Computers and Serial Imagery linked on Astounding ASCII Art

“The tradition of serial imagery in painting began with Monet who, being vitally concerned with light, often painted the same object or scene repeatedly under varying light conditions… Since Monet, many painters (mostly abstract) have worked serially. Andy Warhol, with his painted (and printed) series of movie stars, Mona Lisas, soup cans, coke bottles, etc. is the foremost serial artist today.”

ASCII art has always fascinated me. So when I ran across Laurence Press’s article in the old Artist and Computer• collection, it inspired me to write the asciiArt script for 42 Astounding Scripts.

I ended up not using his greyscale palette, however, mainly because it required too much choice for a script. Most of the letters appear multiple times in his palette. That said, it’s not a bad palette. Choosing somewhat randomly from his 8-level list, the palette --palette "#OX*+=- " produces recognizable ASCII art for complex images.

He also suggests inserting “arbitrary material”, which is what I called “sequential” in the book: using a word or phrase for all non-white sections of the image.

He has some very interesting ideas that I did not use for the script, but which you could program in if you wanted, such as randomly adding noise to the non-white or the white sections.

But also interesting is how unsure he is that using computers for art is a worthwhile use of computer time.

It is uncomfortable to be begging for ‘bootleg’ time. The problem is that computer art doesn’t really fit anywhere. Neither computer scientists and computer science departments, nor artists and art departments generally take it seriously enough to underwrite experimentation. Perhaps this is as it should be, or perhaps the quality of our work will win a place for computer generated art, I think that the jury is (justifiably) still out.

I think the jury is in today about whether using computers for artwork is a worthwhile use of computer time. And that’s partly because a few years after he wrote that, he’d have been able to go out to the local Radio Shack and buy a complete computer that could do what he had to use “bootleg time” for in 1975.