ramblings

My Academic Paper on ASCII Art

Nov 26, 2012 | ramblings

Today A. Bill Miller is at CAC3 in Paris to present a paper we wrote together. It’s called The Future Potentials of ASCII Art. Dunno if you have to pay to read it or sth, lol, but here is the abstract:

ASCII art is a text-based expression that traditionally is concerned with remediating images, words and objects. The paper describes its historical connections to poetry, programming, literature and hacking and defines ASCII art as a genre, consisting of several categories.

The authors identify a number of movements towards novel forms of ASCII art that explore medium specific characteristics for drawing, design, advertising and conceptual art. The authors also argue that the popularity of digital media, which for example leads to scarcity in URLs, increases the potential for ASCII art to play a more active role in human communication.

My Own Teletext Channel!

Sep 25, 2012 | ramblings

Yeah, this could obviously be faked. But don’t worry – you will see soon enough that it’s not. Me and Raquel Meyers are now able to produce our own teletext signal. So now we don’t need a video mixer anymore!

We’ve started to mix teletext with trackers and PETSCII graphics. Check out the first tests at Flickr. There’s also some teletext printouts there, using a TV with a built-in dot matrix printer. Check out text-mode.tumblr.com if you’re hungry for more text graphics.

I made some PETSCII

Sep 13, 2012 | ramblings

The newest release at CHIPFLIP has some really good music by Omri Suleiman, and graphics made by me and Raquel Meyers. Let’s stop making boring MP3/JPG-releases and bring back the future of music disks!

Check it out now! (free download, stream, etc)

/\/ E __7″

Aug 3, 2012 | ramblings

Ne7 made a logo for me in his latest Amiga ASCII colly. Yeah! Greetz to the elitez!

Hello Sweden

Jun 6, 2012 | ramblings

In Sweden, we celebrate the national day med kuken. This is a PETSCII-remix of a painting that the Swedish police confiscated in 1967. Read more over at the unimitable text-mode.tumblr.com.

Text-Mode

Feb 23, 2012 | featured, ramblings

Me and Raquel Meyers (who has a new site) started a tumblr because the world needs a gallery with all kinds of good text art. Petscii, teletext, ascii, typewriters or drawings and “visual poetry” for that matter. Click it! We didn’t share much of our own stuff yet, but we’ve done plenty lately.

An Inventory of Broken Things

Nov 3, 2011 | ramblings

I don’t really work with broken things so much anymore. Still, there are times when everything seems broken. Whatever you try to do, there is a problem. Let’s see:

Both my speakers are cracked (now using in-flight “headphones”). The laptop screen is falling off. The cartridge port of the C64 is glitching. There’s the broken SID condom and the left side of the Amiga keyboard doesn’t work.

Obviously this isn’t very helpful. It’s the kind of basic functionalities that perhaps even most glitch/noise artists rely on. But I’ve realised that I always liked this chaos. It’s a kind of techno angst. You’re never safe!

Of course, the SID condom meant that I could bring the C64 into the most absurd electrical jungles. No AC/DC outbursts could touch me! Now I’m back in paranoia land.

This is either stupid lamer-lazy “punk posing” or healthy and genuine non-control. I just know that it’s a productive environment for me. Nothing works, everything is great. Over and out.

About interviewing

Jul 26, 2011 | attention, ramblings

Interviews are strange. Sometimes it’s almost like being a research assistant for the journalist — especially when it’s about chip/demo stuff. Unpaid work is always the best work!

But yeah, recently I was interviewed by a journalist who had obviously studied my Chipflip-timeline pretty well. That was a nice change. And one of the purposes of that list was indeed to educate researchers (though that might’ve been lost now, when it’s become so big).

Here is the article in English. It’s packed with references, many of which I’ve never heard about (which is good!). I like that Kjell Nordbo is mentioned as one of the most respected producers in the scene (my guess is that both 4mat and me mentioned him).

There are also three separate articles for me (English), Pixelh8 and 4mat. Here are some of the questions with my original answers, if u’re into those things. And if you want to know more, read here.

Q. Do you sometimes feel limited by hardware/software used?

The character of any technology lies in the limitations. If something is unlimited, it doesn’t even exist. : ) The fun part of playing a piano is to have two hands and fixed notes and so on. So yes, of course I feel limited. Often it’s in a good way of subconsciously feeling like “phew, I don’t have to make that decision” or “ah okay nice so I have to challenge myself to come up with a different solution than what I was thinking of”. Sometimes it’s just bad, of course, when you want to have more voices and so on. But then I’ll just record stuff and overdub.

Q. Where do you place the born of chip music?

Either
– 1951 with the first digital music
– 1977 and the first video game console with a soundchip
– 1989 when the term chipmusic first appeared in the demoscene
– 1999 with micromusic.net, record relases, concerts, etc

The origin of chipmusic was, I guess, rather expected. There were computers with software that you could use to make music. So people started to do that. And they distributed their music for free, to get maximum attention. Demos/intros/music-compilations started to appear on big floppy disks, sent around the world. Or – and perhaps more interesting – there were also modem-networks of hackers/traders etc who distributed these materials around the world.

Q. I noticed that people thinks that chip music is a derivation of some Warp ambient-techno, but you will confirm me that it’s not so (maybe it’s the contrary, and people like AFX has been influenced to the gaming culture).

Aphex Twin’s label Rephlex was one of the few labels who were connected with the early chipscene around year 2000. They released Bodenständig 2000’s album, which is one of the first examples, and still a fantastic album. Also artists like DMX Krew and Cylob were slightly involved with micromusic.net. But other than that – all the big labels like Warp were far too serious to have anything to do with chipmusic : ) In general, it’s quite rare to hear chipmusic that sounds like slow IDM. The C64-musician ED is a good exception though.