Back around the early 90s of the previous millenium, out of the underground software pirate ("warez") community on bulletin board systems (BBS), arose a unique and digital native artform known as ANSI art, often stylized "ANSi". This artwork started out as functional or commercial embellishments to advertise the bulletin boards or the groups that distributed warez but then grew into its own underground "art scene" with dedicated art boards and elite art groups with names like ACiD and iCE.
ANSi art looks similar to 8-bit pixel art at a high level but came out of text and terminals. ANSI itself refers to ANSI escape sequences standardized by the ANSI standards organization. These escape codes along with ASCII characters were common on PCs of the DOS era when consumers interfaced with computers through a text interface, 80 columns wide by 25 lines high.
The ASCII standard allowed American English text and punctuation in the lower 7 bits of each byte but also a number of extra characters when using the 8th bit. This allowed text to show boxes or blocks, almost like a pixel. ANSI codes were used to set the foreground and background color and combined with boxes an image of low resolution could appear on a screen.
Besides boxes, some characters could be used in a gradient of a background and foreground color. There were other differences with pixel art, notably that normal alphanumeric and standard English punctuation characters could be used. When ANSI codes aren't used, this is simply ASCII art.
- Mint and host your ANSi files as image blocks
- New blocks are attached in minted order to the ever growing Genesis Scroll
- Change your ANSi image for something new
- Sell your position for rich gains
- If not the seaside villa, buy the adjacent block to a famous artist and get to rub 'blocks' with them
- Hosted on Polygon(Matic) for speed and IPFS(Protocol labs-NFT storage) for eternity!
Bulletin Block System - The collective ANSi scroll
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