Do You Want to Rock – in ASCII?
September 5th, 2003 — 12:00am
C404 — an art/media group — brings you music icons including The Sex Pistols, Hendrix, AC/DC, and Van Halen performing live in videos rendered in Wachowski-style cascades of glowing ASCII text.
I create categories professionally, which means it’s almost inevitable that I’m interested in things that challenge and escape categories (the “mind forg’d manacles” Blake labelled so well) by their nature.
Though I’m sure this will appear in an over-miked commercial for toothpaste or pick-up trucks soon, at the moment it’s a new way of looking at several very familiar cultural properties that questions the thresholds of recognition, percpetion, and identification we rely on every day.