Art's New Frontier: Cyberspace

Tanicea Alicea '95 received her introduction to ASCII art when students circulated a popular series of cows through electronic mail during her first year.

The document held pictures of dozens of cows doing silly things and two of them looked like this:

Cow in water

Cow in trouble

"Those came about my freshman year," Alicea recalls.

The cows hardly represent the limits of ASCII art. Even something as complex as a rendition of the Mona Lisa-composed of letters, semi-colons, dollar signs and other miscellaneous symbols-is possible. ASCII (pronounced "ask-ee") is an acronym for American Standard Code for Informational Interchange. Or, for the computer neophyte, you're standard keyboard text.

The popularity of such art is slowly breaking down the stereotype that all computer hacks are strictly left-brained, with little artistic ability.

"It's just like when you're a little kid and you have crayons and a blank page," says left C. Tarr '96, co-president of Digitas, a student group dedicated to emerging technologies. "Now you have a text editor and an empty screen to work with."

The Hacker's Dictionary, published by the MIT Press, defines ASCII art as: "the fine art of drawing diagrams using the ASCII character set, namely, |,-,/,\,+, etc."

"I've seen everything from pictures of furniture, to pictures of famous people, to pictures of animals, to pictures of landscapes, to pictures of naked people," Tarr says.

The art form developed more than a decade ago, before the advent of graphics-capable computers and printers, Tarr says.

"In the computer labs of the old days, they'd print [ASCII art] out and put them up on the wall," Tarr says.

A frequent use of ASCII art is the smiley faces that often appear in e-mail messages. Some popular faces are,: "smile,": ("frown", and;) "wink."

"I started using those in high school, Tarr says. "I got so used to it [that] when I started writing my papers, I'd insert them into my papers.... I had a hell of a time explaining it to my [teachers]."

Today, the most frequent use of ASCII art is in "signature files" that students often put at the end of e-mail messages they send. ASCII also appears in "plans" that appear when students on the Internet use the "finger" command to find other users, according to Tarr.

"I have the New York City skyline in my plan, along with a cat and a design for my name that I drew myself," says Alicea, a member of the Harvard Computer Society.

Lots of time and a little artistic sense is all that is needed for these computer artists. "People who can draw on paper usually tend to do ASCII art better," Alicea says.

Unfortunately, the art form may have peaked in popularity. Many ASCII artists have moved on to designing World Wide Web pages, Tarr says.