Article out on Space Invader RubikCubism:

http://www.space-invaders.com/tabloids.html

Tabloid Invasion

That’s the spirit…

Beck’s 2006 video Black Tambourine- done in ASCII.

What do you get when you mix one week of blogging about Space Invader with one month of reading Tracy Kidder’s 1981 history of mini-computers, “The Soul of a New Machine”…?

A newfound interest in ASCII art.

American Standard Code for Information Exchange (ASCII), pronounced /æski/ is a character encoding based on the English Alphabet (wikipedia).

ASCII art, in the most basic of descriptions, uses text characters (letters, numbers symbols) to create graphics.  The simplest forms of this artwork have become widely recognized:

:)   equals smiley face
:(   equals frown

…. you get the idea.

There is also ANSI art, which is a bit more extensive and incorporates more letters, numbers, symbols, colors, and cursor control sequences.

I completely missed this underground computer art phenomena in it’s hay-day, and didn’t know anything about it until a friend recently gave me a whirlwind web tour of the scene.
What initially struck me was the ingenuity and creativity of the work- ASCII and ANSI art bring a surprising graphic life to otherwise cold and bland computer text.

raaarrrr….

Also, I couldn’t help but notice a few parallels between ASCII/ANSI art and artists and early graffiti artists. Crazy nicknames… crazy group names… the sometimes viral exhibition of these names… getting the work up in surprising locations… and the “underground” element of the scene.

I’m going to continue chugging along with my homework on the subject. Just in case you want to, too- there is an epic documentary about BBS that you can check out on Google video.
And for a special treat look into the Demoscene of the 80’s and 90’s. Crazy stuff!