Tag Archives: conversion

ASCII Theater by the American art collective MSCHF, 2024. An easy way to look at ANSI-versions of movies in the terminal. Today streaming Barbie, tomorrow Hereditary! From their Instagram-post:

ASCII Theater plays movies as text, directly in Terminal. A single line of code begins playing a new movie every day, like a pirate radio broadcast. The movies are rendered not as video but as colored text characters – every frame can be copied and pasted as a giant string of letters.

There is a long internet tradition of hacks to stream content online, and the resulting workarounds become creatively expressive. That kid who streamed NBA games in the reflection of his sunglasses on Twitch is a hero.

ASCII Theater is now live, streaming a new movie every day until we get shut down.

via kottke.org. Browse our terminal tag.

Self-portraits rendered in the code used to generate the images, by Eric Furst, 2024 (aka Eric Fischer). More details here.

More code calligrams.

Portrait of Jurriaan Schrofer made in 1987 by Total Design, using a font and script that Schroder made in the 1970’s. It achieves this effect not by changing the text characters, as ASCII-converters usually do, but by changing the weight of the type. More info.

Image from Frederike Huygen’s biography Jurriaan Schrofer from 2013.

By 1mpo$ter, 2023. He makes these mainly in the Houdini 3D-software, yep.

Examples from clankill3r’s P5 Terminal Graphics, which uses the terminal to show things programmed in Processing.

Works by 1mposter.

Animations by Seo Hyojung. Based on Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring, Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, Kahlo’s Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird and van Gogh’s Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear.

SRT 2 VIDEO by Ksawery Kirklewski, 2023. Displays a movie through the text of its subtitles. You can try it yourself: upload any movie and subtitle file at his website.

The Flipdigits Monitor by Ksawery Kirklewski, 2020.

Most ASCII-converters work with blocks, but this one focuses on lines and structures. It was made by Xuemiao Xu, Linling Zhang and Tien-Tsin Wong in 2010. The comparison at the end is between an artist’s work (a) and their software (b). More info and images here.