For the vast majority of people today, the term "ascii art" stands for various
types of crude drawings executed using whatever character set is available on
their computers. This includes smileys such as :-) :~ and @>->---, and images
converted from raster graphics using specially designed programs. However, 
textmode art is not limited to these primitive forms, and several particularly
developed varieties flourished for about two decades, from late 1980s to early
2000s. These were ANSI and ASCII art as understood in, respectively, the ansi
and the ascii scene.

Without going into technical details, images created by artists of both scenes
were drawn, as a rule, character by character, in specially designed editors 
that facilitated access to certain rarely used parts of the ASCII character set
(but did not allow drawing with a mouse or anything of the sort). In ASCII art,
by using the differences in height and volume between characters, smooth curves
could be constructed to shape logos, portraits, even landscapes. ANSI art limited
itself to only a few characters from the set - the blocks - and so lacked the
type of curve control available in ASCII; but what it lost in shapes it made up
for using color - the 16 colors available on old computers could be mixed in
a multitude of ways by creative use of different types of ASCII blocks. There 
were other types of textmode art - amiga ascii (sometimes incorrectly referred
to as "oldschool") and X-Bin/Adf. Amiga ascii was born on old Amiga computers
and was limited almost entirely to fonts drawn using straight lines and sparse
decorations. X-Bin and ADF were two file formats developed late in the history
of textmode art; both allowed editing the actual ASCII characters, as well as
the 16 colors. Few artists have used this, even though the potential of the form
is vast indeed.

Most ascii and ansi artists of the period were teenagers, and so much of the
artwork was heavily influenced by street art and cartoon artists. ASCII and ANSI
pieces were typically used on bulletin board systems (the websites of the past)
and depended entirely on the MS-DOS character set. When Microsoft Windows started
replacing MS-DOS as the standard OS for personal computers, and bulletin boards
started dying out, slowly replaced by the World Wide Web, the textmode art scene
began to decline. After a brief surge of activity in early 2000s (when PabloDraw,
a Windows-based editor was released) it collapsed, leaving only a few inexperienced
artists, most of them completely unfamiliar with the tradition.

ASCII and ANSI artists typically released their works to public by forming groups,
and these groups released artpacks - archived collections of artworks. An artpack
would normally include at least a dozen artworks, a small ID file with a miniature
artwork in it (file_id.diz) and a memberlist of the group that released it. Most
ASCII and ANSI artpacks are available for downloading at textfiles.com:

http://artscene.textfiles.com

One needs a standard archiving tool (PKZIP or WinRAR) to unpack the artpacks, and
a special viewer to view the pieces, such as ACiDView:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/acidview6-win32

Alternatively, a large number of artpacks can be viewed on Sixteen Colors, although
that website is slow and the artworks are poorly categorized (wrong attributions, 
etc.):

http://sixteencolors.net

Some of the most prominent ASCII groups were Mimic (1998-2006, the longest running 
group), Remorse (1994-200?, the oldest group, part of ACiD Productions), Karma (1998), 
The Usual Suspects (2001-2002), Odelay (1996-1998), Soap (1995-1996, one of the oldest, 
historically very important), Kwest (1997), and many more. I have much less experience 
in ANSI, but works from packs by 27inch (2003-2004), Legion (1998) and Revival (2002)
can always be recommended, as well as works in ACiD Productions and iCE packs. Perhaps
the single best ANSI collection, certainly one of the most influential, was Dieznyik's
Sztuka (1999, k-sztuka.zip).

Unfortunately, few ASCII artists have put their work online. One of those who did is 
Robin Pearson, a member of Mimic. His ASCII and ANSI archive is usually available 
online at HeySuburbia:

http://konami.heysuburbia.com/ascii

Another artist who put an entire body of work online is Frederic Cambus. His ASCII 
and ANSI artwork may be viewed at his personal website:

http://cleaner.untergrund.net/gallery.html

A selection of ascii artwork by me is available at this website:

http://jashiin.com/ascii


-J.

^^^TO TOP
<<<BACK