Stare at it long enough and let your eyes glaze over, and the images snake even more smoothly across the screen, becoming a homogenous, waving form. Developing out of ‘true’ ASCII art are pieces such as Emoji Wave (2022) by internet artist Ilithya.
ASCII ART CHARACTERS CODE
These evocative little Unicode playthings, like art made from ASCII symbols, often mean more than their code alone would suggest: see 🍑 and 🍆. This means that while it may not share all of the linguistic beauty of shaped poetry, its ability to convey visual artistic feeling is not limited by language.Įmoticons made with ASCII symbols 🙂 have evolved into smileys ☺ and now into emojis. While shaped poems such as The Mouse’s Tale are susceptible to translation barriers (the aural similarity between ‘tale’ and ‘tail’ is of course not shared across languages, and changes in word length can also affect shape), ASCII art is based on a symbolic standard used internationally. Just look at Lewis Carroll’s winding, dangling poem The Mouse’s Tale in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (first published in 1865) a twee interweaving of linguistic and visual references, the poem is the tale of a mouse in the shape of a mouse’s tail. The rise of the printing press allowed typography and shaped poetry to thrive – poetic synergies could be created between written form and content. Shaped poetry dates back to Ancient Greece (for example, Egg by Simias of Rhodes ). While ASCII art was very much the product of its time – a delightful use of new technology – its aesthetics and techniques are a continuation of a long tradition. Combining its technical capabilities with the possibilities of artistic thinking allowed engineer-artists like Harmon and Knowlton to extend its relevance. That ASCII had been created for a more practical purpose was by-the-by. The image was later displayed at an event organised by Robert Rauschenberg which sought “to bring modern technological tools to the artist for creating new art forms and fresh insights and viewpoints to the engineer for creating a ‘people-oriented’ technology’”. Zoomed out, they reveal a gently shaded and undulating human form – hard code turned soft through creativity. Much like in a pointillist painting, up close the symbols look like random little groups of shading. Widely spaced multiplication and division signs make up the highlights of Hay’s arms as she reclines, while tightly bunched symbols make up her navel and one visible nipple.
ASCII ART CHARACTERS SERIES
The transparency was scanned, with the visual information stored as a series of pulses, processed by the computer, and printed out as a drawing made up of symbols. Made by two engineers from Bell Laboratories – Leon Harmon and Ken Knowlton – Computer Nude was made using a transparency of a photograph of choreographer Deborah Hay.
Computer Nude (Studies in Perception I) (1967) was one of the earliest ASCII artworks.
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