Text Art

20 goto 10, a gallery in San Francisco, just ran two exhibitions with ASCII and ANSI art. It’s about text-art - ASCII is a set of characters and doesn’t use colours, whereas ANSI has more characters and uses 16 colours. There are also other standards, such as Commodore’s PETSCII which is also 16 colours. I will just shortly introduce these two exhibitions, and then write about text-art more in general.

“Welcome to #BUTTES” shows ASCII-art by the BUTTES collective. There is also a limited edition book released called “The Horrible Boner Tragedy” which might still be available at Needles & Pens. Some photos by Nullsleep here. The ANSI exhibition focused on ANSI-art by ACiD which have been a big name in the ANSI-scene since the start around 1990. Geek Entertainment TV did a piece about it which you watch here.

Text as Art

According to SixteenColours.net there have been a number of gallery appearances with BBS-related ASCII and ANSI before, mainly in Russia and Belgium 1999-2005. If you want to look at BBS-related ASCII/ANSI I can recommend BBS Ads Collection (ASCII-ads for BBS) and Sixteen Colours (ANSI-artpacks). But there is a lot of non BBS-related text art around aswell, tracing back to the 1960s - Ken Knowlton and Leon Harmon: Studies in Perception I (1966). Here’s some teletext-graphics in an art-context:

• Page 444 (2007) by MOMS, teletext broadcasted on Icelandic TV.
• Teletext by Jodi, everybody’s favourite data trash duo.
• Teletext is Dead (2007) by Dan Farrimond - animated teletext glitches.
• Microtel (2006) was a teletext exhibiton organized by Emma Davidsson (Lektrogirl) and Paul B. Davis (8 Bit Construction Set) that ran on Dutch public television.

Probably the most famous ASCII-artist in the art world is the net.art pioneer Vuk Cosic and his team ASCII Art Ensemble. They made projects such as History of Art for the Blind, History of Moving Images and Deep ASCII. Definitely worth checking out although his concepts might be overshadowed by the billions of AVI/JPG->TXT converters around these days.

Non Purist Text Art

All the above mentioned constructs text-art within the bitmap grids that we usually see on old computerscreens and in books (where the font is not proportional - the character ‘i’ is as wide as the character ‘w’). This “digital” technique was probably used even before the birth of digital computers - in Teletype maybe as early as 1923. In the early computer days ASCII was not a standard, but 5-bit Baudot was common. There was a Baudot-based program called EDITH (IBM 1401 and Univac 1004) in the early 1960s that made print-outs of a naked woman. You could set switches on the front-panel to decide the level of nudity - B being soft and E being completely nude. (source 1 2)

We could also go back to creative ways of using typography, such as in Alice in Wonderland (1865). We could even, through the 50s movement of concrete poetry, look at the 17th century when people used letter arrangements to enhance meaning. But that’s maybe going a bit far back. Going a bit further on in time, we can see text-art from 1898 by Flora Stacey here. However, this was made by turning the paper around so it is not locked into the traditional digital typography bitmaps. (A very extreme example of this technique is the American artist Paul Smith.)

• Delaware is a Japanese collective that made some very nice art/design using pixels and bitmap graphics. They also tend to write really nice texts about their art and music philosophy.
• Gelbart - Please Don’t Use Drugs - Music video in ASCII-characters, but animated outside of ASCII-grids.

Demoscene

The BBS-culture and the demo/cracking scene of the 80s/90s were using ASCII/ANSI/ATASCII/PETSCII as fundamental parts of their distribution. However, there were also demos made in these text-modes. Here’s a small (rather strange) selection:

• Hack n’ Trade - Goa Brudbilder (2007) - C64-demo quickly switching between 4 PETSCII-images to create a higher resolution (with heavy flickering). (howtorun)
• AA group - BB (1997) Very typical demo, but it’s all in ASCII. This youtube-clip is a bit trashy, but you can download and run it in MS-DOS, Linux, etc.
• Pentagram - Chistoria Pewnego - Atari 800 demo, really nice minimalist trashy style.
• Impact - In a World of ASCII (1994) Amiga demo in true Amiga demo style

Sources:
Vuk Cosic and ASCII Net.Art - Youtube-video
The History of ASCII (Text) Art
Ancient Alphabetic Art @ Jefferson Computer Museum

Soundchip-Musik 1977-1994

It’s out - the most comprehensive text about chipmusic I have read!

Nils Dittbrenner: Soundchip-Musik - Computer- und Videospielmusik von 1977-1994. Buy it here, read some here. You will notice it is only available in German and even if I keep brushing and brushing, the dust of my German skills won’t come off. But I will try to give you a very brief and general idea of the book.

1) Technology. It has in-depth explanations of the soundchips from Stella / TIA (Atari VCS) through to the early General MIDI chips. This covers roughly half of the book.

2) Musicology. Discusses composers’ ideas and tricks with composing on the soundchips. The technical limitations are defined as: polyphony, timbre, storage, CPU and other external restrictions. Some tricks discussed are the combination of bass and drums on one single channel, using arpeggios instead of chords, pulse width LFOs and samples. Dittbrenner also approaches some dilemmas of chipmusic: incompatibility problems when converting game music, the music in games having less priority than graphics and code, and the tempo-problems coming out of NTSC/PAL-sync.

3) Sociology. Like the book title implies, the focus is on computer- and videogames but there are also discussions about the demoscene and chipmusic in pop culture, etc. As for genres, Dittbrenner seems to focus on Micromusic and Chiptunes. This passage is hard for me to understand, but it seems like the making of genres is more about social than musical factors.

Ok, that’s the introduction. This book is quite a piece of work, and it’s very frustrating to not understand it. So please buy the book and translate it for me :-)

ChipFire

I got this candle for my birthday. When you light it, there’s chipmusic! It plays Happy Birthday with bleeps, slightly off key and with some wrong notes. When you blow it out, the song plays until it’s finished. I’m hoping to see more fire induced chipmusic in the future!

Chipmusic Movies

I recently got to see the French chipmusic documentary 8 Bit Generation, which premiered at Blip Festival 2007. Compared to 8 Bit, shown at the previous Blip Festival, this is more focused on the European chipmusic scene’s place in popular music culture, whereas 8 Bit had an American focus and discussed chipmusic more in relation to art and the future. In 8 Bit Generation you can hear a lot from Malcolm McLaren, who was quite into chipmusic a few years ago - when this documentary was essentially filmed. I will get back with more proper reviews when I can see 8 Bit again.

Reformat the Planet is movie documentary to be released soon by 2 Player Productiuons. Based on the Blip Festival 2006, it is “using New York as a microcosm for a larger global movement” and seems to focus on Nintendo products and videogames. update feb09: after seeing a private screener, the narrow focus on New York and Gameboy/NES feels a bit annoying (even ignorant?). But the inclusion of visual artists and interesting discussions about videogame nostalgia and commercialism in the second half, lifts the documentary.

The 8bit Philosophy is another upcoming documentary with an online trailer. It seems to be aimed at C64-gamers and people that enjoy remixes of C64 game songs, so I would expect less philosophy than history, really.Does anyone know of more chipmusic documentaries around?

That was Then, This is Now (and then there’s chip music)

Sometimes I can lose the belief in why chipmusic is still (or, especially) today - artistically and politically - important to present as something other than videogame romantics. I came across something today that hit the spot. It was written by Laurie Spiegel, who was making chipmusic already in the 1960s. In 1995 she wrote That was Then <=> This is Now where she compares the contemporary computer music environment with the one two decades earlier. Here is an excerpt from the text. (sorry about the length of it but I didn’t want to cut it shorter)

Commonly Assumed Then:

• Diversity and individuality are essential to the methods as well as the results of artistic processes.
• These technologies consist of hand-created tools bearing the creative stamps of their makers’ individual personalities, identities, values, methods, and goals.
• It’s amazing that we’ve been able to get computers to do this and how rapidly the technology is evolving.
• Tools, techniques, and information for doing music with computers should be available to everyone who wants to try.
• Figuring out how my computer can do music, technically, is how I can do music the way I want to.

Commonly Postulated Now:

• Whatever can be standardized should be, if consensus can be attained, because standardization simplifies manufacture and use and lowers cost.
• Tools should be impersonal and devoid of aesthetic bias. [...]
• It’s amazing how long it’s taking these companies to bring out the features we want and how slow progress is.
• Tools, techniques, and information for doing music with computers are proprietary intellectual property that should not be divulged and can only be used by paying for them or other special arrangement.
• Figuring out how computers can do music, technically, is too complicated. Fortunately, I don’t have to because its someone else’s job. [...]

Spiegel herself expands on mainly the artistic consequences of this. There is a lot to comment about these things, and for me it’s basically about a standardized consumerist view of the user: we expect corporations to satisfy us and make things easy for us, we accept the intellectual property laws (thanks, Bill) and we do not expect to understand how things really work and how we can change it. I enjoyed reading Spiegel’s text about this, because her experience and humble writing gives new light to the commercialisation of computer composing. I recommend you to read the whole text.

Sega Mega Drive Slack-Hack

Now this is a great idea for lazy chipnoise fanatics! By pulling out the game cartridge while some music is playing and quickly inserting another cartridge - you get new music! Made by the people at dramacore and sickmode. Download their album

Sega Death - 16 bits from hell (22mb)

“the album is weird but thats what happens.
nothing was sequenced and no fx were used.
just some cutting out of the silence and crap.”

- ian @ dramacore