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
19-Sep-82 11:44 Scott E Fahlman :-)
From: Scott E Fahlman
I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers:
:-)
Read it sideways. Actually, it is probably more economical to mark things that are NOT jokes, given current trends. For this, use:
:-(
”Today is the 30th anniversary of the ASCII :-) Smiley
More at WIRED 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.
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.
(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
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.
Cathode

A terminal app for Mac that provides a slick retro computing look to command line functions, including artificial glitches and drag-and-drop text art:
Fully Featured Terminal
A fast and stable terminal with all the mod-cons: drag and drop, scrollback, colors, key combos, international characters, and mouse support. Works with regular Mac fonts, but also includes a handful of bitmap classics.
Millions of Monitors
Choose from a large collection of themes spanning every era. Tweak to your heart’s content with a dozen real-time sliders, including screen curvature, burn-in, interlace, and transparency. Use a webcam photo as glass reflection.
Dirty Details
The quirks and annoyances of old video hardware are charming today. Watch the strange dance of beam desyncs and shifting colors. Turn up the noise, jitter, and flicker to add a realistic warmth. Scan and retrace lines top it all off.
More Than Just a Terminal
Cathode also includes a text editor mode. Open, save, and modify plain text files using standard Mac dialogs, menus, key combos, and gestures. You can even open image files to generate ASCII art.
More info and links to buy here
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.
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
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.
Impulse 101 by Anthony Antonellis
Part installation, part net art, part ASCII art, part glitch art - as demonstrated by this ANIGIF:

Impulse 101 is a diptych, half painting/half beamer, 100% on the internet.
The work begins with the 4 foundational font characters of 8-bit Block ASCII, ░ ▒ ▓ █. It consists of two 100 x 100 cm canvases. The left (black) side is acrylic on canvas, while the right counterpart is a beamer projection of ASCII art animations utilizing real and faux copy paste glitches in MS WordPad.
More information, examples, gif animation and videos can be found here