Character Sketches : Computer users are developing an art form all their own. It’s not a new program. It’s right off the keyboard.
Take a colon, a hyphen and an end parenthesis. Like so :-) Now, turn your head sideways. See the smiley? Well, that smiley is the most rudimentary image in what is arguably the world’s fastest-growing art form--ASCII art.
The abbreviation (pronounced ASK-ee) stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange and refers to the 26 letters, punctuation marks and symbols (such as %, * and 7/8) on any computer keyboard. ASCII artists creatively combine these characters to make everything from little smiles and stick figures to incredibly textured pictures, logos, calligraphy, maps and even animations.
Pictures made from type may be almost as old as the letterpress, but the Internet and electronic-mail explosions have vaulted ASCII imagery into millions of homes and offices throughout the world.
“The thing about ASCII is that it’s basically transportable to any type of machine,” explains Steven Sullivan, a computer programmer from Lowell, Mass., and a self-described “Mega-ASCII-Head” who collects ASCII art. “Since they’re character-based pictures, they can be viewed on any type of terminal. You don’t have to have any special hardware or software.”
The same goes for printing it out. (Most ASCII-art experts, however, know to set their screens and printers for courier type because it’s monospaced, meaning each character takes up an equal space.) Thus, someone wanting to flirt via the Internet can send an ASCII wink without worrying about the intended’s operating system. Parents E-mail their children hugs. Students show their spirit with ASCII university logos. And, should things get ugly, the bird can be flipped ASCII-style.
Sullivan began collecting the ASCII masterpieces he found on the Internet about four years ago. He archives his finds in virtual libraries and publishes on-line magazines--editions, he calls them--of popular and impressive ASCII creations.
“There’s Rod Serling, Spock, Harry Truman, William F. Buckley, you name it,” Sullivan says. “There’s a ton of Christmas stuff, Easter, St. Patrick’s Day, Valentine’s Day. They all come out of the woodwork during a holiday.” Such perennial faves as birthday cakes, birds, roses and “Star Trek” stuff turn up next to the pop culture icons Barney the Dinosaur and Beavis and Butt-head.
Some of this art, he says, evolved in a practical attempt to broaden electronic communicability. “When you’re writing something, you can’t tell tone of voice,” Sullivan explains. “So if you post a snide comment, but tongue-in-cheek, you put that little smiley next to it” so people don’t take it the wrong way.
Much of ASCII imagery, however, is simply the most modern of twists on the old human aesthetic impulse.
“I really think there’s a deep-rooted human need to exploit every new medium for making art,” says Jorn Barger, a Chicago-based computer consultant and ASCII artist. “E-mail is such a desperately impoverished medium that every little bit of art seems to satisfy a hunger.”
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Barger began experimenting with ASCII art four years ago. Then, last year, he got serious: “When I was unemployed, I got much more deeply into the Internet.”
His first real accomplishment was a rendering of singer Kate Bush.
“When I worked on this portrait, I would try a little area and stand back and kind of squint and I could see which characters needed improving. I would keep changing it until I got something that looked good,” Barger says. “It’s kind of a geeky way of doing art that doesn’t require any grace.”
In this trial-and-error manner, he has also crafted textured portraits of James Joyce as well as more fanciful images, such as a pair of hands reaching for a floating heart. He is now creating an ASCII-graphic novel.
Barger does not draw or paint off the keyboard, but other ASCII Picassos do equally impressive work in other media.
Mike Jittlov--an L.A.-based independent filmmaker, special-effects creator and animator--sees ASCII art as “one more creative outlet.” His full-length, three-page-long nude portrait of a woman named Meriday--done predominantly in 8s, uppercase Ms and colons--is said by many to be the most oft-posted piece of ASCII art.
“From what I understand, Meriday’s portrait is now gracing the inside of filing cabinets around the world--especially IBM offices,” Jittlov says. “She’s just received a small (electronic) avalanche of birthday greetings.”
Early ASCII artworks, Barger says, rarely reached Meriday’s dimensions. They were used in what is known in ‘Net speak as “.sig files.” These files, almost always four lines high, are appended to E-mail and represent the sender’s “signature.” A lot of creativity goes into them.
“That’s really the finest art to me, to be able to put something that expressive in that small an area,” Barger says. The Energizer bunny, Bart Simpson and a pair of dueling fencers are a few of the notable .sig pieces. “People have done amazing things with stick figures lately,” Barger adds. “Somebody did a whole encyclopedia of Tai-Chi (positions). They did really lovely images of a couple dancing, doing swoops and dips.”
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Most of these .sig file pictures are what ASCII aficionados call line drawings. They involve a limited set of characters--what Barger has dubbed the “line-draw palette”--to render lines and forms.
The more pyrotechnic ASCII art uses the “ASCII gray scale,” which exploits a character’s light-emitting value (or ink saturation, when printed)--an uppercase M being a very saturated character; a period, a low one--to create the illusion of texture and shading. But it gets even more sophisticated: “You also make use of the fact that the small m is filled (with pixels) in the lower half, but not in the upper half, while h would have the left and bottom filled but the upper right is blank,” Barger says.
Three-dimensional images can be created using various character combinations to give the illusion of depth. And, by programming a command that moves individual characters or flips screens, some artists have even pulled off ASCII animations.
This new medium began to get serious attention last year. Barger was among those spearheading an ASCII-art news group on the Internet that allows users worldwide to request, post, trade and download images as well as to give and solicit advice or discuss pressing ASCII issues. This cluster of ASCII brainpower quickly advanced the art form. Even the simple smiley can now:
wink ;-)
wear shades 8-)
get drunk :*)
cry :’- (
among 40 or so other things.
Such progress also means that amid the posting, copying and improving of artwork, the original ASCII artist often goes uncredited.
“There’s been a thread (a discussion on the Internet) about attributions and people improving other peoples’ work,” Sullivan says, adding: “There haven’t been any flame wars (Internet arguments) over it. We’re a pretty civil group.”
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Barger is against credit lines. “It looks silly, the attribution is usually wrong, and, anyway, appropriation has always been the name of the game,” he says. “My feeling is that I like being credited better than uncredited, but I also like it better having my work reused than not reused, credited or not.”
The oft-appropriated Jittlov is hardly proprietary either. “It would be nice (to get credit),” he says resignedly. “(But) people don’t often do that.”
What the ASCII world really needs now, Barger says, is software that would make for better ASCII art. “Right now, you’re working in a word processor and everything is clumsy and slow,” he explains.
Some programs do exist, and they’re given away freely via the Internet. Figlet, for example, generates ASCII “fonts,” allowing the user to create calligraphy, block letters or other odd-shaped characters of various types and styles.
But the most revolutionary ASCII program is the creation of Rob Harley, a 23-year-old doctoral student in computer science at Caltech in Pasadena. “I wanted to include my picture in my E-mail messages,” he explains. “But I’m not a good enough artist to do the whole thing by hand.”
So, rather than use Barger’s hunt-and-peck method, Harley wrote a program--one that took him all of one afternoon to complete--that converts a computer image, including drawings and photos input via scanner, into ASCII. The “Mona Lisa” Harley created using this “Asc” program is the ‘Net’s most popular.
Although Barger sees these developments as ushering in a new age of ASCII art--in which ASCII graphics, flow charts and other made-from-text visual delights will be a regular part of E-mail transmission--Harley sees the march of nanotechnology as the death knell for character-based creativity.
“The reason this is so popular now is because people can send text more freely than they could send pictures or sounds,” Harley says. “I expect that in the future, we’ll be able to send pictures as easily as we send text today. When that happens, ASCII art will be history.”
