about

A collection of standard text graphics like ASCII and PETSCII and its distant relatives, maintained by Goto80 (infoමgoto80●com).

+++

text-mode.tumblr.com was launched in February 2012 by Raquel Meyers and Goto80 in order to gather quality text graphics in one place. We selected our favourites from archives such as asciiarena, sixteencolors, utf8art and ANSIart and started to explore what were less noticed formats at the time, such as PETSCII, teletext and sharpscii.

Gradually we expanded the technocentric gaze to also include related works with pottery, architecture and mosaics. You can read a critique of the technocentric idea of text graphics in this paper.

+++

text-mode.org was launched in March 2014 (as t3xtm0.de) to gather 2000+ posts in a searchable and organized archive. We also appeared on Twitter. Up until October 2015 there was at least one post per day and updates have been more sporadic since. In 2017 there were 3,000+ posts and the Tumblr had 10,000+ followers. In 2023 the Tumblr had almost 14,000 followers, despite very few posts.