prosthetic knowledge

Litterae Finis

Textmode demoscene winner of TDMC 2012 put together by Trauma - very impressive stylistically rendering 3D objects in ASCII.

Video embedded below:

Alternatively, you can download the demo yourself at Pouet here (it is much much better than the video above, sharper and cleaner, Windows only).

Rhizome: Prosthetic Knowledge Picks - Web Toys 

In this submission, a collection of online projects to play around with, such as remixing Google Maps Streetview photos that become ASCII art or Little World fish-eye panoramas, draw with text, or remix images with animated emoticons.

You can find out more at Rhizome here

ASCII Street View by Teehan+Lax Labs 

Interactive, brower-based WebGL-powered text-mode view of Google Streetview panoramas. Available in colour and green-terminal modes:

Real-time Ascii Art conversion of Google Street View panorama’s done in WebGL.

You’ll need Chrome, Firefox 8+, or another browser that supports CORS WebGL textures.

Coded by @peter_nitsch. Inspired by Sol’sTextFX library. Built with @thespite’sGoogle Street View Panorama library, and three.js.

Read about this at Teehan+Lax Labs.

Try it out here

2ch Kaomoji Pop-Up Toaster 

Japanese ASCII emoticon toaster, from J-List:

Enjoy a Japanese kaomoji smile on your morning bread with this fun toaster that cooks the image onto your food. This is the blue shakin & haahaa version, one side of the toast featuring a determined face, the other side a worried face. Super kawaii!! This toaster is designed to work on Japanese voltage of 100V, but has a tolerance for up to 115V (US). If you live in a different country, you’ll need to purchase a transformer as well in order to enjoy this wonderfully fun toast.

Available in blue and pink

10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10 (Book Cover) 

The first book cover (I have seen) to use PETSCII (Commodore ASCII) characters as a pattern.

It is part of a compilation of writing from software artists (via Amazon):

This book takes a single line of code—the extremely concise BASIC program for the Commodore 64 inscribed in the title—and uses it aa a lens through which to consider the phenomenon of creative computing and the way computer programs exist in culture. The authors of this collaboratively written book treat code not as merely functional but as a text—in the case of 10 PRINT, a text that appeared in many different printed sources—that yields a story about its making, its purpose, its assumptions, and more. They consider randomness and regularity in computing and art, the maze in culture, the popular BASIC programming language, and the highly influential Commodore 64 computer.

Previous posts on this piece of code from this blog can be found here (image) and here (video)

ASCII Catz by Kayla Mattes 

Hand dyed silkscreened t-shirts and leggings, and industrial knit Jacquard shirt, based on the development of ASCII art in the 90’s.

More Here (via text-mode)

(via text-mode)

Timmy Printface 

A small hacked together receipt printer project from last year by GO Free Range that could print SMS messages and produce ASCII Art Instagram image printouts.

The project was limited, but was became part of the research and development of software for an Internet Of Things system called Printer

A Coded Message #1 

ASCII art print by Nicolai Troshinsky, available at society6.

Discovered by the lovely Kenna

Warez Rose ASCII Art Wallpaper

ASCII / Text Art Wallpaper - Available at Fancy for $140 USD a roll!

Floral motif wallpaper created from ASCII symbols.  Black ink on white cotton paper.  Rolls measure 27” wide by 5 yards.  Handmade in the United States. 

Interactive Fluid Dynamics Rendered In ASCII

Web designer Nick Kwiatek’s website features a playful interactive home page. Move the mouse around to see virtual fluid forms appear, press the left mouse button for a burst of movement.

Try it out here

Engraved ASCII Art

Proof-Of-Concept technique using Processing and technical ingenuity.

From Evil Mad Scientist:

Seeing these examples reminded us of another “classic” method of making halftones: ASCII art. In what follows, we walk through the process of using making CNC halftones for engraving or carving from both vintage and automatically generated ASCII art.

Seldom seen nowadays, ASCII art is a computer graphics technique where grayscale photos or artwork are represented by keyboard characters on a regularly spaced grid. And while it does show up occasionally in the history of computer graphics, it is perhaps more important as a cultural artifact of the BBS era of computer networking.

While making ASCII art was once a painstaking process of hand creation— a true art —much of what is called “ASCII art” these days is automatically generated.

More a more in-depth look at how the engraving was made, you can see the step-by-step process here

Via Adafruit Industries

ASCII Art from 1740 (via Notes For Bibliophiles)

Taken from ‘Analog ASCII’:

… the idea of building up an image from individual letters and other characters is much older than the computer …

Christian Gessner’s Die so nöthig als nützliche Buchdruckerkunst und Schriftgiessery (1740-1745) is a manual of printing, copiously illustrated with copperplate engravings (including an impressive depiction of a printing shop) and other images, like this fold-out depiction of cathedral spires (with apologies for the poor scan) [Image 1]

If you look closely, you’ll notice that in this case the method of illustration is not engraving; instead the image is composed (literally) entirely of typographical ornaments. That means that every section of every line is probably the imprint of a single piece of type.

This Spanish broadside, printed in Valencia [Image 2], dates from slightly later in the century but it follows the same principle. The most clever touch, in my opinion, is the use of two “O”s for windows in the upper area of the tower.

More information, including high definition photographs of the images above where you really see each individual character, can be seen at the Notes For Bibliophiles post.