3D Ascii, An autobiography di Vuk Cosic
#0
Works and experiments with moving ASCII , ASCII audio, ASCII camera
and such, are all directed towards conversions of contents between one
media platform and an other, every time carefully directed at their
full uselessness from the viewpoint of everyday high tech and all it's
consequences. The ambition to basically convert the whole world into
ASCII contains few conceptual and possibly theoretical premises that
are subject of this text based communication unit.
The idea to develop a three dimensional ASCII environment is deriving
from the evolution of my other ASCII works presented in various web
sites as well as in numerous shows and festivals, but I would like to
present the 3D ASCII project also in the light of several art disciplines
that are tangentially linked to such an endevour. These typically art
related considerations are accompanied also by a number of non-artistic
disciplines or lines of thought. Classical text based art forms
For all my life I have been attracted to unorthodox creation and usage
of writing. Every attempt to explore the space beyond text in lines,
or between two pages in the same leaf, or between the letter and the
paper that hold's it was much more meaningfull then the most skillfully
described night dress in french nineteenth century novel or then an
existential crisis in the soul of a more recent literary hero.
#1 I remember while reading any prose how the spaces
between words used to create landscapes with meandering rivers and naked
trees. Later when I met the writings of Italo Calvino where he spoke
of reading of landscapes as if they were text I saw good symmetry between
these two thoughts.
#2 It's been quite some time that I am seroiusly interested
in what the OuLiPo guys have been doing in the sixties and seventies
(although there's quite some movement even nowadays) - thoughts of text
based art deriving from such a radical formal analysis seemed at first,
and still does, like an utterly useless idea, thus wonderfull. The works
of Quenneau and - even more - Perec have taught me to look at text in
one more way.
#3 Malarme, Apollinaire, Dada, Surrealism, Pataphisique,
OuLiPo, Situ; El Lisicki, Zdanevich, Hlebnikov, Harms; Gorgona, Mangelos,
Martek…
#4 As for three-dimensionality of text, I would say
that Chatwins songlines are very important. Crafts and sciences related
to writing
#5 History of writing sistems offer grand inspiration.
The simillarity of the clay tablet to the computer monitor pushes the
mind towards seroiusly amuzing thouhgts. Advent of movable type induces
even wilder ideas. IBM golf alphabet balls do the same.
#6 One very important source of amazement is the history
of Cryptography. Aestehetically and methodologically, literature as
we know it is eons behind achievements of black chambers cipher alchemists
from times long forgotten. Creativity and motivation of the makers and
breakers of code remains unparalleled for their understanding of quantitative
linguistics and psychology of perception.
#7 Typography and issues of general graphic design
are inseparable from the ambition to convey meaning with text. At the
level of a single sign, writing IS a painting, a very well thought-of
graphic leaning on millenia of work. This has to be respected. History
of Technology related Art lead by ASCII
#8 ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange)
was indtroduced in 1963 and a historiographic research currently on
the way (mostly by Tom Jennings) will give us a full account on it's
evolution that will further enable the quest for very first ASCII art.
Nevertheless, it is known that before the advent of this standard there
was a history of usage of text based terminals for generating graphic-like
arangements. John Foust at the web site of his Jefferson Computer Museum
is not only offering insight in this long marginalized form, but also
mentions so-called RTTY art dating back to 1923. These teletype graphics
were mostly used for christmass cards and were done in the way simillar
to the ASCII graphics of the sixties. Hopefully it will shortly be possible
to announce the publication date of the whole set of research papers
covering this topic.
#9 Other than looking for the eariliest recorded appereance
of ASCII art, it seams important to document all of it's variants in
the long decades of it's existence. Thousands of hard discs around the
world contain millions of ascii drawings, done by more or less anonimous
ascii artists, and clearly one of the tasks is to create a comprehensive
history of ascii art. In my view, most of what this historical overview
will produce is classifyable under Naïve ASCII Art, and very few
works will be accepted as anything more than that.
#10 History of computer aided visual arts is still
in the writing by many scollars, and first texts are long existing.
While the majority of the works known to me are using the computer to
create beautifull and sublime objects, I prefere the ones that sistematically
try to investigate the creative potential of the tool itself. Computer
art is too often just a promotion for specific equipment, but when it's
clever it's the cleverest thing around.
#11 Aesthetics of early computer displays remains a
field I would like to know much better. The cathode ray tubes from the
fifties and sixties were allmost exclusively used by the military and
were all extremely massive which makes them virtually unfindable. The
books that give a glimpse into the early monitors are exciting and the
images and diagrams tell us of truly fantastic designs of hardware and
possibilities for displaying the text and images. Oh, I would love to
see an image of ascii art on a monitor older than I am.
Grand unifying theory stuff
#12 There is such a view of the history of civilisation
where the move from strictly visual culture to writing introduced a
tectonic shift in the way the humans think. On the other hand, the story
goes, we are living in the epoch of visual culture (again). Either way
it is, I like to see the 3d ASCII as an unexpected psychological event
on an individual scale of the viewer through the perception of a space
that is text but doesn't lend itself to reading and is actually conveying
spatial information. I hope that the mixture of expectancies and perception
will lead to interesting and productive confusion.
#13 The choice of ASCII in previous works as well as
in this one is closely tied to more ideological issues. It is often
the case that the artist is forced to produce creative output with the
sole function to justify some art center's hardware investment. By using
given technologies one is also accepting the creativity limits of the
technology maker, maybe, and I like to believe that my creativity is
possibly elsewhere than the one of the engeneer's, however much respect
I express for the makers of tools. My reaction to this is to look in
the past and continue the upgrade of some marginalized or forgotten
technology. Gebhard Sengmüller calles this archaeology of media.
The ASCII Unreal
#14 the piece is dedicated to Mr. Danilo Ž. Markovic,
former serbian ministre of culture who once declared »we all know
that cyrillics is not only the most beautifull script but also most
suitable for work with computers«.
#15 the piece has something to do with the fact that
it's premiered in Vienna where serbian cyrillics was first printed,
by a man called Vuk.
#16 the piece is linked to the work of the Association
Apsolutno whose project in Vienna was to trace cyrillic letters in the
urban raster of the city.
#17 the piece contains a methodological link to the
famous »Disparition« (eng. »Void«) by Perec,
in the sense that the hero also dissapears from the fabula after approaching
the object of search. Neadless to say that the whole Unreal world is
in shape of the letter that doesn't appear nowhere in it's textures
or forms.
#18 The plan is to go on with this project, and to
finally create an ASCII CAVE where all my literary and technology heroes
will meet.