Sunday, February 11, 2007

History of Text Art Video by RaD Man / ACiD

I "messed around" with the Wikipedia article to ASCII art today. Okay, I did not mess with it, but rather cleaned it up and extended it a bit.

This was triggered by a video of a friend of mine who is a well known figure in the underground text art scene with the name Christian Wirth.

Back to ASCII Art Academy


Okay, he is not known by that name, but by his scene "Handle" which is RaD Man. RaD Man was a senior member of the art group Aces of ANSI art in 1989, which is the first known underground text art group on the PC and founded a year after, in 1990, the probably best known and respected ANSI art group with the name ACiD. ACiD stands for ANSI Creators in Demand.

RaD Man was in Finland a couple years ago at the Assembly Demo party and was doing a presentation about the History of Text art.

The presentation is about 1 hour long and covers the early forms of text art starting at the ancient Rome, to Typewriter art, Radio Teletype or RTTY, Atari ATASCII art and C-64 PETSCII art to Amiga 500+ Oldskool art and PC Block or High ASCII art and Newskool. The climax is the presentation of some impressive Textmode demos that are of relative young age (2002 and later).

You can get the video, gigabytes of Text art and related material such as Tools and Editors, DiscMags and Source Code on DVD.

RaD Man published his extensive collection.

The DVD is called "Dark Domain" and you can order it directly from here.

It is only $12.99 plus $4.55 (US) - $9.55 (International) shipping. Quite a bargin considering the amount of content on it.

Here is the full video for free. I still recommend getting the DVD, because the Video is only a very small part of the DVD (which are actually 2 DVDs). To get your head around how much content it is, visit the Art Scene Text Files Archive and look for yourself how much stuff is out there.

There were some glitches during the presentation, but RaD Man is not a professional presenter. So, be a bit forgiving. Great stuff though and worth showing to other folks that are interested in this kind of stuff.



Enjoy the Video! (Backup URL to Video)

Presentation full credits and details.

The ASSEMBLY 2004 demoparty was held at Hartwall Areena in Helsinki, Finland from 5th to 8th of August 2004. The presentation was part of the ASSEMBLY '04 ARTtech seminars.

Presenter: Christian Wirth
Presentation Title: "The Art of Textmode"
Organization: ACID
Position: Founder and President
Homepage: http://www.acid.org
Dark Domain DVD: http://www.darkdomain.org (released 2004)
Email: radman@acid.org
Scene alias: Rad Man




Christian Wirth during an interview by Jason Scott (textfiles.com) for the BBS Documentary film DVD











Back to ASCII Art Academy


Cheers!
Carsten aka Roy/SAC

2 comments:

Kiltak said...

Hey there :)

Any idea if Chris has a blog? I'm an Acid member myself.. Got in the group in 1990 and stayed till the end.. Oh I was in an out once or twice in the decade but still, I stayed there for a while.

Cheers.

K. [GAS]
http://www.geeksaresexy.net

Carsten a.k.a. Roy/SAC said...

Hi K,
No, Chris has no blog (lazy b. hehe). He hangs out in IRC a lot as far as I know. It is certainly the best place to get a hold of him.

I checked your blog (GAS). Too bad that you never blog about text art and stuff like this. There way too few people who do that.

Cheers!
Carsten aka Roy/SAC

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Carsten aka Roy/SAC

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