ASCII art is a graphic design technique that uses images pieced together from a variety of set characters defined by the American coding system. ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information and Interchange. Computers are the only device which can understand numbers, so an ascii code is used for the numerical representation of a character, such as 'a' or '@', but the term is also used loosely to refer to text based visual art in general. This technique is produced from a text-editing program and requires a fixed-width font for presentation, however in it's early development would have originally been created using a typewriter and typewriter fonts. The typically used typeface for this is Courier New. Unlike concrete poetry, ascii art often uses free-form languages, meaning the positioning of the characters on the page is fairly insignificant, whereas concrete poetry often uses text and words which relate to the image as a whole.
Ascii art first came about when early printers would typically lack in their graphics ability and thus the characters were used in place of graphic marks. The first known examples of ascii art come from computer graphics pioneer and artist, Kenneth Knowlton in 1966. This technique can be seen in his body of work 'Studies in Perception I' which would mainly depict portraiture. In general, ascii art was also used to print large banners so that the division between images was clearer, and was even used in the early development of emails when images could not be embedded into them.
I will use this technique in the process of my final designs to create an image through the use of text. The idea of this coding system will create another link between the image, fact and this system, in that coding is a part of mathematics and complex calculations.
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