Instead of a particular artist, I'm going to highlight a specific art movement based off text that many people have likely seen at some point, but might not know much about in terms of its prevalence and significance. It's called ANSI and ASCII art, and is a form of art specific to computers that was very popular in the late 80's and early 90's in the underground hacker/pirate community, and still exists today largely as an homage to an era which gave rise to the internet.
Before web browsers became a prevalent technology, access to the online world was done at the command line through things called Bulletin Board Systems. There were no pictures, no mouse controls; just an ominous black screen that you'd have to type into by connecting to other small networks across the country through modems and your home-phone land line. This is how you'd communicate with people over computers, download software, browse news, play games, etc. The following is an example of what a typical Bulletin Board System or BBS home page menu looked like:
Before web browsers became a prevalent technology, access to the online world was done at the command line through things called Bulletin Board Systems. There were no pictures, no mouse controls; just an ominous black screen that you'd have to type into by connecting to other small networks across the country through modems and your home-phone land line. This is how you'd communicate with people over computers, download software, browse news, play games, etc. The following is an example of what a typical Bulletin Board System or BBS home page menu looked like:
Digital art was in its infancy during this time, and was an otherwise completely new frontier of creativity. Graphic design software was virtually non-existant, clunky, or very expensive, so technologically savvy creative types were limited to the tools of their day, which were a simple set of characters dictated by IBM's operating systems. The forbearer to ANSI was known as ASCII, which was a set of the only available 128 characters you could type on your computer. ANSI evolved out of this, which is a character set of 256 characters with its extended characters created primarily for creating images and art through the use of block-based and shade-based characters. When it first arrived on the scene, ANSI art had to be done character by character, line by line. You couldn't move a mouse and paint a picture. You'd have to code each character and each color for each character. The craftsmanship, time consumption, and attention to detail made ANSI art a powerful and exciting medium to create in.
ANSI art caught on quickly upon its release and was adopted among many digital artists, mainly associated with pirated software and hacking. Pirated software and hacking back then, and still to this day, are largely associated with "street-cred" and a sense of community. Groups of hackers and pirates would try to be the first on the scene with cracked software or computer exploits, and then reap the notoriety that came from being the fastest and smartest. Downloading pirated software would often come with auxiliary files that were a sort of calling card for these groups, composed of detailed and elaborate ANSI art, as demonstrated below:
If any of you have ever pirated software, you might have noticed a separate text file that represents the scene or group it came from, and you'll often find ASCII/ANSI art contained within. Obviously in an age of Photoshop this form of art is no longer necessary, but exists primarily as a purist-homage to a digital history that's long gone.
ANSI art even extends into video games. There's a game that's still incredibly popular today called Dwarf Fortress, and it's ran completely off text and ANSI characters.
Like the crude cave paintings of buffalo by our ancestors, I'd like to believe that when looked back on by historians ANSI and ASCII art will be viewed as the beginning of digital graphic design during the dawn of the technological revolution that has defined the end of the 20th century.