks bemoaned, rolling his eyes with annoyance.

"Pixels, you say."

"Yes, expand it all you want now. Explore its depths."

"And you can scale it now?" said the vectorist. "Are you sure?"

"Scale it up! Have at it!"

"But whence the incoming detail?"

The rasterists were flummoxed. They had, indeed, been caught off-guard. "Ah, well — ahem."

Vectorists the world over raised an eyebrow, waiting patiently. Meanwhile, the computers gave them the tools to finally ply their vectorized craft, which had heretofore been entirely theoretical. "Make me a line!" conjured the vectorists, and a line appeared. Not just any line. Not a mere scrawl of paint. Not even a pencil scratch dragged precisely along the edge of a ruler, so seemingly perfect, so seemingly straight. "No, not straight enough," they would cry, magnifying glasses in hand, squinting with judgment. "Look at the ruler itself, seemingly flawless at a glance but jagged upon inspection — But no longer! Just look at this perfect line," they said of their maiden line, the first perfect line ever created.

"I see nothing," said a suspicious and naive rasterist, balding on top but with hair coming out of his ears. "Just four numbers. You call that a line? Yuck, I say." But the vectorists said to look differently, to see differently, and as they all gazed upon the quadruped of numbers, a pair fore and a pair aft, lurching across the — the canvas? — like an alien creature on four legs, sure enough a line resolved into view. They gasped together, the rasterists in shock and the vectorists with pride. It was truly the most perfect line they had ever beheld.

"But—" began a young rasterist in protest, but she was denied even one more syllable.

"Bring forth the circles!" declared the exuberant vectorists, now holding nothing back. They veritably prestidigitated, and perfect circles were laid upon the — sigh, the canvas — and to everyone's astonishment, the most perfect circles anyone had ever beheld materialized before their very eyes. Plato looked down from heaven and smiled. "They understand," he said to himself. There was a pause, a contemplation, and from the rasterists a desperate seeking of an error.

"No. It can't be. There must be a flaw." And so they delved inward while the vectorists distracted themselves with multitudes of beautiful circles.

"Aha!" came back the rasterists after scrutiny. "Your circles disintegrate. See?" The vectorists flinched, certainty wavering, and turned their attention to the computer code and the numerical arrays. What were the blubbering rasterists going on about now? But there was, indeed, a flaw. Pi itself fell to pieces in its later digits. The computer lacked the necessary bits.

"Oh for crying out loud," said one vectorist, paling with concern as the blood drained from his face. "What did we do wrong?"

An older rasterist responded, "The paint, and now the pixels, will reign supreme."

"Your pixels scale no better than our circles," said the vectorists, grumbling, still seeking a solution to their unexpected oversight.

At this point, the war between the rasterists and the vectorists entered a brief period of mutual deflation. Neither side was particularly happy with the current state of affairs, and the patrons were the least happy of all.

Until one day...

"Oh boy oh boy!" A skinny rasterist came running through the streets barefoot. "Victory!" Thought you had us, did you? Look at this!" Everyone looked on, the rasterists with hope, the populous with curiosity, the patrons with avarice, and the vectorists with dread."

"Belinearize! Bicubicize! By god, I declare, waveletize! Resample! Upscale!" And then the rasterist hollered the strongest one yet. "FRACTALIZE!" He uttered incantations and from these mysterious forces came a seemingly endless river of pixels, ever smaller with infinite detail. There appeared to be no end to the flood of pixels pouring forth. "We can invoke new pixels forever now. We have won!"

"What are you squawking about?" But the vectorists looked on with concern. Sure enough, the rasterists had conjured new pixels from old, more pixels from fewer, smaller pixels from larger. First they called them megapixels, then eventually gigapixels — everyone was very excited about that one. The detail truly seemed to go on without end.

"Have we lost?" whispered the vectorists to one another with defeat. But one vectorist, amongst the oldest, sat silently overlooking the exchange. The younger vectorists noticed her, with wiry gray hair and alligator skin. How they wished to capture her sage semblance with immortal perfection before she passed on, but so far neither school had found a way to do it. With irony they wondered if their hallowed elder might be best remembered with the latest techniques of the rasterists, with their embarrassing resamplings and their devilish fractals. They watched her cracked lips hovering on the brink of speech.

"Their fractals are no better than our circles," she said slowly with a creaky voice. And then she died, leaving both the rasterists and the vectorists flummoxed.

"Crazy old lady," said one rasterist as the vectorists began to feel the first wave of grief at her passing. Within moments her body had begun to decay. Within days it would be radically altered. Within weeks, gone entirely. She would never be immortalized with paint, pixels, or vectors. She was lost.

But what had she meant? The rasterists ignored the omen entirely, assured of their victory. They wandered off to make portraits for their wealthy patrons, leaving the vectorists with a whiff of hope but no path forward.

"My portrait must be bigger than his portrait!" declared one bombastic patron to his frightened rasterist portraitist.

"But sir," sputtered the wild-haired rasterist, pixels spilling out of his pockets and dusting the ground. "Your latest portrait spans half the galaxy. We've pushed the pixels as far as they will go. We lack the bits, the very numbers themselves, to continue our fractaline descent. The well has bottomed out."

The vectorists overheard this commotion and came to see what was about. Sure enough, the resamplings were at their limit. There simply were not enough bits to push the fractals any deeper.

"Vectorists!" boomed the furious patron. "What say you?" A group of vectorists looked on, studying the situation.

"Yeees," they said slowly. "The rasterists are indeed at their limit."

"Can you do better?" the patron said, now more quietly, his anger turning to desperation. "I must outdo my rival." The vectorists meditated and ruminated, then whispered amongst themselves in a closed circle so no one could see them.

"What do you think?" said one.

"I don't know," said another.

"Can we do better?" said a third.

"Surely we can," insisted a fourth, but without a clear idea on offer.

But the fifth and last vectorist in the circle had not spoken yet. "I have an idea," he said.

"Patron!" he veritably yelled as he erected himself from the bent circle of privacy, his black coat embellished with Burmester curves of silver thread. The patron squared his penetrating gaze upon the vectorist, saying nothing, waiting.

"A bag of gold and time to do my work, and I promise you a portrait the expanse of the entire universe!"

The chamber in which everyone stood echoed with a uniform gasp. The patron squinted, unsure, but out of options. His adversary had already installed his fractaline portrait in the galactic portrait gallery and everyone was applauding it as the grandest that had ever been. The bag of gold was delivered, but as he handed it over, the patron brought his face so close to that of the vectorist that their breath became one.

"You better be worth it."

The vectorist didn't even flinch however, for he had already done the math, secreted it away in his head, computed it in his mind. The mind had been computable after all, he realized at his own revelation. He then retired and no one saw or heard of him for seven millennia.

Life went on. The patron gave up and allowed a rasterist to do his best, but the pixels were disappointing in the end. At scale, his portrait was awash in grotesque smears where the bits fell to pieces. His saving grace was that no one else in cosmic civilization seemed to have done any better. Fractals eventually gave way to networks of mechanical neurons that attempted to imagine the missing details, to concoct them based on knowledge of facial anatomy and physiology. What should the pixels be in the depths of a subject's eyelashes and pomegranate cheeks? In the crevices of skin? In the pose itself, evoking contemplations of self-flattering faux wisdom. The networks simply dreamt such details into being from the ether. But they could only go so far. The deeper an imagination network was pushed, the less accurate the fantasized pixels became, for they were extrapolating from ever wispier foundations with each level down. They had propelled pixels to levels never before achieved, but like the fractals, they frayed beyond a point, unlike the ambitions of the patrons. The rasterists were not pulling their weight and the vectorists were agonizing over their imperfect circles. It was a miserable time.

"What if—" said a young rasterist and a young vectorist one evening at the same moment. "Oh, you first," said the rasterist, looking down and dusting pixels from his shirt after a long day's work.

"No you, please," said the vectorist, for unlike their brethren, these two held a fragile peace. She pulled her long hair over her shoulder and shaped graceful vectors from it that hung in the air before her as she awaited her companion's thought.

The rasterist continued. "Forget all this business about capturing a subject's likeness in its cellular, then molecular, then atomic, and eventually particle precision."

"Are we thinking the same thing?" said the vectorist. "Is that why we spoke together? I refer to an autogenerative—"

"—randomizified—", continued the rasterist.

"—confabulatory—", said the vectorist, with excitement.

"—algorithm!" they finished in unison, looking at one another, feeling something between them that had always been there but never had the chance to sprout.

"That could provide infinite details forever," said the vectorist, her hair waving about. "One could descend literally forever."

"Yes," said the rasterist who had failed to remove the pixels from his garment, which now glittered under the moonlight. "No pixelated resampling or extrapolation or network-dreams, for all of those attempt to build upon the original data, which eventually runs out."

The vectorist continued, "And no vectors of ever-finer detail, with their filigreed interweavings, for those too are built on the original scene of anatomical features and impinging light. As you say, such details eventually run out, ultimately displeasing our rapacious patrons. Instead, we shall make up the deeper levels from nothing at all as we go along. Worlds within worlds. A patron's single horrid pore could contain a universe."

They brought their proposal before the councils of rasterists and vectorists with trepidation, if for no other reason than their unholy truce—and now burgeoning desire.

"But that would be a farce," responded everyone on both sides. "The fractals, the neuronological networks, the vectors of curves upon curves within curves — all our established methods seek, however imperfect, to represent the underlying reality of a subject's pristine personage. They are not, in the end, literal fictions as you propose!"

"No no no," said everyone in agreement. "Blasphemy to be sure. Your autogenerative randomizified confabulatory algorithms are an insult to our patrons' nobility. Take your trinkets away immediately." And the pair were banished forever—but they were happy anyway, for they were finally together.

One day, long after everyone had forgotten him entirely, the vectorist in the black coat with the meandering silver embellishments, now rendered mythological in his absence, suddenly reappeared. The fanfare was glorious. New stellar constellations were arranged to celebrate his return. Rasterists and vectorists alike looked on, practically quivering with anticipation.

"And?" said the patron with exhaustion. "It has been a while. I think I want my gold back."

"Wouldn't you rather have this?" the vectorist responded, as he ripped back a veil, revealing a portrait of such immensity that it seemingly went on forever. Civilization itself stopped to gaze upon it.

"What?!"

"How?!"

And one sardonic response, "Why?" but everyone ignored that one.

Society scrutinized the portrait. Did it truly have no bottom? There were no vulgar pixels of course. It was pure vectors, nothing but numbers as far as one could see, so vast it could not be consumed all at once. Instead, it rendered on the fly as fast as one laid eyes upon it, foveating into colorized glory only where it was directly perceived, then immediately vanishing back into numerical abstraction the moment one's gaze wandered elsewhere. Dispensing with simple lines and ellipses, its primary structure was splines, graceful curves with almost limitless variation, and critically, limitless detail. Splines had been the vectorist tool of choice from nearly the beginning, after the initial luster of lines and polygons and ellipses had worn off. There were quintillions of splines. And formulas that generated new splines, and formulas that generated the first formulas. And formulas for those as well.

"See how I did it?" he said with pride as the hem of his coat drifted around his knees. The rasterists scrutinized the arrays and magical code while the vectorists investigated. The patron tried to comprehend it all, but found it boring and admired his colossal new portrait instead, smirking at his rival, whose mere galactic contribution felt rather paltry now.

"Oh no," said the rasterists. "This is remarkable."

"A number requires bits," said the vectorist, who was now The Vectorist. "Our previous circles were as limited by bits as your fractals."

"But these numbers are different," said one vectorist. "How did you create infinite numbers with only the finite bits available in the universe? That seems like some sort of violation. Does nature permit this?"

"See for yourself," he responded.

"This spline here," said one young rasterist with bowl-cut hair and wire-spectacles, "the horny crook of the patron's nose, its shape, its curvature. The spline of that ghastly nose has a control point here that calls for the number one-third. Instead of representing it with an impossibly infinite sequence of threes — for the universe could not supply so many threes in all its duration and expanse — you have represented it simply as a one and a three, a numerator and a denominator. That is..." the young rasterist tilted his head, the light glinting off his spectacles, and squinted, "...that is rather clever. It is truly a perfect third, isn't it?" The vectorist nodded rationally. The young rasterist continued. "This horrid nose could stretch across ten galactic clusters, perhaps twenty, and would never lose an atom's width of precision in its representation. Why must it be that particular nose though?" he lamented, glancing at the ghastly patron who now gleamed with joy.

"Hmmm," said all the rasterists in choir.

"Hmmm," said all the vectorists, following in a round.

"So that's it?" said one hopeless rasterist. "We've lost?"

"There are," said one rasterist pensively, "curves that cannot be represented in this fashion. Consider a spline control point that requires an irrational coordinate."

"Or a simple circle!" declared another rasterist. "You still can't draw—"

"No no, we have the circles fully squared," said a vectorist who had quickly consumed the new method in the intervening minutes since the unveiling. "It needn't be a fractional number. A formulaic one will suffice, and we have the formula for a perfect circle. All the digits of Pi, well any one particular digit at any rate, can be generated at will, and so the pristine music of the spheres is now at our disposal. Bore us not with your tired criticisms of circles."

"But still," said the young rasterist who had begun this diversion, "there are nonformulaic, nonfractional numbers that your new method cannot represent to perfect infinity, and splines requiring such numbers cannot be represented, and should some patron's hideous portrait call for such a spline, relying on such a number, then you could not render it using your vectors."

One vectorist visibly waved the notion away with his hand. "No such nose exists on the face of any patron that would call for a curve containing such a number." Everyone considered this briefly.

"What about an ear?" said a recalcitrant rasterist.

"DAMMIT!" said the vectorist, immediately realizing his folly. "Those damned ears are always so difficult to capture."

"Or lips," interrupted another rasterist. "There are such pristine lips in the world, with their curves, their billows, their glossy scintillations. Might they not call for completely irrational coordinates?"

"Enough of this nonsense!" insisted an authoritative vectorist, whose potent voice commanded deference. "We've won. Our portraits now span the universe. Your pixels are inadequate, even with fractals and artifactual neural hallucinations. The universe is large enough. No portrait can exceed that."

The patrons all grumbled, glowering first at each other and then turning their ire on the artists who had pleased and failed them so many times over. Was this a victory or a defeat? They had lost count.

The rasterists felt this was all quite unfair, and the vectorists felt this was all quite insulting, and the patrons felt this was all an affront to their supremacy. It was at this time that a quantum mechanist wandered in. No one noticed him at first, but he cleared his throat and everyone turned toward him. "What about a portrait that spans the multiverse?" he said. At first, there was tremendous silence, then a growing clarity in the minds of the patrons, the promise of ultimate dominance. Their eyes widened with realization, then narrowed as they spied one other, knowing it would be a race. And then, all at once, they leapt toward the artists, clawing over each other to be the first to lavish promises of wealth unimagined for this new proposal. But in their clamoring and brawling they merely tumbled over themselves in a snarling ball, a battle that eventually encompassed the entire cosmos, and they steadily ground themselves to dust, with the artists watching, dumbstruck, from a distance.

The rasterists and vectorists reeled at the violent exchange, taking in the scene of mayhem that had consumed all known existence. Stars shone from overhead upon the bloody aftermath spread across the universe. All was still for a moment, and then from the silence someone shrugged and said, "Well at least he isn't a mathematician."