X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: f8267,94e92e6bca4b3ba2,start X-Google-Attributes: gidf8267,public X-Google-Thread: 10ed27,94e92e6bca4b3ba2,start X-Google-Attributes: gid10ed27,public X-Google-Thread: 1138b4,94e92e6bca4b3ba2,start X-Google-Attributes: gid1138b4,public X-Google-Thread: fbb9d,94e92e6bca4b3ba2,start X-Google-Attributes: gidfbb9d,public X-Google-Thread: fa3c8,94e92e6bca4b3ba2,start X-Google-Attributes: gidfa3c8,public X-Google-Thread: f996b,94e92e6bca4b3ba2,start X-Google-Attributes: gidf996b,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 1994-11-01 23:37:36 PST Path: nntp.gmd.de!dearn!blekul11!idefix.CS.kuleuven.ac.be!ub4b!EU.net!howland.reston.ans.net!news.sprintlink.net!sashimi.wwa.com!not-for-mail From: smiley@world.std.com (sarah smiley) Newsgroups: rec.arts.fine,rec.arts.misc,alt.postmodern,alt.ascii-art,rec.arts.ascii,alt.artcom Subject: Line: UPDATE!TheVirtualBeret Date: 1 Nov 1994 21:57:57 -0600 Organization: The World Public Access UNIX, Brookline, MA Lines: 474 Sender: boba@wwa.com Approved: boba@wwa.com Message-ID: <3972o5$m5m@gagme.wwa.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: gagme.wwa.com Xref: nntp.gmd.de rec.arts.fine:7219 rec.arts.misc:1460 alt.postmodern:11178 alt.ascii-art:16219 rec.arts.ascii:2582 alt.artcom:3712 This is the November 1994 edition of The Virtual Beret Update. Due on the first of every month, I post it it alt.artcom, rec.arts.misc, and rec.arts.fine. This month I am also posting it to rec.arts.ascii, and alt.ascii-arts, as well as alt.postmodern. TABLE O' CONTENTS: 1) THE VIRTUAL BERET QUESTION 2) NET RAMBLINGS AND MUSINGS 3) A FEW ASCII-ARTISTES 4) ARTWORK BY SCARECROW I) THE VIRTUAL BERET QUESTION For those of you who aren't familiar with the Virtual Beret Project, here is the essence of it: Call to Writers, Artists, Doodlers, Channel-Surfers, Mouse Clickers, or anyone who sees this: My name is Sarah Smiley, and I am a media artist in Boston, Massachusetts. I'm working on a project called "The Virtual Beret: Perceptions of the Artist in the Online World" I'm putting out a questionaire, and your response will be archived with others at a Web site, managed by Patrick Jordan, a computer artist from Sydney Australia, and myself. Answer these questions in any manner which you see fit-image, audio, video, or text. Complete html (WWW hypertext) pages are also acceptable. If you participate, you will at least get a thank-you, and further information will be available online. The Questions: 1) Invent an Artist. This Artist can be a he, she, or it, working with any materials, in any medium, with an unlimited virtual budget. 2) Describe the Art created by said Artist 3) Describe said Artist's Beret (hint: what is a Beret? In this case, an Artist's Hat. What is the nature of this Artist's Hat? What is the relation of the artist to said Hat?) Please tell me if you want your piece to be included in a collection such as I have described. Also, tell me what city and country you posted your response from. If you send text response, please send it to sarah_smiley@bmugbos.org. I will respond within one or two days at the most. If you are sending audio, images, or video, please uuencode your submission, and send it to smiley@world.std.com. It may take me longer to respond at this address. Include as much information as possible about the work's original format and how it was compressed. I will confirm when I receive it, but it will take me a bit longer to look at it. To take a look at the Web site, the address is: http://www.rp.csiro.au/~pjordan/VirtualBeret/ (No spaces between Virtual and Beret, trailing / is important). Please send comments, suggestions, or complaints about the Web site to pjordan@rp.csiro.au If you just want to comment, or say hi to me or Patrick, you can do that too... Thanks for taking the time to do this! And please feel free to distribute and post this as much as possible. Regards, -sarah smiley My address is: sarah_smiley@bmugbos.org II. NET-RAMBLINGS AND MUSINGS This month I didn't go to several groups like I usually do. Instead, I stopped by rec.arts.ascii, and alt.ascii-art. Apart from the instant ascii- gratification of seeing pictures immediately (for those of us who are -ahem- text-based wanderers) the ascii-groups have plenty of info for those who want to find out more about how to make, view, and shall-we-say- collect ascii-art. What is ascii-art? You'll have to read the FAQ to get a more full explanation, but it is essentially art that can be created through using the characters on your keyboard. There is a tremendous amount of it floating around the Internet. To me, it almost seems like the Hieroglyphics of the Internet...except text becomes pictures, not pictures text. Though it has had its origins in the "Real World", it has really come of age with the advent of text editing, and ease of distribution via the Internet. Sounds familiar yes? I find that writing is taking on some of those same characteristics. And ascii-art, like writing, is making its own rules of distribution in the online world. The ascii-art groups were considerably more organized than many Usenet groups where I have wandered. Even the alt. group was well- organized, with peoples' subject headings. actually reflecting the content of the message. Well, blow me down. (I've added Popeye cartoons to my morning TV viewing habits) I guess if enough people follow the rules, others follow. In the case of the ascii- art groups, it's very efficient. LINE indicates that there is ascii-art to follow. TALK indicates that there are technical issues being discussed. REQUEST indicates that there is a request for ascii-art. In a group such as this, the organization is a good thing. You don't want to open a message, hoping to view some ascii-art, only to find that some net-BOZO is vomiting their manifesto/advertisement into a message that could only very loosely be called ascii-art, and then only by abstract expressionists who have a penchant for text as object. My experience in the ascii-art groups is that usually, there are more requests than drawings. However, there are certainly enough drawings to keep you amused for some time, and around various holidays, you can expect to see, for example, pumpkins, jolly old elfs, and whatnot. Happy Birthday stuff seems to pop up fairly often, as well. I think it is fair to say don't put in a request, and expect to see it the next day...especially if what you are looking for is fairly obscure. (Spot, the Wonder-Pup napping in the nude on the sun porch for example. Oh, that's no example.) However, a lot of ascii- stuff has been already created, so if you think it has, then take a look around for it. Who is responsible for this ascii-order in the midst of Usenet chaos? I couldn't help but notice that there were many posts by Bob Allison, a.k.a. Scarecrow, and that those posts were usually answering questions that people had asked. He has written an excellent FAQ, which he posts fairly frequently to these groups, so take a look at it before exercising your curiosity publically- I found that this FAQ was very well written, and it also answered some of my basic questions about uuencoding and text editing as well. Both these functions are vital to ascii-art creation, especially text editing. He also maintains various Internet sites, with one of his Web sites being http://gagme.wwa.com/~boba/scarecrow/html/ You can access this thru lynx, if you are a text-oid like myself. When you take a look at the extensive holdings within, it becomes immediately apparent (if you hadn't discovered this in the ascii groups) that ascii-art is more than birthday cakes, and halloween pumpkins. As an additional bonus, there is a link to the Spider's Web at the top level, which basically lists hundreds of Web sites. So even if you aren't an ascii-art fetishist, you can go for the Web site info. There are actually different kinds of ascii-art. Here are a few kinds to begin with. This info is taken from the FAQ which can be found at the Web site before mentioned, or within the Usenet groups. "Other forms of ASCII art using the standard printable set include the following four: o Geometric Article - Text is formed into interesting, meaningful shapes. o Picture Poem - A geometric article that is also a poem. See the swan in the examples in ASCII Art Resources and ASCII Art Reference (the Web version of the FAQ). o Page Making - Text and graphics are intermixed, as in a magazine. o Picture Story - A story told with accompanying ASCII pictures. Created using ASCII art page making techniques." Who owns ascii-art? How does it get distributed? Well, in the early days of ascii-art, it was common to take something, sans the signature of the artist. So there are a number of ascii-pieces floating around who are by artists unknown. However, common protocal is that you can take something, as long as the original artist is credited. I think this is facinating...since there is essentially no commercial value in ascii-art, its distribution sets its own rules according to convenience. Would that it were the case in general. It certainly lends itself to an attitude of co-operation amongst people, in terms of creation, and distribution. The FAQ is fairly clear in terms of how far you can take distribution of ascii-art. From the FAQ: "Is it OK to copy ASCII art? Assuming the ASCII art is being used for non-commercial purposes: ASCII art that is posted is considered copyrighted by the poster. But since the post goes around the world, and copyright laws vary, you'd have trouble enforcing it in some places. Even when ASCII art is copyrighted, there is a general agreement among most of us that it is OK to copy and clip, repost and pass it around. It is generally used AS IF it were Public Domain. All that most artists ask is that their credit be left on the art. Until recently, it was common for the creator's credit to be lost. For example, you could make an instant sig with a piece of existing art, a Figletized name, a quote, and your email address. The one thing that is generally considered bad is to copy somebody's sig, only changing the name and address." END QUOTE In the course of my ascii-art wanderings, I asked myself "how did this all start?" Certainly, the concept of using text as art existed before the Internet. It is its explosion within the context of the Internet that interests me. I posed this question to Scarecrow, and he answered thusly: "I too would like to know the history of ASCII art. It's the unwanted step child of the established art world. It isn't 'serious'. Nobody has bothered to chronical it. What I mention above is about all I know of it's history. If you find out anything, please tell me. As to my involvement in it, I just sort of accidentally started collecting it, posting it, offering archives, etc. Then came the FAQ, the rec.arts.ascii group, the FTP site, the Web pages, etc." END QUOTE This information is something I'm willing to post in the next Virtual Beret update, if I find out between now and then. If you, gentle reader, can shed some light on to this dark mystery, feel free to respond. However, maybe it is just a bit too early in the online life-span of ascii-art to look for a "history". I'm especially interested because I find parallels with the distribution of ascii-art and the ease of distributing writing online. But that for another Virtual Beret issue. Halfway through the month, I was a convert to ascii-art. In my personal opinion, the best ascii-art is the kind with fairly simple drawings, with a short text explanation. (See the infamous "cows" in the humor section of Scarecrow's Web site) If someone uses text as a drawing tool, this contradiction results in a certain amount of humor, and as a result, ascii- humor is amongst the most convoluted that I've found on the net. That's about all I have to say for now, because this is a big issue..since instead of the usual beret, I've included work by Scarecrow at the end of this Update. And tho its text, it's no small thing. So on, for now...to a new aspect of the Virtual Beret project... III. A FEW ASCII-ARTISTS I'll admit it- I jumped on with a sonorous thump to the ascii-art bandwagon, and here I have created some ascii artists of my own. Please feel free to alter these in any way, and if you send'em back altered, we will post them at the Web site. We will also credit you with the alterations. VARIATIONS ON AN ARTIST by sarah smiley smiley@world.std.com ? ? ????????? ??????????? | | {| 0---0 | | ^ | | ___ | (_______) ARTIST SORELY MISSING ONE EAR, WHICH WAS CHOPPED OFF IN A FIT OF ANGST ? ? ????????? ??????????? | | {| 0-0 |} | ^ | | ___ | (_____) STARVING ARTIST (WITH BOTH EARS, SAME BERET) ? ? ????????? ??????????? | | | X-X | | ^ | | ___ | (_____) STARVED ARTIST (MISSING BOTH EARS) ? ? ??????????? ??????????? | / \ | {| 0---0 | | ^ | | O | (_______) DISMAYED ARTIST WITH ONLY ONE EAR AND A SQUARE HEAD ? ? ??????????????? ????????????????? | | {| 0---0 |} | ^ | | ___ | (_____________) WELL-FED ARTIST (NOT TOO MANY OF THOSE.) ALSO, IF YOU TAKE OFF THE HAT AND GLASSES IT LOOKS LIKE TED KENNEDY. 4) ARTWORK BY SCARECROW This month, I've decided to feature work by Scarecrow for this last section of the Virtual Beret Update. For his Real-World existence, he resides in Chicago, where he does pagemaking for the locals. 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' ,\( / , | |___|_____| | | ,| '|\/ \| \\,' ,'.' || \\,' .' ,| ' | | |_._______| " ,|' .| \_ |\/ |#\_/#| /_|\_ |#\_/,) ',.|,' |_________| | | | #|(,' ) \\\#\ \##/ ||/ \#\ \###/\ \/ \/.', | | | |_____|__,| || ) | \ |/ /#/ |#( \|\\| |#/ /##( )| \\'/ |___|_____| | | \ |.\\ |\_/#| /#)|##\ \\_/#| |######\ \\/#| | | |_________| /\\_/# |#\##/ boba@gagme.chi.il.us @#\ /#/\ |_____.___| | | | / ##/# ##\/#@####@@###V###\/#@####@@#Y### \ | | | |___._|___| / :Y##@@##@##@@###@@@###@##@@###@@@###@####: \ |___|_____| | | / :;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;: \ | | |_________|/ :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: \|_____.___| .......... .......::::::....... .......:::======:::....... .......::===========::....... ......::===####@@####===::...... ......::===####@@@@####===::...... .....::===####@@@@@@####===::..... .....::===#####BOBA#####===::..... .....::===#####@@#####===::..... .....::====########====::..... .....::=====####=====::..... ....::============::.... ...::==========::... ..::========::.. |__________| <__________> <__________> <__________> \/ __________ ______________ |:""""""""|: | ............ : |: |: | : | : |: >boba |: | : | : |:________|: | :>@wwa.com | : | ..... :---_____---| :__________| : | '-----" : |..............: | @ :"-__-_ |"""""""""""""": |..........: _-" |..............: /.::::::::.\ /\ /.::::::::.:::.\ /____________\ (__) /________________\ -- ? ? -"Walk softly and carry a large beret" ????????? ???????????