ANSI art

Arrangement of (primarily) the block characters in the ANSI character set, with their 16 foreground colour attributes, eight background ones and eight blinking ones. Manipulation of these (placement on the page akin to two-dimensional Lego) results in a visible, doublepluslow-resolution picture.

Though much recent subject matter has been original and/or abstract, traditionally it falls along the lines of comic book transcriptions.

See also: ansimation, ASCII art.

During the early to mid 90s, The ANSI art scene increasingly became a complex, soap opera-like world of competing groups, area codes and BBS's. Artists with the most skills were offered to join bigger art groups, people actually paid cash money to get original ANSI graphics done, and elitism became the norm. Along with the warez scene, it was definitely one of the early breeding grounds for l33+ sP33k.

437 art n. ASCII art that also uses the block characters of IBM codepage 437. Used often in README files of DOS apps.

ANSI art n. colorized 437 art. Note that the term ANSI is a misnomer, as the only thing ANSI about it is the escape character sequences used in one of the encodings (the one that's actually sent over the wire). ANSI art would be a bit more ANSI if it used ISO-8859-1 aka Latin-1 character encoding instead of codepage 437.