ANSI art - NicheInterests/mistfunk GitHub Wiki

ANSI ART

  1. n. Arrangement of (primarily) the [block characters] in the [PC-ASCII] character set, with their 16 foreground colour attributes, eight background ones and eight [blinking] ones. Manipulation of these (placement on the page akin to two-dimensional Lego) results in a visible, doublepluslow-resolution picture. Though much recent subject matter has been original and/or abstract, traditionally it falls along the lines of comic book transcriptions. (source: everything2.com -- heh, Cthulu wrote this definition there in 2000)

  2. n. During the early to mid '90s, The ANSI [art scene] increasingly became a complex, soap opera-like world of competing groups, area codes and BBSes. Artists with the most skills were offered to join bigger art groups, people actually paid cash money to get original ANSI graphics done, and [elitism] became the norm. Along with the [warez] scene, it was definitely one of the early breeding grounds for [l33+ sP33k]. (source: everything2.com)

  3. n. Colorized 437 art. Note that the term ANSI is a misnomer, as the only thing ANSI about it is the escape character sequences used in one of the encodings (the one that's actually sent over the wire). ANSI art would be a bit more ANSI if it used ISO-8859-1 aka Latin-1 character encoding instead of codepage 437. (source: everything2.com)

from The Artscene Dictionary

"ANSI art" at Wikipedia likely contains a lot more information and is hopefully unlikely to disappear there anytime soon.

Note -- a few places you might be surprised to find ANSI art in use in the 21st century, outside of its traditional stomping grounds of BBSes and [MS-DOS] [textmode] applications:

  • [MUD]s (specifically eg. the [8bitMUSH] at ansiart.com -- technically [FANSI])
  • homebrew levels for the [ZZT] / MegaZeux games
  • [ENDOOM] screens displayed at the end of fan-made Doom WAD files