Yesterday the GLOW Festival started in Eindhoven. They had a bunch of lights in several places. Which sort of makes sense, as the world’s largest lightbulb manufacturer is from here.
I went on a tour with Dirk and Ronny to see the highlights (ha!). I snapped some photos of this and that. The tour itself was so-so at best (the guide couldn’t speak loud enough, half the exhibitions were closed, and we spent too much time gathering people and looking at the less interesting stuff), but some of the exhibitions were quite neat. Unfortunately, we started with the best, the 18 Septemberplein, which has some neat light-flowers and view to the arc over Demer, so the rest seemed a bit boring in comparison. I mean, running a video camera thru AAlib and projecting it onto a wall is art, now?
Night Before
One of the artists pioneered the automatic generation of ASCII-art in the past. That you can use the tools that came from this does not say a lot.
I never suggested (except sarcastically) that my use of aalib was by any means art – the point is that I do not, in any way, consider that art.
I did not know that one of the artists pioneered this, but as far as I can see, this is also not true. this page suggests that the ASCII Ensemble started operations in August 1998 whereas the aalib homepage clearly shows that aalib version 1.2 was released in March 1998. aalib is created by Jan Hubicka whereas the ASCIi Ensemble consists of Walter van der Cruijsen, Luka Frelih, and Vuk Cosic.
So, unless you have a source indicating that the ASCII Ensemble’s work predates aalib, I’ll just go ahead and assume they basically did what I did: downloaded aalib and hacked a demo in 10 seconds, and that therefore my piece is every bit as valuable.
I can’t find any proof of it predating it, so you might be right. I did like the effect though 🙂
Yeah, I guess it’s more impressive if you haven’t seen the effect for more than 10 years already and even used it yourself in a fit of silliness (for a project on drawing maps of the US 7 years ago, none less) 😉
the ascii art ensemble used software called ttyvideo by chris pirazzi running on an sgi indy to convert video to ascii files. aae developed a java web applet player for the ttyvideo files and published sample ascii video conversions on the web using the player.
check the ttyvideo readme here: http://stuff.mit.edu/afs/athena/contrib/potluck/doc/README.ttyvideo
ttyvideo was already around in 93/94, and so predates aalib quite a bit, as do many other ascii animation experiments.
the work of ascii art ensemble and aalib was parallel and independent of each other. the two groups met once, for “asciimilation” at the time’s up space in the linz harbor.
http://muzak.timesup.org/Obsolete/ascii1.html
anyway, my favorite work of meta ascii-art remains the instant ascii camera: http://www.ljudmila.org/~vuk/ascii/camera.htm
http://www.flickr.com/photos/nearnearfuture/312113076/
it does not use aalib or ttyvideo, but a custom conversion routine optimized for the specific condensed font of the printer used