The term ASCII porn –sometimes
typographically euphemized as "ASCII pr0n"
[ Kerstin Mey, ''Art and Obscenity'', I.B.Tauris, 2007, p155. ]– describes
porn
Pornography (often shortened to porn or porno) is the portrayal of sexual subject matter for the exclusive purpose of sexual arousal. Primarily intended for adults, ographic images consisting of
ASCII art
ASCII art is a graphic design technique that uses computers for presentation and consists of pictures pieced together from the 95 printable (from a total of 128) characters defined by the ASCII Standard from 1963 and ASCII compliant chara ...
. ASCII porn was the world's first
Internet pornography
Internet pornography is any pornography that is accessible over the internet, primarily via websites, FTP servers peer-to-peer file sharing, or Usenet newsgroups. The availability of widespread public access to the World Wide Web in late 1990s ...
, and was popular (among the then fewer computer users) before the invention of the
World-Wide Web
The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system enabling documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet.
Documents and downloadable media are made available to the network through web s ...
, and often found on
BBS
BBS may refer to:
Ammunition
* BBs, BB gun metal bullets
* BBs, airsoft gun plastic pellets
Computing and gaming
* Bulletin board system, a computer server users dial into via dial-up or telnet; precursor to the Internet
* BIOS Boot Specificat ...
es and other
text mode
Text mode is a computer display mode in which content is internally represented on a computer screen in terms of characters rather than individual pixels. Typically, the screen consists of a uniform rectangular grid of ''character cells'', each ...
terminal
Terminal may refer to:
Computing Hardware
* Terminal (electronics), a device for joining electrical circuits together
* Terminal (telecommunication), a device communicating over a line
* Computer terminal, a set of primary input and output dev ...
-based systems that could be reached via direct
modem
A modulator-demodulator or modem is a computer hardware device that converts data from a digital format into a format suitable for an analog transmission medium such as telephone or radio. A modem transmits data by Modulation#Digital modulati ...
dial-up
Dial-up Internet access is a form of Internet access that uses the facilities of the public switched telephone network (PSTN) to establish a connection to an Internet service provider (ISP) by dialing a telephone number on a conventional telepho ...
. It was also exchanged via
sneakernet
Sneakernet, also called sneaker net, is an informal term for the transfer of electronic information by physically moving media such as magnetic tape, floppy disks, optical discs, USB flash drives or external hard drives between computers, rather ...
and on the early
Internet
The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, pub ...
using pre-
WWW
The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system enabling documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet.
Documents and downloadable media are made available to the network through web se ...
services such as
email
Electronic mail (email or e-mail) is a method of exchanging messages ("mail") between people using electronic devices. Email was thus conceived as the electronic ( digital) version of, or counterpart to, mail, at a time when "mail" meant ...
,
telnet
Telnet is an application protocol used on the Internet or local area network to provide a bidirectional interactive text-oriented communication facility using a virtual terminal connection. User data is interspersed in-band with Telnet control i ...
, and
usenet
Usenet () is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979, and it was ...
.
A contributing factor to the relative popularity of ASCII porn in its time was high compatibility: the standard
ASCII
ASCII ( ), abbreviated from American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for electronic communication. ASCII codes represent text in computers, telecommunications equipment, and other devices. Because of ...
character set
Character encoding is the process of assigning numbers to graphical characters, especially the written characters of human language, allowing them to be stored, transmitted, and transformed using digital computers. The numerical values that ...
could be displayed on most computer monitors –even on early
desktop
A desktop traditionally refers to:
* The surface of a desk (often to distinguish office appliances that fit on a desk, such as photocopiers and printers, from larger equipment covering its own area on the floor)
Desktop may refer to various compu ...
s/
terminal
Terminal may refer to:
Computing Hardware
* Terminal (electronics), a device for joining electrical circuits together
* Terminal (telecommunication), a device communicating over a line
* Computer terminal, a set of primary input and output dev ...
s incapable of displaying
digital image
A digital image is an image composed of picture elements, also known as ''pixels'', each with ''finite'', '' discrete quantities'' of numeric representation for its intensity or gray level that is an output from its two-dimensional functions ...
s– and could be printed on most printers. Also, ASCII porn could be composed by hand using nothing more than a
text editor
A text editor is a type of computer program that edits plain text. Such programs are sometimes known as "notepad" software (e.g. Windows Notepad). Text editors are provided with operating systems and software development packages, and can be us ...
, without the need for a model or camera. With the advent of the World-Wide Web, ASCII porn largely slipped into obscurity.
Net artists in the late 1990s returned to the form, for instance in the work ''Deep ASCII'', a rendering of the movie ''
Deep Throat'', created by
Vuk Ćosić
Vuk Ćosić ( sr-cyr, Вук Ћосић; born 31 July 1966) is a Slovenian contemporary artist associated with the net.art movement.
Active in politics, literature and art, Ćosić has exhibited, published, and been active since 1994. He is well k ...
of the ASCII Art Ensemble.
[ ]Concrete poet
Concrete poetry is an arrangement of linguistic elements in which the typographical effect is more important in conveying meaning than verbal significance. It is sometimes referred to as visual poetry, a term that has now developed a distinct mea ...
Florian Cramer also produced ASCII work based on sexually explicit images.[Kornelia Freitag, Katharina Vester, ''Another Language'', LIT Verlag Berlin-Hamburg-Münster, 2008, pp. 102-3. ]
References
External links
asciipr0n.com
- a website featuring a large ASCII porn archive
* The textfiles.com
textfiles.com is a website dedicated to preserving the digital documents that contain the history of the bulletin board system (BBS) world and various subcultures, and thus providing "a glimpse into the history of writers and artists bound by ...
br>ASCII art archive
also contains a significant amount of ASCII porn (including a mirror of asciipr0n.com).
asciiporn.us
- a blog
A blog (a truncation of "weblog") is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts). Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order ...
-style website dedicated to ASCII porn
ASCII art
Pornography
{{porn-stub