ASCII porn, sometimes typographically euphemized as "ASCII pr0n",[1] is the depiction of pornographic images using the medium of ASCII art. ASCII porn was the world's first Internet pornography,[2] and was popular (among the then fewer computer users) before the invention of the World-Wide Web. ASCII porn was often found on BBSes and other text mode terminal-based systems that could be reached via direct modem dial-up. It was also exchanged via sneakernet and on the early Internet using pre-WWW services such as email, telnet, and usenet.[3]
A contributing factor to the relative popularity of ASCII porn in its time was high compatibility: the standard ASCII character set could be displayed on most computer monitors, even on early desktops/terminals incapable of displaying digital images,[4] and could be printed on most printers.[5] Additionally, ASCII porn could be composed by hand using nothing more than a text editor, without the need for a model or camera. As computers developed, it became possible to transmit digital images on the World-Wide Web, and thus ASCII porn slipped into obscurity.[6]
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 of the ASCII Art Ensemble.[1] Concrete poet Florian Cramer also produced ASCII work based on sexually explicit images.[7]
References
edit- ^ a b Kerstin Mey, Art and Obscenity, I.B.Tauris, 2007, p155. ISBN 1-84511-235-0
- ^ Annalee Newitz, On-the-go porn Archived January 15, 2009, at the Wayback Machine, salon.com, July 4, 2001.
- ^ Cole, Samantha (January 14, 2019). "ASCII Pr0n Predates the Internet But it's Still Everywhere". www.vice.com. Retrieved 2022-02-26.
- ^ such as for instance original IBM PCs with MDA cards
- ^ Many early computer printers were either incapable of printing graphical images or required custom software support in every program to do so, which was not always implemented.
- ^ Wagner, Karin (2023). "From ASCII Art to Comic Sands: Typography and Popular Culture in the Digital Age" (Document). The MIT Press. p. 29.
- ^ Kornelia Freitag, Katharina Vester, Another Language, LIT Verlag Berlin-Hamburg-Münster, 2008, pp. 102-3. ISBN 3-8258-1210-3
External links
edit- asciipr0n.com - a website featuring a large ASCII porn archive
- The textfiles.com ASCII art archive also contains a significant amount of ASCII porn (including a mirror of asciipr0n.com).
- asciiporn.us - a blog-style website dedicated to ASCII porn
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