ANSi Art Background

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.

One other feature distinguished ANSi art. Most new text on a terminal appears on the bottom row, causing the old text to scroll up by one line. BBS connections were limited by the modem speeds of the era which were slow enough that you could visibly see each character transmitting across and appearing on your screen. Once your screen filled up 25 rows then new lines would cause the top to scroll off but this also allowed art that spanned much more than 25 rows and they were often several screen-fulls of blocks. But art generally expanded vertically, not horizontally.