Low-Resolution Computer Art Exhibit?

t-bob asks: "For those of you that remember the glory days of the BBS, ANSI and ASCII art probably bring back some nostalgic memories. It may surprise you, however, that low-resolution art of various kinds is still being drawn (although the low-res scenes are in their last dying convulsions). I have been contemplating, for a while, a means of introducing these art forms (ANSI and ASCII as well as XBIN, ADF, RIP, etc) to a wider audience, and have decided that a conventional art exhibition is, if not the best, the most interesting way to go about this. As some of you may have already guessed, this could prove quite problematic: all low-res art pieces must be viewed in their original font at the original resolution, which makes pieces more than, say, 25 lines long--when they were meant to be viewed at 80x25--impossible to display on a conventional monitor." Could a program be written so that it can take ANSI, XBIN, RIP and other formats, open an xterm window of the proper size, set the right font and then display them in the way they were intended to be seen?

"Converting them to an easier-handled image format (i.e. ansi2pcx.exe) will also not work because it throws the proportions of the characters off just enough to change the piece, and does not work with XBIN, ADF, RIP, ASCIIs that use the Amiga font (more common than you'd think), ANSIs that use iCE-Color (16 instead of 8 background colors), or ANSIs/ASCIIs more than 80 columns wide. The only solution I have thought of is a program made to display the entire piece on a long rectangular monitor of some kind, and that may prove completely impractical as the unorthodox dimensions of some pieces (1000+ lines long, 160-column wide BINs) would necessitate custom monitors in this case. Any suggestions?"

Unicode Art?
In a related question, Tim Ringenbach asks: "ASCII art has been popular for years now. I was wondering though, is anyone doing ASCII art in Unicode? Would the extra characters actually be helpful, or is 7-bit ASCII really all we need? A google of "unicode art" found only 7 pages. But I suppose since 7-bit ASCII is an UTF-8 file that just happens to not use any multibye characters, we could retroactively upgrade most ASCII art to Unicode art without even altering a timestamp."

freedos

[Zurk]

boot into freedos on any new monitor and run your art. it will display at the full screen size since DOS defaults to 640 x 480 VGA mode and your monitor expands the picture to cover the whole screen anyway...

Re:freedos

[Zurk]

640x480 DOS mode is 80 x 25

Huh?

[_typo]

Why don't you set up the xterm the way each piece needs and then take a screenshot?

Post the images on the web or make big printable versions to present at art exhibits.

What am I missing here?

Some thoughts.

[shumacher]

Not too clear from your article - is your exhibit for consumption on the web, or some sort of real world show? If the latter, you have many, many more options, including special software.

If I assume that your exhibit will be on a web site, I'd suggest a few things...

First, text rendering in html tends to be iffy. PDF tends to work a bit better.
I'd try telnet. It's possible to embed a java telnet client [freshmeat.net] to allow your web-based users a quick connection to ASCII/ANSI content.

As for the RIP, you'll probably be best off with screen captures. If you're willing to go into a great deal more effort, you could try to convert them into Flash animations. It would suck to do, but I would think it would be possible. RIP is just relativly easy to interpret commands in plain old ascii. The geekish could even create it in vi. I've seen perl create flash animations in real time [2shortplanks.com]. I suppose it would be within the realm of someone versed in Perl to create something that would do the translation. No idea about NAPLPS.

The Amiga thing could be done a few ways. My favorite is to get a Amiga and do screen caps. Could even automate the process with AREXX. IIRC JRCOMM supported event handling.

great idea!

[cr@ckwhore]

Great idea! Of course, this does bring back nostalgic memories of the BBS days. My first BBS was a part time, single line, running on on an XT with 2 floppy drives and 300 baud. A few years later, I had a 2 line bad-boy running on a 386 with 8Mb ram @ 9600 baud (which was quite expensive BTW).

Anyway, I love ascii/ansi art. If I were to put ascii art on display, I wouldn't mess around with monitors, old computers, etc. I would have a quality commercial printer make them into gigantic prints. That way, in order to view them, people would have to stand a way back from the actual print. I think by doing that, it would not only show the art, but would emphasize the granularity and essence of ascii art, especially with block character drawings.

There are several ways that prints could be made... best bet would be to create accurate representations of each character in the 80x25 grid for the printer. Or, you could break each 80x25 cell down into its 8x8 pixel representation according to the actual system character layouts in the BIOS, and then print those purposefully "blocky" so that the sub-blocks will be visible in each character. Poor man's solution... take a hi-res digital photo of your monitor, and have it enlarged.

Great idea, I hope you succeed with it!