Thursday, March 15, 2007

ascii exploration















4 comments:

Darko said...

Mmmm man! I have been looking at these images.... every day since you posted them...they were intriguing, albeit simple in graphic terms... there was something really interesting in them but i never knew what was that.

Just now i realised... they are a real poem... i dunno whether you thought'em as a poem but, graphically and literary the are... and they make sense. I was thinking today while being 'underground' that you should consider publishing your stuff... I do think it is really good.

thundercomb said...

haha :-) lol, you are right there is something in them, in the arrangement. But it's also an "exploration" as the title suggests. I wondered what looking at a simple ascii composition would be like if literally "looked at" from different angles. Those familiar characters, what if we approach them as something more than the utility of words and sentences, as something more alive in their own right. And without getting wordy about it, but ascii art has been around a while - what I have in mind (in a more general sense) is also different from the somewhat literal representation in a lot of ascii art that I've seen (eg. http://www.chris.com/ASCII/ or http://www.afn.org/~afn39695/collect.htm and not to mention the complete translation of jpegs into ascii - that is just too naturalistic - see this link for what I mean: http://www.glassgiant.com/ascii/).

Darko said...

haha... perhaps like Guillerme Apolinaire the French Poet?....

thundercomb said...

Apollinaire's "visual poetry" experiments were still tied to the restrictions of a typewriter on the page (wasn't there a eulogy written in the shape of a gravestone? [shudder]).

But digital technology adds a dimension he didn't have access to. Who can say where it will lead?