by Lauri Rauhanen

The early history of text art – Text-based artwork dates back several thousand years: Visual wordplay was practiced by ancient Romans, Greeks, and Persians as far back as 324 B.C. The Swan Created during the ancient Roman-Latin period, over 2,000 years ago.

The early history of text art ● Shaped poems began to appear in early 1600s An excerpt from Chapter 3 of Lewis Carroll’s 1865 novel, Alice in Wonderland.

The introduction of a typewriter ● QWERTY keyboarding was introduced by Sholes and Glidden in 1874 ● Typewriter manufacturers organized speed writing competitions, which led to typewriter art

Butterfly Earliest preserved example of typewriter art by Flora Stacey, 1898.

The Duke of Edinburgh Photograph typed by Dennis Collins,1957.

The near history ● The 1970s brought the typewriting art into videoterminals ● Introduction and the popularity of IBM PC ● MS-DOS ● 1986 Ian Davis introduces TheDraw, fueling a completely new generation of artists

THE UNDERGROUND..the introduction of scene culture - With introduction of BBS (Bulletin Board System) people of similar intrests could find eachother - This resulted that these people with similar skills wanted to group up - Groups started competing with eachother - This happened also to text art, now known as Art Scene, or, ANSI SCENE // ASCII SCENE - Text art was often used in info files of groups, which is why ascii art is still thought to be very closely tied with the hacking and pirating scene.

CHARACTER LIMITATIONS  The number of available text characters has increased over time: – Teletype art – 64 characters/codes. (5-bit) – ASCII art – 128 characters. (7-bit) – ANSI art – 256 characters. (8-bit) – Unicode 4.0 – over 96,000+ characters.(21-bit) – Text demos – modifiable character set. Few terms to know.. ASCII – American Standard Code for Information Interchange ANSI – American National Standards Institu te

The IBM PC supported an extended character set based upon the ASCII standard, code page 437. reminder: the artscene was not only PC but also C64, Amiga and Atari thing

ANSI / ASCII scene is born ● 1989 Aces of Ansi Art (AAA) creates the first team of text mode artists ● Year later AAA is broken apart and the main members create a group called ACID (Ansi Creators in Demand) ● Soon after came iCE (Insane Creators Enterprise) ● Amiga ASCII scene starts to take shape in year 1992 ● Hundreds of groups followed

Why would anyone draw ANSI / ASCII graphics? ● Fame ● Access ● Money Why would anyone need ANSI / ASCII graphics? Then: ● More users to BBS ● Which results to... Fame. ● Make your group look cool with professional nfo files and file_id.diz Now: ● Still, make your product / group look cool with a great nfo file ● Retro is cool!

The Pits by Marshal Law. (IBM PC ANSI scroller, 1991)

Collection Volume 1 by ART. (Amiga ASCII colly, 1992 – excerpt)

TEXT ART TODAY Many Art communities continue to thrive today ● US ASCII - alt.ascii.art ● Amiga ASCII - Boondocks ● Japanese ASCII - Channel 2 ● PC ANSI - Acheron.org ● PC ASCII - thuglife.org ● PC ANSI / ASCII - sixteencolors.net ● Textmode demos

MODERN ART Blending fresh styles with the old ones, the scene is maybe more alive than ever Text mode demos have brought the demo scene and ansi scene together Retro is in!

The Yard by dMG and webpige0. (Oldschool Amiga ASCII, 2004)

Haciend by Ansichrist. (Newschool PC ASCII, 2004)