There have been some recent discussions assessing the history of ASCII art — along with some thoughts about its future. ASCII art is basically images created only through text characters, specifically the 128 characters specified in the American Standard Code for Information Interchange, a character encoding standard for electronic communication. Text art predates computers by a long while. Researching the topic, I learned that people have been playing around with the spacing of their text since ancient Greece, a phenomenon which is sometimes called “concrete poetry” (or “shape poetry”). George Herbert’s “Easter Wings” from 1633 Last month someone calling themselves “Sourcerer Bot” attempted to trace the history of what we refer to today as text art, and actually dig up this spectacular example from 1898.

This image — created by Flora F.F. Stacey — was included in the 2014 book “Typewriter Art, A Modern Anthology,” which notes that the text artists of the 19th century had a different technique available to them: “feeding the paper into the rollers at numerous times, each at a different angle to allow the overprinting and fine-tuning of the image.” “Victorian female stenographers pioneered a unique art form” notes a 2014 essay at BrainPickings.org, calling the book “a beautiful allegory for how all technology is eventually co-opted as an unforeseen canvas for art and political statement.” Into the 20th Century The book also cites the use of typewritten characters in the Bauhaus school of art during the 1920s “as a way of exploring composition and the three-dimensional space of the page.”

This image is from a now out-of-print work called “Typewriter Art” (1975) by Alan Riddell, which tried to capture the earliest evolution of the artform from the 1890s through the 1970s. Its preface claims to have identified “119 works by 65 practitioners from 18 countries.” (A PDF of the book is available online.) And there’s also some other early examples. One text art enthusiast