As an old-school guy, I remember this “art form” from its early days. I am not a Digital Native. I am a Digital Immigrant, and as such I’ve been exposed to a lot of the early advances in technology that are nearly extinct today. I’ve seen fax machines come and mostly go, dial-up modems (to include the early handset cradles), cordless telephones (landlines), and of course, ASCII art. In the early Internet days I was a big fan of Archie, Gopher and UUENCODE/UUDECODE, gifs and Usenet newsgroups. In the very early days of HTML, with the advent of the Worldwide Web (WWW) the king of the hill was Mosaic, with a young upstart “Netscape” on the rise. I thought, in all honesty, that this “Hypertext Markup Language” would never last…it was much too much work to be practical, in my opinion.
For this project I used an online ascii-art creator (http://www.ascii-art-generator.org/) along with a portrait of my favorite blues guitarist, the venerable Chris Duarte.
One thing I thought was odd…I had to invert (make a negative) of the photo I was using to get a “positive” monochrome output using this online tool. The image and output are below:
