 |
 |
From the diatrope list (who should know better!) Computer art was invented in the 80's and early 90's "before the advent of the internet". Read on and be illuminated... Early computer-generated art revived for S.F. exhibit Ellen Lee, Chronicle Staff Writer Saturday, January 12, 2008 Back in the days of the early computer, before the advent of the Internet, the only kind of art that could be created and transmitted consisted of the letters, numbers and symbols found on a keyboard. Named for standard text codes, it was called ANSI and ASCII art. As if using tiny brush strokes, its makers pieced together keyboard characters to create their works, which today look like oddly pixelated pictures. Beginning today, an exhibit at a small San Francisco art gallery, 20 goto 10, will take people back to the age of ANSI art. The technology- oriented art gallery, named after a sequence used by computer programmers, will display pieces by Chris Lewis, known online as Lord Jazz, and Jeff Lindsey, known as Somms. Their art punctuates the era just before the dawn of the Internet. During the 1980s and early 1990s, computer users would connect over a phone line and communicate via the Bulletin Board System. Many of the bulletin boards, like early Web pages, featured the art. But as people began connecting to the World Wide Web instead, bulletin boards, along with ANSI art, went away. "You don't hear about it anymore," said Kevin Olson, a computer programmer in San Francisco and co-curator of the project who produced a few ANSI pieces himself. "It's an old-school thing that no one is bringing out, so my main objective is to bring it out of the woodwork." ANSI refers to the American National Standards Institute and ASCII refers to the American Standard Code for Information Interchange. ANSI art stems from the characters on computers running MS-DOS, Microsoft's pre-Windows operating system. A combination of keystrokes could create blocks and symbols, as well as 16 colors. ASCII art was more basic, using just the letters, numbers and symbols on the keyboard. Olson selected 11 ANSI pieces by the two artists. Like many of that time, they were inspired by dark comic books and Japanese anime. One is a gray, red-eyed, drooling monster. A lighter one features a fish once used for a sushi bar's bulletin board. For six of them, Olson enlarged the pictures onto translucent sheets, which have been framed in a box with fluorescent lights. When lit up, the picture looks like it would have on a computer monitor. The only difference is that when the pieces were created, the screen could not display them in their entirety. Only 30 lines of text could be seen at once, so viewers had to scroll the see the whole picture. For the other, larger artworks, Olson and gallery owner Christopher Abad, who is also a computer programmer, hung up flat-screen monitors that let the audience scroll through the entire picture. Made up of 200 to 500 lines of text, the pictures were too big to turn into a framed piece. Since ANSI art faded away, many of its creators, who were in their teens and early 20s, have gone on to computer- and graphics-oriented careers at Pixar, Lucas Arts, Electronic Arts and elsewhere. Lindsey, one of the artists featured in the exhibit, works as a producer for a New York City video game company. Now 33, he learned about bulletin boards through a friend as a 20- year-old junior college student in Southern California. He taught himself how to create ANSI art and became popular in the underground ANSI art scene. His pieces include a black and white rendering of a scene from "The Crow" comic book, which will be on display at the gallery. He would outline the basic picture before shading it in with detail, a process that could take 20 to 30 hours. After a few years, he lost interest and moved on, working at Redwood City's Electronic Arts Inc. before landing his current position at Longtail Studios. He rarely looks at or thinks about his ANSI art, considering it a bygone period in his life. "I appreciate the desire for someone to archive it. It's a piece of technology's history," Lindsey said. "It was a primitive form of art before the Internet." nsi art Where: 20 goto 10 gallery Address: 679 Geary St., San Francisco Dates: Through Jan. 31 Hours: Thursday and Friday, 7-10 p.m., Saturday and Sunday, 3-6 p.m. Cost: Free On the Web: www.twentygoto10.com ==== Paul Brown - based in OZ Dec 07 - Apr 08 mailto:[log in to unmask] == http://www.paul-brown.com OZ Landline +61 (0)7 5443 3491 == USA fax +1 309 216 9900 OZ Mobile +61 (0)419 72 74 85 == Skype paul-g-brown ==== Visiting Professor - Sussex University http://www.cogs.susx.ac.uk/ccnr/research/creativity.html ====