ASCII Art Ensemble
«ASCII Art»

The goal of the ASCII Art Ensemble (a group with members in Amsterdam, Ljubljana and Berlin), which was founded in 1998, is to transfer moving images on film into «net-based moving ASCII». The idea behind this is not to turn the source code into the image, as in Jodi's projects, but instead to represent (moving) images using ASCII characters. The process reminds the visitor of the early, graphic-free and 24-needle phases of printer technology, when images could only be displayed using existing ASCII characters and were therefore indecipherable. The ASCII Art Ensemble has already developed a java script and a java player for moving ASCII images. It is now working on a fast converter that would enable them to create moving ASCII on the Internet in real time. The final long-term goal is to develop a RealPlayer G2 Plug-In that supports the aforementioned new file format and can ensure that it is widely disseminated. Up to now ASCII to Speach history of art for the blind , is one of the only projects that has been developed to transform historical images into ASCII characters, character by character. […] A History of Moving Image, which gives the visitor an overview of the evolution in style and the distribution media of moving images in a series of seven clips, also exists, as does Deep ASCII , an ASCII version of the film Deep Throat, that runs on a Pong Arcade. The visitor does not see the pornographic images, but rather their indecipherable ASCII versions.

(source: Inke Arns, «The Birth of Net Art Stems from an Accident. Comments about net.art in Europe from 1993 - 200», in: art.net.dortmund.de, August/September 2001)