ASCII History of Moving Images

Question: 

Introduce one example of digital art that you consider to be a work of art. Explain why you consider it to be a work of art, showing how it fits the particular definition of art that you support. To support your argument refer to the work of scholars of digital art as well as the work of scholars who have defined art.

a)  Introduction to the work

http://www.ljudmila.org/~vuk/

Name of the work: ASCII History of Moving Images

Artist: Vuk Ćosić

Year: 1998

Display: UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAM/PFA) NetArt online                          gallery

b)  A detailed description of the work 

    ASCII History of Moving Images, just like film nowadays, is a series of moving pictures. Those pictures are all combined in ASCII. ASCII is American Standard Code for International Interchange. That means the pictures are combined with nothing but just number, alphabet and symbols. Vuk Ćosić uses software created by himself to transform each frame of the original into an image, where the ASCII characters play the role of pixels or dots, creating figures, shadows and objects on the screen. In that year, computer technology is just started. Digital imaging was just like in its infant stage. It gives a function to the computer languages out of writing program or doing computer  work, that is seen as image and video. It create a interesting place where texts can be written as a image. It is a really new idea in that years.

Quote:

"The clips include film footage from the Lumière brothers, Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, King Kong, Star Trek, Blow Up, Psycho, andDeep Throat. These clips offer a menu of possible scripts for net.art, from Marxist parable to spectacle society to Modernist utopia."

Richard Rinehart (2010)
Vuk Ćosić: ASCII History of Moving Images
(http://bampfa.berkeley.edu/exhibition/cosic)

"Cosic’s consideration for the use of ASCII is developed as a critique of the utilitarian logic of the new media and a celebration of their lack of objectivity by spreading a crude method of production to an almost absurd limit, creating animations with a retro-futuristic aesthetic. The unreserved expansion of computer games is seen as a primary means of that nonobjective accession, especially in the Western world."

Sandra Araújo
Deconstructing Vuk Cosic: Data as Language

(http://www.artandeducation.net/paper/deconstructing-vuk-cosic-data-as-language/)

c)  An evaluation of the work in terms of your specific research question

Art Elements

    ASCII History of Moving Images just like digital film, but it just use ASCII languages as it's pixels. It contains almost all the art elements which a film contains. For example, the objects in the video is in three-dimensional. It use different words or symbols to create the light and the shadow in order to create the space. Also, ASCII History of Moving Images, to some extend, is a realism works. It depicts human, landscapes and animals like birds in reality.

Conceptual Art

     Same with many digital network art, to me, ASCII History of Moving Images put the emphasis on the concept and the experience rather than the object itself. Compared to painting, it emphasize on  the object since what we appreciating is the colors, the technique or the expression of the painting. They are very important to the painting itself. But it is not the case on ASCII History of Moving Images since although it is fun and new that it use the ASCII to shape object, we ultimately are not appreciating the ASCII, we enjoy the experience that it give to use while looking at the video. It makes people thinks. That is how conceptual art work.