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).

The 20th Anniversary of the SMS Text Message

20 years ago today, the first text message was sent by an engineer: “Merry Christmas”.

At BBC News, an interview is presented in text message format with Matti Makkonen, a Finnish Civil Servant who came up with the original idea. You can read the interview here

Also, why SMS messages are 160 characters long? Via The LA Times:

Alone in a room in his home in Bonn, Germany, Friedhelm Hillebrand sat at his typewriter, tapping out random sentences and questions on a sheet of paper.

As he went along, Hillebrand counted the number of letters, numbers, punctuation marks and spaces on the page. Each blurb ran on for a line or two and nearly always clocked in under 160 characters.

That became Hillebrand’s magic number — and set the standard for one of today’s most popular forms of digital communication: text messaging.

“This is perfectly sufficient,” he recalled thinking during that epiphany of 1985, when he was 45 years old. “Perfectly sufficient.”

Texter 

Fun browser toy that lets you create text art, drawing lines with sentences you enter into it:

Texter is a little javascript experiment that lets you explore your creativity by drawing with words. This app is an extension of a demo from this book.

This has been made using Javascript and the HTML5  canvas element. You can find the source on Github

Made by: Tim Holman - @twholman

As you can see in the above animations, it appears to work with non-Western scripts too. You can also edit some of the parameters such as size and colour.

Try it out here

NEXT by Carlos Zuniga 

Art series created in 2007 of hand-drawn portraits on pages of a telephone directory using the lines of names and numbers as a guide to mark making - a sort of pseudo-reverse text art.

More Here

The Talking Computer 

Early computer animation from 1967 to demonstrate early text-to-speech synthesis - via AT&T Archives, video embedded below:

Speech synthesis at Bell Labs dates back to the 1930s and Homer Dudley’s Voder, which was exhibited and publicly demonstrated at the 1939 World’s Fair. Because understanding all aspects of the conversion of speech to electrical signal was a core interest of the Bell System, speech synthesis research continued at the company in the ensuing decades, entering the computer era in the 1960s, with articulatory speech vocal tract models created by Paul Mermelstein, Cecil Coker, John L. Kelly Jr., and Louis Gerstman, among others. Text-to-speech programs were researched from the 1960s all the way to the present day.

This film specifically documents the output of an early text-to-speech program. Cecil Coker worked on this project, which is an articulatory synthesis program. Coker most likely first presented this film at a conference, either in Japan or at the 1967 M.I.T. Conference on Speech Communication and Processing, or the 1968 Processed Speech Symposium in Kyoto. 

More 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

90º - Typography Book 

Handmade book by Iwona Przybyla features typographic alphabet with letters presented in 3D using thread and stitching:

Kąt 90 stopni (90 degrees) is a book presenting a font style bearing the same name, designed in such a way that each of its letters can be displayed in a three-dimensional space. The letters are made of a string threaded through two sheets of paper perpendicular to each other. All twenty-six letters of the English alphabet have been created using this font style and put together to create this one-off book design.

More Here

Smileys, 1881 

Late 19th Century emoticons, via The Retronaut

PK Note: For a year, I was working on the Google Print project in Oxford, and one of the books we encountered (whose name I have completely forgotten) arrived in it’s own white box, featuring an average size book with an additional smaler one. The books were basically printshop humour of the time, early examples of text-based art, such as emoticon smilies and character decoration. It wasn’t suitable for digitalization as it was published on the cusp of the copyright window (no books during and after 1885 were processed), but it was a fantastic little discovery.

DNA Letters, Numbers, and Wingdings 

Alpha-numeric characters each made a tile constructed from a strand of DNA. From the Nature article ‘DNA drawing with an old twist’:

Scientists have developed a way to carve shapes from DNA canvases, including all the letters of the Roman alphabet, emoticons and an eagle’s head.

Bryan Wei, a postdoctoral scholar at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, and his colleagues make these shapes out of single strands of DNA just 42 letters long. Each strand is unique, and folds to form a rectangular tile. When mixed, neighbouring tiles stick to each other in a brick-wall pattern, and shorter boundary tiles lock the edges in place.

In their simplest configuration, the tiles produce a solid 64-by-103-nanometre rectangle, but Wei and his team can create more complex shapes by leaving out specific tiles. Using this strategy, they created 107 two-dimensional shapes, including letters, numbers, Chinese characters, geometric shapes and symbols. They also produced tubes and rectangles of different sizes, including one consisting of more than 1,000 tiles.

More 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

On Journalism #2 Typewriter 

Installation piece connects computer to typewriter that generates stories about journalists who have died since 1992. By Julian Koschwitz:

The typewriter installation «On Journalism #2 Typewriter» writes generatively constructed stories about all journalist who have been killed worldwide between 1992 and today based on the existing data of their lives as well as their published work. The individual stories are connected through common fields of coverage, places, professions and many other aspects. Besides the text the typewriter creates also images e.g. flags which are heavier distorted the more journalists got killed in that particular country.

The story is written endlessly on one endless piece of paper.

More about the project can be found here

Live Subtitles 

Art installation from 2005 by Gareth Long used speech-recognition software to capture what people were saying around the piece, and were printed onto paper as well as projected onto a screen.

A transcript of one of the captures is available here, although it is very repetitive and almost abstract it has a visual pattern quality as you scroll through.

More info here

The Art Of Ken Knowlton

Artist who was working with alternative pixels and text art before it was fashionable. I’ve covered Ken Knowlton many times previously, but thanks to the Tumblr text-mode for, err, re-reminding me …

He has been making these images with various objects for years (from dominoes, sea shells to toy cars), with the examples above ranging from 1966 to 2003. Here, in his own words, is an explanation of his background, taken from a short piece “Mosaic Portraits: New Methods and Strategies”:

My main interest was computers, particularly their use in picture-making … The non-scientific, some say artistic, aspects of computer graphics arose for me via a sophomoric prank. Ed David, two levels up, was away for a while and the mice, one might say, played ever more freely. Leon Harmon stopped by to ask me for help with a brilliant idea: when Ed returns, one entire wall of his office will
be covered with a huge picture made of small electronic symbols for transistors, resistors and such. But overall, they will form a somewhat-hard-to-see picture of, guess what, a nude! And so the renowned Harmon-Knowlton nude was conceived, coaxed into being, and duly hung on Ed’s wall.

But the big version burst forth a while later at a press conference on Art and Technology in Robert Rauschenberg’s loft, and on the watershed date of October 11, 1967, it appeared atop the first page of the second section of the New York Times, which made not the slightest effort to conceal its birthplace. Billy Kluver claims that this was the first time ever that the Times printed a nude! The PR department huddled and decided, so it seems, that since she had appeared in the venerable Times, our nude was not frivolous inyour-
face pornography after all, but in-your-face Art. Their revised statement was: You may indeed distribute and display it, but be sure that you let people know that it was produced at Bell Telephone Laboratories, Inc.
We did make similar pictures - of a gargoyle, of seagulls, of people sitting at computers - which have appeared here and there. But it was our Nude who would dolphin again and again into public view in dozens of books and magazines. Sometimes it is excused by a more dignified title, like Studies in Perception I; once the two of us were photographed in front of it, providing a scant two-piece cloak of modesty. Just recently I encountered it in Lewis Mumford’s The Myth of the Machine (1970) where, as last in a three-panel display, it demonstrates progress (or regress) in mechanization of the portrayal of woman.
That was the beginning for me of a fascination with large pictures made of small things, that has occupied my eyes, hands and mind ever since. It was also my first conscious buffeting by chaos: a mischievous butterfly had flapped, and a huge chunk of my career and persona veered onto a new course.

On the other hand, and again by chance, my debut as artist was postponed for several years. How so?
Because Art-and-Technology was the rage, and The Museum of Modern Art had a “Machine Show,” and the Brooklyn Museum and other places had similar parties, and in each case Leon and I submitted the Nude to demonstrate a collaboration between artist and techno-geek (or whatever). One of us had to be an artist. So
by the whim of a spin-launched coin, Leon became the artist and I remained a technologist (pretense aside, so did he). I did not understand until ten years later that I had lost the toss, since artists, I was learning, were the perceptive predictors, the daring, flamboyant and revered analysts of past, present and future, the grand but sly commentators on human joy and sorrow. (After another ten years, and exposure to a hundred artists, I learned that that notion was 90 percent humbug.)

Interesting to read how “… Art-and-Technology was the rage …”

You can read the rest of the essay here, and see more examples of Ken’s mosaic pixel work here

“And That’s the Way It Is” by Ben Rubin 

Public installation art projects transcripts of US broadcaster Walter Cronkite onto the matrix-like front of the academic building named in his honour:

To honor the Cronkite legacy, the College of Communication at The University of Texas at Austin dedicated the Walter Cronkite Plaza on Thursday, April 19, in front of the Jesse H. Jones Communication complex, near Dean Keeton Street and Whitis Avenue.

“And That’s the Way It Is,” an art installation by renowned new media artist Ben Rubin, is filmed in part in this video. The permanent art installation can be seen every evening from dusk to midnight and is projected on the front of the CMA building on campus at 2504 Whitis Avenue.

Cronkite attended UT from 1933 to 1935 and served as anchorman for the CBS Evening News from 1962-1981.

The digital art installation by media artist Ben Rubin entitled “And That’s the Way It Is,” is named for the iconic catchphrase used by Cronkite at the end of his news broadcasts. The piece was commissioned for the College of Communication by Landmarks, the University’s public art program, and will use lighting to display images and text from Cronkite’s news broadcasts, along with current news coverage, across the south side of the Communication Building.

Rubin said the purpose of the work is to both honor Cronkite and foster research regarding the differences between past and present news coverage.