Concept in Definition ABC

When it comes to artistic manifestations, the imagination of the human being seems to have no limits, and new technologies have also been used as a vehicle for expression artistic on the part of a few.

Such is the case of video art, or the facilities that use resources technological to deliver an artistic message to the public. A lesser-known form of artistic expression through technologies, and one that moves mainly in the circles of technology hobbyists, is ASCII art.

The so-called “ASCII art” consists of the composition of images using only characters of the ASCII code, that is, letters, numbers and symbols.

This means that the generated image can only be seen as a whole from a certain distance, and not looking closely, since it that we will see in the latter case will only be a set of characters, either numeric or alphanumeric, without much sense of set.

The precedent of "ASCII art" can be found in the technique of Pointillism.

Although the latter dates back to the end of the 19th century, the basic idea is very similar, since the artists expressed complex images through specific points painted on a canvas, in a way that the global result of these points could only be appreciated from a certain distance, and not from near the frame, since in this case only a few points without sense of set.

The first uses of ASCII art are in terminals without complex graphic capacity, whose only possibility is the representation of characters, and in which we do not have color capacity either.

In fact, we can make ASCII art with a to write, and this is the idea: that devices that cannot render images in Format graphically, can present them in a composite form.

This is the case of the first "dumb" terminals that worked connected to mainframes of the 60s and 70s.

Its usefulness ranged from the representation of the logo of the companies, to the presentation of graphics, although we cannot consider these representations as very "artistic" either, a certain non-analytical vision was needed to represent these data in a "graph”.

Later, hackers and other profiles seeking a social use of new technologies made use of ASCII art. Thus, it was very common to find images of this type in the welcome headers of electronic bulletins (BBS), and in the files of text that accompanied the programs.

Over time and thanks to advances in hardware, this type of representation became unnecessary in practice, but what it lost in use was gained from pure art.

From here, and with the hatching of Internet, ASCII art explodes as a pure artistic conception, focusing on the composition of images for sheer aesthetic pleasure.

A simple search through Google or any other seeker, allows us to appreciate images of great beauty and very elaborate. We will be amazed at what can be done by properly using each character in its proper place.

Photos: Fotolia - crimson / Claudiu Badea