ASCII History of Art for the Blind

Interactive net-based installation www.ljudmila.org/~vuk/ascii/blind/

ASCII History of Art for the Blind allows a picture to become audible. Initially transformed into ASCII Code, which is a keyboard norm code, and then encoded in the form of sounds and finally saved in an archive, works of historically important art are accessible for visitors in an audio format. This is a hybrid construction combining the fields of art, science, and technology as well as low and high technology and the domains of the analog and the digital, bringing together diverse forms of media history. By transferring the content from one media that has become obsolete to another, this work also reflects the question of data transferring and data formats-a significant theme in the 1960s.

Artists dealing with technology today are falling in the trap of accepting somebody else's creativity as their limit and in this way they are becoming advertisers for equipment. One possible reaction for an artist is to investigate the misusage of technology as a gesture of freedom, and in this way oppose the mainstream taste and expectations. Works and experiments with moving ASCII, ASCII audio, ASCII camera and such are all directed towards conversions of contents between one media platform and another, every time carefully directed at their full uselessness from the viewpoint of everyday high tech and all its consequences. I try to look into the past and continue the upgrading of some marginalized or forgotten technology.

-Gebhard Sengmüller, calling this the "fake archaeology of media."