INDUSTRY NEWS: Ask Me About ASCII ART

ASCII art, in the formal sense, means a graphic representation consisting of the 95 printable characters of the ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) standard of 1978 (and compliant character sets, if you want to get picky) but most people refer to any text-based art as ASCII art.

Ken Knowlton is known as the father of ASCII art. A former employee of Bell Labs, Knowlton developed the Bell Flicks (beflix) programming language which he later used in collaboration with Stan VanDerBeek to create Poem Field Animations. As his interest in art grew, he began experimenting with photomosaics and creating images made of up small units. He, with Leon Harmon, scanned the photo of the above artwork entitled Studies in Perception I and converted the “analog voltages to binary numbers assigned typographic symbols based on halftone densities.” (Wikipedia … you can’t have thought I wrote that!)

Any kid who typed “71077345″ into her calculator and turned it over to see that it read “shell oil” understands the basic premise of ASCII art – using scientific units to create a different perception. Nowadays, cell phone use has made this an everyday occurence. Right? LOL?

Then, of course, came low-brow ASCII art – ASCII comics.You already know how to do it. All of you knew the semi-colon and closed bracket that I put at the end of the last paragraph was a wink. But did you know there is a whole underground world of ASCII comics? ASCII Farts are one image comic cells that people all over the world are creating and publishing on the internet.

ASCII now appears in wide-spread art and design, a pervasive message that we continue to search out new ways to communicate.

The Emoticon Mask developed by Digital Media Design Department at Hongik University in Korea is the quintessential example of human emotion replaced by code. A brilliant piece on so many levels.

Below A Tribute To deviantART’s Emoticons

“Some time in the not too distant future, the Emoticon Legend will be completely revamped. Already this process has begun at *EmoticonHQ and whilst the completion of this project is still quite far, one day we will lose a number of classic emoticons that we’ve grown accustomed to.

Here is just a small selection of some current ones. Enjoy.

And if you really want to find the llama, you’ll need to hover over the text.;)”