#0 Works and experiments with moving ASCII, ASCII audio, ASCII camera and such are all directed towards conversions of contents between one media platform and another, each time carefully directed at their full uselessness from the viewpoint of everyday high tech and all its consequences. The ambition to basically convert the whole world into ASCII contains a few conceptual and possibly theoretical premises that are the subject of the present text-based communication unit. The idea of developing a three-dimensional ASCII environment has evolved out of my other ASCII works, presented on various web sites as well as in numerous shows and festivals, but I would like to describe the 3D ASCII project also in the light of several art disciplines that are tangentially linked to such an endeavour. Current 3D ASCII pieces, such as The ASCII Unreal, suggest future 3D ASCII developments. In what follows art-related considerations are accompanied also by a number of non-artistic disciplines or lines of thought.
Classical text-based art forms
All my life I have been attracted to the unorthodox creation and usage of writing. Each attempt to explore the space beyond text in lines, or between two pages of the same sheet of paper, or between the letter and the paper that holds it, seemed much more meaningful than the most skilfully described night dress in a French nineteenth-century novel or than an existential crisis in the soul of a more recent literary hero.
#1 I remember how while reading any prose the spaces between words used to create landscapes with meandering rivers and naked trees. Later when I encountered the writings of Italo Calvino, where he spoke of reading landscapes as if they were text, I saw a neat symmetry between these two thoughts.
#2 It's been quite some time now that I have been seriously interested in what OuLiPo was doing in the sixties and seventies (although there's quite some movement even nowadays)--the thought of text-based art deriving from such a radical formal analysis seemed at first, and still does, like an utterly useless idea, thus wonderful. The works of Quenneau and--even more--Perec taught me to look at text in one more way.
#3 Mallarmé, Apollinaire, Dada, Surrealism, Pataphisique, OuLiPo, Situ, El Lissitzky, Zdanevich, Khlebnikov, Harms, Gorgona, Mangelos, Martek.
#4 As for the three-dimensionality of text, I would say that Chatwin's songlines are very important. Crafts and sciences related to writing.
#5 The history of writing systems offers great inspiration. The similarity of the clay tablet to the computer monitor pushes the mind towards seriously amusing thoughts. The advent of movable type induces even wilder ideas. IBM golfball typewriters do the same.
#6 One very important source of amazement is the history of cryptography. Aesthetically and methodologically, literature as we know it is aeons behind the achievements of black-box cipher alchemists from times long forgotten. The creativity and motivation of the makers and breakers of code remains unparalleled for the insight it offers into the understanding of quantitative linguistics and the psychology of perception.
#7 Typography and issues of general graphic design are inseparable from the ambition to convey meaning with text. At the level of a single sign, writing IS a painting, a very well thought out graphic which leans on millennia of work. This has to be respected.
History of Technology-related Art led by ASCII
#8 ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) was introduced in 1963 and historiographic research currently under way (mostly by Tom Jennings) will give us a full account of its evolution, This will further aid the quest for the very first ASCII art. Nevertheless, it is known that before the advent of this standard there was a history of using text-based terminals for generating graphic-like arrangements. John Foust at the web site of his Jefferson Computer Museum not only offers insight into this long-marginalized form, but also mentions so-called RTTY art dating back to 1923. These teletype graphics were mostly used for Christmas cards and were done in a way similar to the ASCII graphics of the sixties. Hopefully it will shortly be possible to announce the publication date of the whole set of research papers covering this topic.
#9 Other than looking for the earliest recorded appearance of ASCII art, it seems important to document all of its variants in the long decades of its existence. Thousands of hard discs around the world contain millions of ASCII drawings, done by more or less anonymous ASCII artists, and clearly one of the tasks is to create a comprehensive history of ASCII art. In my view, most of what this historical overview will produce is classifiable under 'Naïve ASCII Art', and very few works will be accepted as anything more than that.
#10 The history of computer-aided visual arts is still being written. While the majority of the works known to me use the computer to create beautiful and sublime objects, I prefer the ones that systematically try to investigate the creative potential of the tool itself. Computer art is too often just a promotional mechanism for specific equipment, but when it's clever it's the cleverest thing around.
#11 The aesthetics of early computer displays remains a field I would like to know much better. The cathode-ray tubes from the fifties and sixties were almost exclusively used by the military and were all extremely massive, which makes them virtually unfindable. The books that give a glimpse into the early monitors are exciting and the images and diagrams tell us of truly fantastic hardware designs and possibilities for displaying text and images. Oh, I would love to see an image of ASCII art on a monitor older than I am.
Grand unifying theory stuff
#12 There is a view of the history of civilization in which the move from strictly visual culture to writing introduced a tectonic shift in the way humans think. On the other hand, the story goes, we are living in the epoch of visual culture (again). Either way, I like to see 3D ASCII as an unexpected psychological event at the individual scale of the viewer, through the perception of a space that is text but doesn't lend itself to reading and is actually conveying spatial information. I hope that the mixture of expectancies and perception will lead to interesting and productive confusion.
#13 The choice of ASCII in previous works as well as in this one is closely tied to more ideological issues. It is often the case that the artist is forced to produce creative output with the sole function of justifying some art centre's hardware investment. By using given technologies one may also be accepting the creativity limits of the technology maker, and I like to believe that my creativity is possibly elsewhere than the engineer's, however much respect I express for the makers of tools. My reaction to this is to look into the past and continue the upgrading of some marginalized or forgotten technology. Gebhard Sengmüller calls this the archaeology of media.
The ASCII Unreal
#14 The piece is a navigable three-dimensional world. First shown at Synworld, ArchitecturZentrum, Vienna, in May 1999, it is dedicated to Mr. Danilo Markovic, former Serbian Minister of Culture who once declared, "We all know that Cyrillic is not only the most beautiful script but also the most suitable for work with computers."
#15 The piece has something to do with the fact that it premièred in Vienna where Serbian Cyrillic was first printed, by a man called Vuk.
#16 The piece is linked to the work of the Association Apsolutno whose project in Vienna was to trace Cyrillic letters in the urban raster of the city.
#17 The piece contains a methodological link to the famous Disparition ('Void', in English) by Perec, in the sense that the hero also disappears from the fable after approaching the object of search. Needless to say, the whole Unreal world is in the shape of a letter that doesn't appear anywhere in its textures or forms.
#18 The plan is to go on with this project, and to finally create an ASCII CAVE where all my literary and technological heroes will meet.
Vuk Cosic was born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, in 1966. He graduated in Archaeology in 1991, when he emigrated to Trieste, Italy. In 1992 he emigrated further to Ljubljana, Slovenia. Cosic is active in many fields, such as literature, politics and art. He has exhibited, published, and has been active online since 1994. He is an active member of the Ljubljana Digital Media Lab. His work can be seen at http://www.vuk.org.
