ASCII

ASCII generated image of found image file of Hugo Ball's Dada poem Karawane

In the past couple weeks Ryan and I have been fooling around with ASCII images. For those of you don't know  what ASCII art is, here's a little history lesson. There was a time on the internet before graphic cards were good enough to render certain image files (i.e. anything above a low-quality GIF and certainly not  JPEG) and not cost thousands of dollars. So, to create and share images, artists used different characters as determined by UNICODE. (i.e. using characters you can type or input using a keyboard). Back then websites, e-mail, and message boards handled text differently than a lot of websites and web applications today: text wasn't re-spaced or otherwise processed to reduce space and allow for more functional web design or more desirable content (ever notice how Flickr automatically undoes the caps lock key in its comments?). 

So, ASCII has been pretty much a retro thing since the late 90's or so, depending on which channels you were navigating on the internet. If you were mostly doing text-based chatting, ASCII still would come up now and then (and still does), although cheap graphics and readily-available processing software, free online image storage, and the fast speed of the internet really lends this to be unnecessary, unless the novelty of ASCII art is trying to be evoked. 

So yeah, if you're looking to achieve this sort of image, you have two options:

1) Go back in time and read up on it

2) Seriously. 1995 style tips!

3) Search online for ASCII generators. This is the one Ryan and I have been playing around with.

4) Other generators have different purposes, like this one that makes 733+ 455 |34|\||\|0RZ

Although it's retro, kind of cheesy, and has potential for great ironic/cool shit, ASCII has very interesting artistic potential. The notion of rendering images using type is not a new idea -- typewriters have been used for this for decades. Text is a basic unit of computer processing still, much more so than the pixel. Take the above image, for example - an ASCII translation of an image of a Hugo Ball poetry piece.  Consider the amount of translations:

1. Hugo Ball writes Karawane, translating the idea from his head onto paper (somehow)
2. His version of Karawane is translated into typographic form
3. That form is then reproduced, photographically or otherwise, preserved in books and other publications
4. The reproductions (presumably) are then re-photographed (either by camera or scanner) and compressed into a lower-quality image format (such as the GIF file I used)
5. The image file is copied onto an online web server, which is then accessed and catalogued by Google search spiders.
6. I find the image using Google Image Search.
7. Using the Glass Giant ASCII art generator, the web app accesses the server hosting the Karawane GIF, copying it again, and then translating it into ASCII  text (according to my inputted specifications)
8. The poem, which started out as oral language, is now lost in the endless reproduction and replacement of text with type. 

...And viola*: Instant alter-modernist neo-DADA data art!  

*NOT Bill Viola