Avainsana: overview

Casinos, China, Cosmopolitan, Film Studies, Macao, Urban Imaginary

Benjamin Kidder Hodges
bhodges [a] umac.mo
Department of Communication
University of Macau

Printable PDF version

This article explores ways in which a cosmopolitan, urbane subject is on display in Macao’s gaming, tourism and leisure industries. Much like the fin-de-siècle flâneur studied by Walter Benjamin, the cosmopolitan tourist and gambler portrayed in the visual culture of Macao witness the city as both an aesthetic object and as a set of new experiences to be seen and felt. In asking for whom and to what end this subject and the urban imaginary of Macao is created, it is necessary to examine how a cosmopolitan space and subject have historically been represented. This article borrows from Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas and Thom Anderson’s video essay, Los Angeles Plays Itself the use of a comparative approach to scenes and images. While Warburg’s early 20^th century approach to art history and Anderson’s later film criticism arose from different eras and disciplines, they both point to the value of juxtaposing images as a form of analysis. The contention in this case is that through the comparison of specific details in movies set in Macao one might construct a visually mediated genealogy of the cosmopolitan. In other words, to better understand the urban imaginary of contemporary Macao it is helpful to look back at cinematic images of leisure and nightlife from the past. To this end, the tuxedo, as well as other luxury goods, so often seen in films about Macao can be explored as a visual through-line linking tropes of success and leisure to the construction of a new vision of cosmopolitanism that is marketed to predominately Chinese tourists.

Branding Macao as cosmopolitan

Macao is a place built around arrivals and departures with the average visit lasting little more than 24 hours. Thousands of tourists come across the border daily to enjoy the legal gambling that is available in this special administrative region of China. Macao, a city with roughly 650,000 permanent residents was visited in 2016 alone by 30 million visitors. The vast majority of these visitors come from mainland China, but the numbers include visitors from Hong Kong, South Korea, and other parts of Asia. Gaming was a large part of the economy of Macao well before its return to China during the 1999 handover from Portugal and remains so today. Its special administrative status makes it an ideal testbed for the mainland Chinese government to experiment with introducing and regulating the availability of legal gaming for its citizens with the flow of tourists effectively managed by changes to visa schemes (Simpson 2011). Nonetheless, central government officials have routinely encouraged Macao to diversify its economy to provide alternative attractions for tourism and leisure. So while the predominate industry remains gaming there is an active effort to rebrand Macao as a site for other forms of leisure.

Leading up to the handover, the Chinese and Portuguese governments worked together to define and promote a continuous image and history of multicultural cohabitation in Macao (Clayton 2010). Every year, since 2011 the date of the handover, December 20^th, has been celebrated through a campaign called “Parade through Macao, Latin City.” In addition to marking the anniversary of the handover, the campaign promotes a vision of multicultural harmony. With costumed dancers, musicians, and elaborate pageantry Macao’s Portuguese heritage is linked with a broader notion of Latin culture. The city itself becomes an example of a multicultural ideal meant to be seen both by local residents and through its television broadcast seen by the millions of potential tourists that may one day come to experience it in person. This is just one example of the active effort to brand Macao as a safe controlled cosmopolitan experience of different cultures.

Outside of the typical heritage tourist sites and such occasional festivals celebrating cultural heritage and diversity, the casino industry that drives most of the economy also offers its own vision of cosmopolitanism. In one continuous air-conditioned space, tourists can walk from the Venetian to the Parisian or cross the street to a wide variety of large scale casino resort complexes. With names like Studio City, City of Dreams, and the Galaxy they suggest their ambition to offer a whole world of leisure and gaming services. For the potential tourist, the suggestion is that it is possible to take in the world in just one destination.

A whole host of cultural criticism has rightly been levied at the notion of a singular universal vision of cosmopolitanism. James Clifford’s notion of discrepant cosmopolitanism highlights the wide variety of mobility around the globe in contrast to traditional narrative tropes of discovery that inform European colonial literature (Clifford 1997). In Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality Aihwa Ong studies a Hong Kong Chinese diaspora that has expanded beyond a traditional notion of a bounded national culture (Ong 1999). Given the new mobilities of transnationality and the wide variety of economic and cultural imperatives to move, ranging across a spectrum from tourists to refugees, is it still viable to describe oneself, as the Greek philosopher Diogenes did, as a “citizen of the world?” To answer this we need to ask alongside Ulf Hannerz, “[a]re tourists, exiles, and expatriates cosmopolitans and when not, why not?” (Hannerz 1990, 241). He answers himself in theorizing that cosmopolitanism “is an intellectual and aesthetic stance of openness toward divergent cultural experiences a search for contrasts rather than uniformity” (1990, 239).

Studying the image of cosmopolitanism on display in Macao does not have to involve questioning the authenticity of the resorts and cultural experiences on offer. The more relevant question is what kind of experiences and differences tourists can encounter and how they might be construed as part of a cosmopolitan experience. Tim Simpson has theorized that Macao offers an “interiorized and encapsulated urbanity” (Simpson 2014, 824). Given that Macao’s casino resorts promote themselves as cities in miniature, we can ask what kind of encapsulated cosmopolitan do they deliver. Do the amenities, services, and experiences they provide to tourists looking to temporarily participate in new cultures and cities result in a new form of cosmopolitanism?

Dressing Cosmopolitan: the tuxedo and Macao

As with other cities designed around tourism, Macao is a place first seen ahead of time. It is seen in official promotional materials as well as in vlogs, travelogues, and other such material shared online. In a media landscape dominated by the gaming industry, a particular vision of cosmopolitanism is on display. Images of nightlife, leisure, and luxury are regularly depicted. These also often take the form of a cosmopolitan male subject decked out in black tie who is there to witness the city as a set of new aesthetic experiences. Deniro, Decaprio, and Beckham have all appeared in advertising campaigns for local casinos which show them in formal attire ready to explore the night life of Macao. Similarly, stars from Korea to India come to Macao to walk red carpets at film festivals, concerts, and enjoy Macao as a tourism and lifestyle destination.

“Tek sei tou” (踢死兔) is the phonetic version of “tuxedo” in Cantonese. It directly translates as “kick the dead rabbit.” This playful, seemingly nonsensical mnemonic helps Cantonese speakers remember this English word. One might also construe that it has some class based significance, perhaps implying a criticism of the upper class; but I have not encountered any literature or references to directly support this interpretation. In contrast to this speculation about the etymology of the Cantonese phrase, it is clear that tuxedo, in fact is an Algonquian word, as it has its origins in the dinner jackets worn by wealthy New Yorkers visiting the resort town of Tuxedo Park, New York in the later part of the 19^th century. This formal evening wear has remained a symbol of affluence. Worn to weddings, film premieres, and state dinners, it has become synonymous with wealth, success, and leisure. More than just a sartorial history, the iconic character of the tuxedo signals the associated affects of aspiration and accomplishment. In New York’s Chinatown, from 1897 to the 1920s, the “Chinese Tuxedo” operated as a popular restaurant; and in 2017 a new restaurant opened with the same name. This genealogy from Tuxedo Park through to Chinatown is slim anecdotal proof of anything; but it does show a legacy of trading on black tie as a persistent marker of success and cosmopolitanism. It is a concept that travels. The forms of luxury and leisure change and evolve like fashion but the desire and aspiration for such forms persists. What does this mean for a city like Macao attempting to brand itself as a place for leisure and luxury? The tuxedo may be more or less relevant depending on the whims of fashion, but the desire to differentiate and create markers of success remain.

For most, to wear a tuxedo is a rare occurrence, something just rented for the day, unless it is a part of one’s uniform. Many of the dealers and hospitality staff that populate Macao’s casino resorts wear some variation of the tuxedo or formal evening wear. I know the only time I wore a tuxedo was to my high school prom, so I can not profess to be an expert in the particulars of high-society fashion. I did, however, grow up seeing a certain kind of male cosmopolitan subject decked out in tuxedos. I watched James Bond and countless other espionage themed films portray a world of international travel, danger, and leisure. When I first came to Macao in 2008 to teach film-making at the University of Macau I was uncertain what might be the appropriate attire. I knew very little about Macao; only later did I learn more about the city, about its Portuguese colonial past and its history as a port, one that predated Hong Kong’s later role as the region’s center for trade. I also learned that even though I did not know about Macao directly, I had unwittingly grown up with it. As a child in the 1980s and 90s in the U.S. making the usual pilgrimage to see movies on the weekends, I had unwittingly seen a version of Macao appear on screen. Macao regularly stood in for Shanghai during years when commercial production in the mainland was not possible. It was there, when Indiana Jones in a white tuxedo replete with a red carnation escaped from a bar in the opening of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984). And it was there again in the Kung Fu films of the 1970s. Hong Kong based studios like Golden Harvest and the Shaw Brothers used the streets of Macao as a stand in when they were unable to shoot in Shanghai or elsewhere in Mainland China. Perhaps most notably, in Bruce Lee’s Fist of Fury (1972), Macao again played the part of Shanghai.

Sean Penn and Madonna’s Shanghai Surprise (1986) also used Macao to stand in for Shanghai. During the shooting, Penn notoriously fled Macao after being arrested for attempted murder of a paparazzi caught in his hotel room (South China Morning Post 2004). This gossip cements the cliché of Macao as a place to which, and from which, one escapes under the cover of night. In the French film Largo Winch (2008), based on the Belgian comic by the same name, Macao plays Brazil; with the village of Coloane dressed up to play the part of the state of Mato Grosso. Locals were easy enough to cast as extras given the Portuguese connection. The James Bond film, Skyfall (2012), also shows an invented Macao, a virtual Macao that was produced by an animation studio in Shanghai. The computer rendered establishing shot shows a fantasy version of the floating Casino Macau Palace that once famously operated in Macao. In the scene, James Bond appears in a dark blue tuxedo, enters the lantern lit casino and narrowly escapes equally computer rendered Komodo dragons and other prototypical bad guys.

Macao plays itself

In Thom Anderson’s video essay Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003), Anderson shows how the city has been seen in films throughout the many years of filmmaking produced along its streets. The changes in the city are revealed in the background of films that never had such a documentary intention. He also highlights ways in which the city itself has played as a character in films. Los Angeles became a good guy and a bad guy, a pivotal part that could be relied on to support one’s plot. Macao has also played itself and continues to play itself in films meant for the burgeoning mainland Chinese market and for international audiences still apparently keen to see James Bond walk into a exotic bar and ask for a drink.

Anderson’s approach to Los Angeles as seen through film, echoes the Mnemosyne Atlas of Aby Warburg. Warburg sought to trace and explain the persistence of iconography in Western art. There has been a resurgence of efforts to link Warburg’s visual approach to art history to contemporary theories of the archive and curatorial practices (Latsis 2013). In the Mnemosyne Atlas, Warburg constructed panels with photos of different works of arts on a black background. Whether or not the central iconography of Warburg’s panels are legitimate underlying engines of art history, the form of his approach is still relevant. These black panels grouped artwork from different time periods and cultures, much like Anderson looks to draw links by putting movie scenes from different eras side by side in his film collage in order to draw out the iconography of Los Angeles.

Warburg looked for the Pathosformel or “emotionally charged visual tropes” expressed through elements in western art (Becker 2013, 1). He focused on specific details and ornaments what he called bewegtes Beiwerk” or animated accessories.” For Warburg, the flowing hair and dresses in the Birth of Venus and Primavera paintings by Sandro Botticelli and work by Domenico Ghirlandaio hinted at some underlying motion and energy (Russell 2007). In Macao, tuxedos, nightlife and other such images of success and luxury hint at some underlying possibility of financial power and mobility. To see cosmopolitan figures in movies and advertising campaigns is to see the potential of a cosmopolitan subject. The goals of diversifying Macao’s economy and creating more family friendly tourism activities arrive into a visual landscape that is already populated by figures of cosmopolitan subjects from earlier eras.

The popularity of Anderson’s video essay and the renewed interest in Warburg may have something to do with the ways in which we are regularly tasked with negotiating a landscape of multiple images, genres, and media content. To see and experience Macao as a city is to negotiate these links, to sift through a wide array of user-generated content, social media feeds, and popular media. Historical images of it and emergent visions of what it may soon become can be thought together at the same time. The origins of a particular Macao modern or urban imaginary may not be so clear but the persistent details and images of success and luxury remain. There may not be a continuous genealogy of luxury that we can trace. We may, however, find parallels in the depictions of a fictional Macao on display in movies from a wide variety of eras and genres.

Film noir and precode films from Hollywood and Europe imagined Macao as a place to escape to and from, a liminal port city on the physical edge of China and the discursive edge of morality and legality. The city’s appeal was that it worked as an escape from the rest of the world. These story-lines primarily appealed to western fantasies of travel to exotic locales with heroic male leads saving troubled women from the dangers of a dubious other. In movies and in reality, however, it was a place to hide, a place like Casablanca from which to flee the fronts of World War II. In the nineteen forties it served as a nearby escape from the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong and mainland China. Then governed by a neutral Portugal, Macao was a place to wait out the war. It was also a place to hide and move money into and out of China. This was aided by the fact that it was not a signatory to the international gold standard so it served as a financial intermediary between otherwise warring sides (Gunn 2016). And later it was a refuge for those fleeing from the Cultural Revolution in mainland China. This trend continued in the 1960s and 70s, when numbers of overseas Chinese from Myanmar and Indonesia escaped to Macao. Later on Cambodian and Vietnamese additionally sought out refuge in Macao. The exceptional status of Macao, made it attractive to a wide variety of interests and a perfect location for the gaming industry to grow and eventually eclipse Las Vegas.

The earliest western film set in Macao was the French film Macao, l’enfer du jeu (1942) or as it is known by its English title Gambling Hell directed by Jean Delannoy. It was based on a book of the same name by Maurice Dekobra and tells the story of a lounge singer in peril in Macao only to be saved by a ship captain. In Josef von Sternberg’s Macao (1952) another lounge singer, played by Jane Russell also finds herself in danger in Macao only to be saved again by the male lead played by Robert Mitchum. In both of these films, Macao is depicted as a place of peril, an existential milieu that must simply be survived. In Josef von Sternberg’s earlier film Morocco (1930), staring Marlene Dietrich, the character of the endangered lounge singer already appears. In one scene, Dietrich’s character famously appears wearing a tuxedo, replete with white tie and top hat. This scene has since been interpreted as a positive emblem of female empowerment and gender play. Years later, in Macao (1952) Russell’s character does not don a suit but she occupies the same position as a lounge singer surrounded by a backing band as she soundtracks the gaming of the casino’s patrons. Both these films set in Macao were notably not shot in Macao outside of some exterior pickups for the later film. This meant that both literally had to reconstruct Macao on a sound stage in France and Hollywood respectively. These constructed visions of the city offer an imaginary urban space that may never actually be visited but remains visible.

Cosmopolitan for whom?

Since the opening of the casino licenses in 2002, a number of large scale casino-resort complexes have been built in a stretch of reclaimed land between the previously separate islands of Taipa and Coloane. Sheldon Adelson, the owner of the Venetian, branded it the “Cotai Strip” in a clear move to both rival and mimic the Las Vegas Strip. From the Venetian to the City of Dreams, from Studio City to the Galaxy, each resort offers a different themed space combining hotels, retail, and gaming tables. The urban on offer in these themed spaces is a particular kind of enclosed or encapsulated luxury. Promotional material for these venues and the venues themselves present a vision of the city that is regularly swept clean and free as possible from everyday concerns. The mundane and the cosmopolitan are etymologically related, they are both of the world. The distinction is which world. The mundane suggests a world, from which to escape, and the cosmopolitan suggests another world, to which to aspire. By comparing images of a cosmopolitan subject in movies set in and shot in Macao, we can see changes in the world of leisure that is on offer. Through these images we can consider for whom and to what end this vision of a luxury city is created. These contemporary media, when combined with historical images of the city, form an ever evolving picture about what Macao was, is and will be.

As Venturi, Brown and Izenour show in Learning from Las Vegas, there is much to be learned from the vernacular architecture and aesthetics that arise in support of and alongside the gaming industry. The compressed confines of Macao and its status as a special administrative region of China, make it the most densely populated region in the world, with 21,340 people per square kilometre (DSEC 2017). At first glance Macau’s casino architecture appears to have little to do with the expanses of highway and roadside signs that these scholars studied in Nevada. The architectures and aesthetics of Macao, nonetheless, address visitors directly as iconic images. Visitors to Macao crowd to take in the ever-present Grand Lisboa, with its pineapple shape and mirrored base. Shuttle buses unload masses of tourists at the internationally themed casino resorts of the Cotai Strip. The buildings themselves serve as giant LED displays delivering images of success and leisure. These themed architectures and spaces are designed to be iconic, to be seen and photographed, to lure in patrons and stand in as a backdrop for photos to be taken back home and shown around to friends and family, first hand proof for having been there. Whatever a visitors’ wins or losses at the gaming tables, this experience of the themed architecture confirms participation in a cosmopolitan space.

The video content on the giant LED billboards on display inside the shopping arcades of the casino resorts also narrate an experience of the city that focuses on escape, luxury, and new aesthetic experiences. Tuxedoed celebrities, brand ambassadors, and movie stars stand in as proxy representatives of what it is like to visit a world of luxury and success. The reality of travel is, of course, not always as glamorous as that being portrayed in films and promotional videos. Masses of tourists must negotiate lines at the border and lines at the shuttle buses. Public transportation and the streets themselves can become overwhelmed with the sheer numbers of visitors. This can lead to tension between locals and tourists. Similarly construction projects to improve the existing infrastructure have become symbols of the difference between the needs of a tourist only in town for a day or two and a local resident troubled by the additional traffic and delays in construction. Such a gap between promotional images used to market a city to tourists and the reality of mass market tourism is not, of course, unique to Macao. What is specific is the relationship between the scale of the mass market tourism and the recurrent images of high-rolling vip gaming.

The foil to the commonly portrayed urbane subject jetting into Macao for a round of VIP gaming, is the figure of the nouveau riche or in Cantonese touhou (土豪). This term suggests provincial Chinese who have come into new money without an associated cultural background or frame of reference for the luxury items that they now have the economic power to purchase. As in the familiar shift in Western popular culture from the flâneur to the dandy to the swell, the image of a wealthy mainland Chinese visitor to Macao runs a continuum from a positive vision of a modern cosmopolitanism to that of a naive person from the countryside.

Hong Kong director Wong Jing’s series of gaming themed films, starting with God of Gamblers (1989) show Andy Lau as a debonair, suave gambler who is able to win high stakes games involving international rivals. These films, while less commonly the subject of film studies criticism, do express popular anxieties and attitudes of film audiences that have had to negotiate the changing political landscape of Hong Kong (Chan 2011). In the most recent film from the series, From Vegas to Macau III (2016), Lau remains a worldly character even able to best K-Pop star Psy who makes a cameo in the film. This figure of the cunning and witty gambler contrasts with mainland produced films that have focused on using Macao as a setting for romantic travel genre films. In director Xue Xiaolu’s Finding Mr. Right II (2016) a casino worker who is the daughter of a gambler who moved to Macao from mainland China, finds love through becoming anonymous pen-pals with a similarly second generation Chinese realtor living in Los Angeles. In the end, they find love not in success at the gaming table, but rather in a bookshop in London. These two films, both catering to the large mainland Chinese audience, provide a chance to see how Macao has evolved as a constructed cinematic space. A vision of the city is built in much the same way that scale models are used in architectural previsualization to present what will be. In other words, these new visions of Macao speak to an imagined future.

Cosmopolitanism as world building

Macao is simultaneously different worlds. It is sometimes a cosmopolitan world of luxury. At other times it is a mundane world of 24 hour shift work and labor in support of the large scale of mass market tourism. The intent of this article has been to consider if the image of the cosmopolitan can be used to make sense of these different worlds. By focusing on the details that represent success in films set in Macao, can one contribute to the existing literature on cosmopolitanism? Questions about the relationship between globalization, tourism, and cosmpolitanism, as explored in work by Ulf Hannerz, James Clifford, Aihwa Ong and others, can also be brought to bear in Macao. While scholars might debate the utility of the cosmopolitan as a concept in theorizing global mobility, it is clear that the cosmopolitanism on display in films set in Macao is a kind of costume that is tailored and worn for different audiences and purposes. Particular forms like the tuxedo give shape to the otherwise fleeting affects of aspiration, ecstasy, and interest. Like the animated accessories Warburg noted in Renaissance painting, the forms of fashion indicate that there are some otherwise unseen forces at play. At different times, these cinematic details may be more or less significant, represent different symbolic or cultural capital, but their presence is a sure sign that there is something at stake.

The cosmopolitan subject on display in Macao, and in films about Macao, is an urbane subject whose very being is connected to and of the city. The tuxedo provides the corporeal form for this subjectivity, and promises that there is somewhere to go, some party, event or other special occasion that necessitates such formal evening wear. So the brand ambassadors, movie stars, and other such besuited subjects confirm that there is something happening. There is a place to which we may or may not be invited, rarefied exclusive spaces to which Macao offers access or, at least, of which it offers glimpses. The theme spaces of each mega-resort casino complex offer visions of the city. The city is confirmed in the faux facades that line the outside of the Venetian and the avenues and shopping arcades of its interior. The existence of these cities in miniature is also confirmed in the details of luxury that serve as a guarantee that there are still more exclusive VIP spaces that may not be seen but whose existence is confirmation of the scale of the city. The tuxedoed subject is proof that there is still more to see and experience just out of sight. In this way, depictions of a cosmopolitan subject help build the city as a new world to be discovered.

Themed spaces and built environments are not the sole domain of Macao. The window shops of turn of the century Paris juxtaposed luxury goods and products sourced from around the world long before the Cotai Strip. Through a simple stroll one could take in the world, browse what it had to offer. To walk in the enclosed canal promenade of the Venetian Macao with its painted sky ceiling and swimming pool blue canal water is to similarly experience a commercial world of products. The relevant question here may be if this version of the Venetian is doing something different than the one that came before it in Las Vegas. Is this copy of a copy producing something new? So too the newly unveiled half scale version of the Eiffel Tower at the Parisian Macao is not the first to try and trade on this vision of modernity and European cosmopolitanism. As casino companies look to new markets from Japan to the Philippines, Macao’s unique advantage as a nearby region to China where gaming is permitted is drawn into question. Promotional videos and marketing teams from these new projects are also after the same VIP gambler and Chinese tourist. So Macao must regularly offer up new visions of luxury and new urban experiences to compete for their attention and interest.

In K-Pop star PSY‘s shoot for his 2017 music video “New face,” shot in the resorts of the Cotai Strip, he plays a variety of parts, from the bellhop to the masseuse to the cosmopolitan tourist. PSY wears the attire appropriate to each, from the staff uniform to the tuxedo. His ecstatic enthusiasm for the potential of “new face,” new people and new affects suggests exactly the kind of appeal that the local gaming companies want to attract. This music video, with its tightly choreographed dance numbers set in and around the city, greets visitors on the Turbojet ferries that shuttle tourists to and from Hong Kong and Macao. It plays together in a loop alongside promotional videos from the casinos and Macao tourism office. The combined effect is designed to promote Macao as a place of visual pleasures and leisure. However they are dressed, the tourist, pop star and the movie hero alike want to imagine themselves as cosmopolitan, part of a world that includes them and is full of new possibilities.

Video 1. PSY’s music video New Face.

For those studying cosmopolitanism, tourism and urban studies, we might ask if the comparative visual approaches of Warburg and Anderson, not to mention PSY, offer a relevant method to better understand how the urban imaginary that precedes a visitor’s arrival to a city inform their experience of it? Does such imagery do more than simply create interest? In the specific case of Macao, cinematic images and details of nightlife persist as traces of an earlier era of colonialism and gaming. New mass market tourists may never dress up in these fashions, but they are still met with these images. They are seen ahead of time, on arrival, and in memories shared after the trip. They appear in advertisements, films, and even in the background of their own tourist photos. The changing symbolic implications of luxury and black tie attire across various contexts are up for debate but the persistence of these images is undeniable. Brands and companies trade in these details while the government-organized Parade through Latin city does not. They are two different approaches to the multicultural and cosmopolitan. Both revolve around the optics of seeing the world, experiencing it as a different set of affects and aesthetic pleasures. The government’s aim to promote Macao as a family friendly destination and to diversify the economy away from its reliance on the gaming industry compete with the legacy of the cosmopolitan subject that has historically been a predominant figure in narratives and films about Macao. At face value, many of the films set in Macao are comprised of the same film tropes and clichés that inform many other genre movies. From action adventure chase scenes, troubled femme fatales, and scenes of high stakes gambling, the actions of these films appear to have little to do with the current industry of mass market tourism.

The clean, safe urbanism and interior spaces of the Cotai Strip with its all-encompassing mega resorts appears counter to the allusions to criminality and noir that informed earlier representations of Macao in film. What they have in common is the offer of an encounter with another world of new and different experiences. When transitioning from one casino to the next, from the Venetian to the Parisian, from the Galaxy to the City of Dreams, these border crossings between different themed spaces and cities in miniature are a positive advantage of Macao. The difference on offer is important. Macao’s cultural and urban heritage is just one other city in miniature offered to be seen and experienced. If we accept that these casino resorts are miniature cities or even worlds, we might describe the movement between them as a kind of encapsulated cosmopolitan. They provide a safe form of travel across different spaces without the dangers or anxieties that accompany so many border crossings. The question to be posed, then, is whether the amenities, services, and experiences they provide to tourists looking to temporarily participate in new cultures and cities constitute a new form of cosmopolitanism.

To answer this question of whether or not a new form of cosmopolitanism is on display in Macao involves deciding where to look for the answer. In addition to the built environments of the Cotai Strip and the earlier fantastical casino architecture of Macao, one can also find the image of the city in visual culture. This entails not just images from movies and advertisements but also the self-generated content produced by the tourists and residents of a city. Like Warburg and Anderson, so many of us now regularly make archives and share collections of images online. On social media and in the consumption of visual culture, we curate our desires and interests. The resulting collections made up of material from different influences and cultural traditions draw into question the utility or necessity of the cosmopolitan as a particularly distinct or rarefied figure or subject. In other words, browsing and collecting worldly images and experiences is no longer just the domain of international spys and well financed scholars. Nonetheless, there is still a need to name this aspiration that drives tourists and flâneurs alike to take in differences between worlds and chronicle the encounter. Casino designers, filmmakers, and content creators design new worlds of images to be seen and visited. In the case of Macao, the visions they offer trade in certain recurrent icons of success and leisure, tuxedos and other markers of achievement. In order to make sense of these new visions of cosmopolitanism and success I suggest that it is helpful to put them alongside the images that preceded them, to construct a local, miniature Mnemosyne Atlas; or in the case of Macao, to think “kick the dead rabbit” alongside “Macao, l’enfer du jeu” and the all the films and visions of Macao still to come.

References

All links verified 11.5.2018.

Films

Los Angeles plays itself. Directed and written by Thom Anderson, starring Encke King, Ben Alexander, Jim Backus. Los Angeles: Submarine Entertainment, 2003. 169 min.

Macao, l’enfer du jeu. Directed by Jean Delannoy, written by Maurice Dekobra (novel), Pierre-Gilles Veber, Roger Vitrac, starring Sessue Hayakawa, Mireille Balin, Henri Guisol. Demo Films, 1942. 90 min.

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Directed by Steven Spielberg, written by Willard Huyck, Gloria Katz and George Lucas, starring Harrison Ford, Kate Capshaw, Jonathan Ke Quan. Los Angeles: Paramount Pictures, 1984. 118 min.

Shanghai Surprise. Directed by Jim Goddard, written by John Kohn and Robert Bentley, starring Sean Penn, Madonna, Paul Freeman. Los Angeles: MGM, 1986. 97 min.

Macao. Directed by Josef von Sternberg and Nicholas Ray, written by Bernard C. Shoenfeld and Stanley Rubin, starring Robert Mitchum, Jane Russel, William Bendix. Los Angeles: RKO Pictures, 1952. 81 min.

Fist of Fury (Jing wu men). Directed and written by Wei Lo, starring Bruce Lee, Nora Miao, James Tien. Hong Kong: Golden Harvest, 1972. 106 min.

God of Gamblers (Dou san). Directedand written by Jing Wong, starring Yun-Fat Chow, Andy Lau, Joey Wang. Hong Kong: Win’s Movie Productions Ltd, 1989. 126 min.

From Vegas to Macau III (Du cheng feng yun III). Directed by Andrew Lau and Jing Wong, written by Jing Wong, starring Sally Victoria Benson, Chun-Tung Chan, Jacky Cheung. Hong Kong: Gala Film Distribution Intercontinental Film Distributors, 2016. 113 min.

Finding Mr. Right 2 (Beijing yu shang: Xiyatu 2). Directed by Xue Xiaolu, written by Miao Jiao and Xue Xiaolu, starring Wei Tang, Xiubo Wu, Zhihong Liu. Beijing: EDKO Distribution, 2016. 132 min.

Online videos

officialpsy. “PSY – ‘New Face’ M/V”. Filmed [May 2017]. YouTube video, 3:21. Posted [May 2017] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OwJPPaEyqhI.

Online resources

DESC (The Statistics and Census Service) (2017, May 5) “Detailed Results of 2016 Population By-Census” http://www.dsec.gov.mo/Statistic/Demographic/GlobalResultsOfBy-Census/2016%E4%B8%AD%E6%9C%9F%E4%BA%BA%E5%8F%A3%E7%B5%B1%E8%A8%88.aspx?lang=en-US.

News articles

South China Morning Post, December 26, 2004. “Penn tells of Macau arrest for murder attempt” scmp.com http://www.scmp.com/article/483396/penn-tells-macau-arrest-murder-attempt.

Literature

Chan, Brenda. 2011. “Identity and politics in Hong Kong gambling films of the 1990s: God of Gamblers III and God of Gambler’s Return” in New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film, 9 (1):35–48.

Becker, Colleen (2013). “Aby Warburg’s Pathosformel as methodological paradigm” in Aby Warburg’s Pathosformel as methodological paradigm” in Journal of Art Historiography (9).

Clayton, Cathryn H. 2010. Sovereignty at the edge: Macau and the question of Chineseness. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Clifford, James. 1997. Routes: Travel and Translation In the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Gunn, Geoffrey C. 2016. Wartime Macau: Under the Japanese Shadow. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.

Hannerz, Ulf. 1990. “Cosmopolitans and Locals in World Culture” in “Theory, Culture & Society 7(2): 237–251.

Latsis, Dimitrios S. 2013. “Geneaology of the Image in Histoire(s) du Cinéma: Godard, Warburg and the Iconology of the Interstice” in Third Text, 27(6): 774–785.

Ong, Ahiwa. 1999. Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Durham NC: Duke University Press.

Russell, Mark A. 2007. Between Tradition and Modernity: Aby Warburg and the Public Purposes of Art in Hamburg 1896–1918. New York: Berghahn Books.

Simpson, Timothy. 2011. “Macao Noir: Criminal Brotherhoods, Casino Capitalism, and the Case of the Post-Socialist Chinese Consumer,” Fast Capitalism 8(1). Special issue on Global Noir,” ed. By Gray Kochharr-Lindgren (With photographs by Adam Lampton).

Simpson, Timothy. 2014. “Macau Metropolis and Mental Life: Interior Urbanism and the Chinese Imaginary”, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 38(3): 823–842.

Venturi, Robert, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour. 1977. Learning from Las Vegas: the forgotten symbolism of architectural form. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.

floating population, landless poor, migrant labour, moral landscape, New Delhi, slums, urban landscape, urban underclass

Somdatta Bhattacharya
jijabh [a] gmail.com
DR, Assistant Professor
Department of Humanities and Social Sciences
Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur
West Bengal, India

Printable PDF version

This essay uses as an illustrative example the infamous Nirbhaya Case, the brutal case of gang-rape and murder in New Delhi, India, and a set of politico-legal, governmental, moral, socio-economic and journalistic narratives that ensued in its wake, to analyse a broader discourse on the urban landscape of Delhi as a morally pristine space threatened and invaded by “urban floating populations”. The author looks into the narrative construction of the (threatening) floating populations of migrant labourers and the (threatened) urban landscape within an ethical-politico-legal-cultural discourse that constructs – and imagines – the city as a moral landscape conducive to the manoeuvres of Big Capital, and simultaneously uses, abuses and erases the migrant labour feeding the city’s upper and middle classes. The discussion draws upon a range of materials – from journalistic writings, opinion pieces and media interviews, to court verdicts and government reports – to locate a perception of insecurity that structures the narrative rendering of the city as a cluster of middle- and upper-class residential areas (sharif mohallas, as a Delhiwallah, a citizen of Delhi, would put it). This narrated insecurity touches upon issues that range from sexual violence and murder to urban cleanliness and littering of the urban landscape.

Introduction

In the winter of 2012, New Delhi, the National Capital of India, was rocked by the brutal gang-rape of a paramedical student in a moving bus. As the victim battled for her life in a hospital bed, there was an explosion of narratives – politico-legal, governmental, moral, socio-economic, journalistic, among others – that covered the (in)security questions haunting the Capital. A major issue arising out of these narratives was that insecurity is created by “landless” poor, of “migrant” workers, i.e. by people who circulate between rural hinterlands and urban centres in search of livelihood. This “floating population” was variously traced back to the economic liberalization of India in the early 1990s and the real-estate boom that transformed urban-rural borderlands.

In this essay I explore the more general ethical-politico-legal-cultural discourse that seeks to construct the city of New Delhi as a pristine moral landscape by simultaneously representing, using, abusing and erasing the migrant labour that feeds the city’s upper and middle classes. I will look closer at narratives that “imagine” the city as a cluster of middle- and upper-class residential areas (sharif mohallas, as a Delhiwallah would put it) threatened by the “floating populations” of migrant labourers. The Delhi gang-rape (the Nirbhaya Case) serves as an example of how a city and its underclass are publicly imagined in the Indian context. I use diverse discursive materials (journalistic writings, media representations, etc.) to illustrate the popular narratives emerging in the wake of the gang-rape as parts of a broader discourse articulating the city’s response to its perceived Other. I use the term “discourse” in the essay to mean, borrowing from Foucault, “the general domain of all statements . . . and a regulated practice that accounts for a number of statements” (1972, 80), as a body of utterances in various media. With the term “narrative”, in turn, I refer to the mediated telling and retelling of events and ideas that comply with the rules and structures of a particular discourse.

Nirbhaya’s Killers: Specimens of a “Floating Population”

The news broke on 17 December 2012. New Delhi, and in fact the country as a whole, was shocked by the heinous gang-rape of a twenty-three-year-old female physiotherapy intern the previous night. The incident would be later termed the “Nirbhaya Case”; the word “Nirbhaya” is a Hindi equivalent of “fearless”, the adjective that will go on to represent the victim’s fight for survival and her strong resolve to see the rapists punished. She was brutally raped, tortured and fatally beaten up in a private bus which she had boarded with her male friend, Awindra Pratap Pandey. She fought for her life in hospital beds and intensive care units. As a nation took to streets in outrage, she was taken to Singapore’s Mount Elizabeth Hospital on 23 December, where she died on 29 December (Press Trust of India 2013).

The timeline and details of the case are only too well-known to warrant an exhaustive recounting.[1] The six joyriders on the bus – the bus driver Ram Singh, his brother Mukesh Singh, Vinay Sharma, Pawan Gupta, Akshay Thakur, and a juvenile who could not be named for legal reasons – who brutalised the girl and her companion were quickly identified and apprehended by Delhi Police. As the case unfolded and details were revealed, an alarming pattern became visible in the profiles of the accused: Ram Singh (33) and Mukesh Singh (in his early 20s) were members of an immigrant family from Rajasthan, a desert state neighbouring Delhi; Vinay Sharma (20) was an assistant gym instructor who lived in the same slum area, Ravi Das Slum, where Ram and Mukesh had their two-room shanty; Akshay Thakur (28) was a helper on the bus and hailed from the eastern Indian state of Bihar, and had moved to Delhi in 2011, looking for a livelihood; Pawan Gupta (19) was a fruit-seller; the juvenile accused (who was 17 at the time) had come to Delhi from a “village in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh at the age of 11, and lived his formative years alone, doing menial jobs in Delhi” (“Profiles: Delhi Gang Rapists” 2015). Their class profile was immediately evident as was the fact that the majority of them were immigrant labourers living on the fringes of the urban landscape of Delhi. It seemed to fit a pattern, as the “threatening urban fringe” has been a refrain in narratives that had constantly been warning the city of the dangers posed by the rural interloper (as we will see below in the essay).

As the case unfolded in the investigation and the extent of the brutality became known through incessant reporting on national media, commentators were quick to point out the class-angle in explaining the misogyny implicit in the act. For instance, Kishwar Desai, a well-known Indian journalist and writer, wrote:

. . . there are some who feel that a certain class of men is deeply uncomfortable with women displaying their independence, receiving education and joining the workforce. The gangrape becomes a form of subduing the women, collectively, and establishing their male superiority.

The frightening fact is that many of these alienated young men have reached their twenties with a bizarre attitude towards women, and little affection towards them. […]

As a society with a skewed gender ratio, we need to be extremely vigilant about the delivery of justice in crimes against women and in trying to bring disaffected family members, especially alienated and marginalised young men, back into a civilised discourse. (Desai 2013)

Soon the fact that the convicts formed part of the “floating population” inhabiting the fringes of the city entered public discourse, and a number of commentators pointed out that these “faceless multitudes” of people, who enter the city from rural hinterlands looking for work, were a clear threat to the security of the city. In an interview with the New York Times, published just five days after the gang-rape, Suman Nalwa, then the head of Delhi Police’s Unit for Women, directly pointed to the link between the crime and the city’s insecurity as the influx of the floating population” changes its demographics:

Q: The number of reported rapes in Delhi is higher this year than before. If the police are doing their job, why is it that cases of sexual harassment and rape are increasing?

A: It’s not just this year, it’s been happening for several years now, ever since economic liberalization. There is a lot of floating population in Delhi. We have a lot of people who are not residents of Delhi, but are just coming for work.

Plus we have a lot of immigrants in Delhi, so social alienation is high. A lot of people have made it big, but they don’t know their neighbors. So social corrective mechanisms are not in place. Earlier, people would hesitate to commit a crime because they were worried: What will people think of me? That doesn’t exist anymore.

Also, because of economic liberalization, many people in the national capital region have made good money through land deals. But they haven’t changed their values. For years, they have treated women as second-class citizens or maybe worse than that. Delhi is different from Mumbai, which exists almost as an island. Delhi has such porous borders. It’s very difficult for Delhi to control its floating population. (Mandhana and Sreedharan 2012)

The essay will revisit these assertions, by Desai and Nalwa, in the course of the discussion below.

Delhi’s Floating Populations: The Indispensable “Undesirable”

For the purpose of this essay, I use the term “floating population” as a term denoting a group of people “whose normal place of residence is different from where he [or she] is ‘temporarily’ present” (Canales 1993, 69). In the context of Delhi, this includes the migrants (especially rural labourers) who arrive at the city everyday in overcrowded trains and buses and become part of the city’s shifting, unaccounted shanty/slum population. A short discussion of the location of this floating population” within the urban power matrix of Delhi and NCR (National Capital Region, a metropolitan area that includes the National Capital Territory – NCT – of New Delhi and surrounding urban areas of states such as Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan) may better inform this analysis.

Delhi, the national capital of India, has always been a destination for the rural poor, especially of the country’s northern belt, who had dreams of transcending the shackles of a stagnant agrarian economy steeped in feudalism.[2] However, a veritable explosion in this exodus takes place, as Nalwa rightly points out, in the wake of the economic liberalization of early- and mid-90s, as the federal government, facing defaults on its foreign debt, was forced to introduce marked economic reforms. Within the next decade, the urban population of the city pushed outwards to the fringes and, in the case of Delhi, ancillary cities took shape in Gurgaon and Noida where large townships developed around industrial and IT hubs. The other side of this apparent glitz and wealth was the arrival of herds” of migrant workers, who tended to the needs of the urban sprawl. One estimate in 2011 reported the number of migrant workers in Gurgaon alone to be 200,000 (Yardley 2011). This was inevitable as the agrarian economy of the rural heartland plummeted further in the wake of the withdrawal of many subsidies and state support,[3] as much was it essential for the new urban landscape which was underserved by a state unprepared for the rapid expansion of the urban landscape.

Jim Yardley’s reportage on Gurgaon (referred to above), although indirectly, proves how central the migrant” had been to this new urban”. As Yardley describes: Gurgaon (…) would seem to have everything, except consider what it does not have: a functioning citywide sewer or drainage system; reliable electricity or water; and public sidewalks, adequate parking, decent roads or any citywide system of public transportation. Garbage is still regularly tossed in empty lots by the side of the road” (Yardley 2011). The new city, rapidly growing despite the much-needed infrastructure that should have been provided by the state, largely provided for itself: In Gurgaon, economic growth is often the product of a private sector improvising to overcome the inadequacies of the government” (Yardley 2011). The floating populations of migrant labourers are the cogs of this growth engine: they provide the scavengers, water-carriers, chauffeurs, domestic labourers, courier boys, and (in an ironic twist to the insecurity narrative) private security guards that “man” the city.[4]

This veritable army of urban underclass is massed around in the slums that dot the city, especially around affluent townships that they serve. A 2015 survey conducted by the Government of National Capital Territory of Delhi said that “about 6343 slums with approximately 10.20 lakh households were estimated to be in existence in urban Delhi in 2012,” and defined a “slum” as “an urban phenomenon which comes into existence on account of industrialization in and around cities thereby attracting in-migration of population from country side” (Directorate of Economics and Statistics 2015). It is this context of reliance and dependence that makes the discourse around the security threat posed by the floating population seem a subterfuge. I peg the central argument of this paper on this context, to ask whether the narrative of insecurity that attempts to erase the “slum” from the sharif mohalla masks an economic necessity. The discussion below seeks to analyse the various coordinates of this narrative and its attempt to characterise and qualify, simultaneously using and erasing, deploying and spatially containing, an economically essential and socio-culturally undesirable” population.

Moral Parables and the Migrant Other

The commentaries by Desai and Nalwa, which are representative of the many pronouncements that came out of the protests around the Nirbhaya case, are unequivocal in their construction of an urban moral landscape. A conflation of the two statements will easily bring out the contours of this inherently spatial narrative. Spatial metaphors abound especially in Nalwa’s characterization of the city as having porous” borders, as (regrettably) not being an island” like Mumbai, and as being under threat from the floating population” and immigrants”; the atrocity happens when the police/state fails to secure this landscape against the invasion. The narrative clearly constructs a moral landscape which is, in itself, pristine and innocent, before it is invaded by the immoral Other – the landless, rootless, floating migrant laborer. This Edenic landscape reflects certain moral codes: it is (apparently) at ease with its women being educated, independent and being part of the “workforce”; it is rooted and socially connected”, and values societal approval and fears social censure. However, this landscape is invaded by alienated” men and rootless groups that have come into a lot of money. They are brazen enough not to think of societal sanctions. The interlopers’ communities uphold values that treat “women as second-class citizens or maybe worse than that”. Urban space is vulnerable because “they haven’t changed their values” although they partake of urban economic prosperity in the wake of “economic liberalization” (emphasis added). This separation between “them” and “us” is inscribed on the moral landscape of the city. In what follows I explore and try to understand the discursive production of this moral landscape through its various markers.

The urban woman (and her body) is located at the centre of this discourse. Like any other morality tale, this one too hinges itself on the woman’s inviolate body and its moral ambience. The observations made by both Nalwa and Desai paint a picture of the alienated immigrant male who is cut off from his roots and family left behind in his native village, and often frustrated in his libidinal lures in the city-space. His unchecked sexual drive then becomes a threat to the city-space, as it is often directed at women who have imbibed the values promoted by the modern city and are liberated and defiant of patriarchy (while retaining their rootedness in the moral landscape of the city). As Krupa Shandilya has shown in her analysis of the nationalist and patriarchal discourses surrounding the Nirbhaya Case, the victim was often framed as a “chaste Hindu woman” (Shandilya 2015, 472). The doublespeak that proclaims the immorality of retrogressive patriarchy while denying the female body both agency and sexuality, is an important marker of the them vs. us” narrative. Mukesh Singh’s statements that blame the victim for the rape and murder – A decent girl won’t roam around at nine o’clock at night. A girl is far more responsible for rape than a boy” (Udwin 2015) – have often been cited in these narratives. Children are equally vulnerable to the invading predators. Commenting on the increase of sex crimes directed at children in India, Samar Halarnkar writes that the perpetrators are mostly semi-educated, male migrants in their 20s, unmarried and living away from a social structure.” The criminals worked as fruit sellers, itinerant labourers, gym cleaners, wood-cutters, private-bus drivers and other dead-end marginal jobs on India’s urban edges.” (Halarnkar 2013.) The narratives here, as Halarnkar explicitly admits, resonate with the argument of “Bare Branches” made by Valerie M. Hudson and Andrea den Boer (2002).[5] The “Bare Branch” theory endows the rural immigrant male with anti-social, anti-urban, and immoral tendencies that are reiterated in most of the commentaries connecting urban crime (especially sex crimes) to the immigrant problem in Delhi.

The discourse that posits the urban female as the symbol of vulnerable urban landscape, and the rustic immigrant as its immoral Other, subtly glosses over the class moorings of the narrative. While Desai, in her analysis” of the anatomy of gangrape”, discusses “a certain class of men” which “is deeply uncomfortable with women displaying their independence”, she does not elaborate on some who feel” and perceive them to be predators, or profile the victim. Shandilya, in her analysis of the discursive production of ’Nirbhaya’, has shown how the debates around the Delhi gang-rape framed the victim, while she remained anonymous as stipulated by courts, as everywoman”, which helped rally disparate activist groups as well as citizens from all walks of life to the protest”. However, even after the victim’s identity was revealed, she remained everywoman”, because of her very specific identity as a middle-class, urban woman” (Shandilya 2015, 469-70). I argue that, at this point, the urban moral landscape develops into a landscape of exclusion. It seeks to exclude the floating populations as aggressors, while also excluding women who have no access to the class privileges that this narrative presumes in its central subject. As David Sibley has shown, such exclusions are informed by ideas of the “self” and the “other”, where, in spatial conflicts, one “community represents itself as normal, a part of the mainstream, and feels threatened by the presence of others who are perceived to be different and ‘other’” (Sibley 1995, 28-29). Dominant space discourse defines members of the subordinate groups as dirty, defiled or diseased. Boundaries are set up and “violated” through border-crossings, which are a punishable offence. Boundaries “provide security and comfort” to some people, while they are the cause of deprivation to others (Sibley 1995, 32).

The narrative of exclusion, while accounting for the many cases reported around the national capital and reinforcing the mainstream perception of the immigrant laborer as morally suspect, obscures the fact that misogyny is not class-specific or the result of the libidinal urges of the uprooted bachelor in exile. Misogyny pervades all classes of India; it is embedded in highly patriarchal cultural traditions which span from religious rituals excluding women (for instance, the Hindu practice of forbidding menstruating women from entering places of worship) to hyper-masculine popular cultures (the male-centric Bollywood film being one of the most visible examples)[6]. As Leeza Mangaldas has pointed out, in the context of the Nirbhaya Case, Misogyny has long permeated our textbooks, our pedagogy and our parenting. In fact, it runs so deep that it reflects itself even in our linguistics.” (Mangaldas 2013) It would be fatuous to apportion this cultural trait along class divides. The fact that misogyny is not a class-specific malaise brought into the city by itinerant laborers is borne out by the statements made by the defence lawyers appearing for the accused in the Nirbhaya Case, in the same interview which saw Mukesh Singh making derogatory comments about the victim. One of the lawyers, M. L. Sharma, went on to say, “If you keep sweets on the street then dogs will come and eat them. Why did Nirbhaya’s parents send her with anyone that late at night? He was not her boyfriend. Is it not the parents’ responsibility to keep an eye on where she goes and with whom?” (Garg 2015) The comments made by a lawyer (neither a “low status” immigrant nor a “Bare Branch”) that objectify the woman and the female body should be read along with the analysis of the security question posed by the immigrant; the canine metaphor employed above underlines the mainstream view of the “fringes” of the city.

Pristine City/Squalid Slum

Sibley has discussed how the morality of cleanliness” (Sibley 1995, 64) can be pivotal in constructing geographies of exclusion. The morally upright is often equated with the “clean” and the “orderly”. “The virtue of cleanliness can be suggested by associations of people and places” (64) and the “immoral” to be excluded/erased could also be suggested in much the same way. In much of the journalistic discourse following the Nirbhaya Case, the space of Ravi Das Camp, the slum housing three of the six accused, was constructed as the city’s “underbelly”, the Other that bred the criminals running riot in its streets. Many of the reports juxtaposed Ravi Das Camp with the neighbouring R. K. Puram, one of the “swankiest” parts of urban Delhi.

The visual representation of Ravi Das Camp would further underscore this exclusion: the slum was repeatedly represented for its squalidness and cramped, dirty spaces. On 19 December 2012, three days after the gang-rape, India Today carried a piece on Ravi Das Camp, headlined “Dens of Rapists: Delhi’s Underbelly is a Fertile Breeding Grounds for Criminals”. The article, framed as an “investigation” that “brings out a first-hand account of Delhi’s seamy underbelly”, gives a sweeping account of the slum: The accused all lived within 30 meters of each other, in the camp’s narrow by-lanes, clogged sewers and makeshift hutments that turn into breeding grounds for some of the Capital’s worst headlines” (Bagga 2012). The narrative is supported by a composite image that brings together three inter-connected visual representations of the slum (see Image 1).

Here, the resident covering her face in apparent shame, the squalid interior of the home of one of the accused rapists, and the closed and clogged lane that leads nowhere, come together in a ‘spatial’ narrative that reinforces the stereotypes that Nalwa and Desai point to, while at the same time asserting that this site falls out of the moral landscape of the city.

This morality of cleanliness and the need to exclude/erase the “dirt space” is a recurring theme in narratives that posit the floating populations as the Other. The outcry against JJ (jhuggi jhopris, the Hindi term for slums) colonies is a case in point. The ethos of cleanliness and order that govern the moral landscape of the city demand that these be erased. For instance, in 1995, the Pritampura Sudhar Samiti and Okhla Factory Owners Association filed a petition demanding the removal of slums from their neighbourhood because:

JJ dwellers defecate in neighborhood parks causing “untold miseries to the residents” . . . [are] a health hazard to the locality and has [sic] transgressed their right to decent living. Besides young girls do not come to their own balconies throughout the day as obnoxious smell pollute the atmosphere and the entire environment. (qtd. in Batra and Mehra 2008, 401-02)

Sanjay Srivastava, in his study of the Akshardham Temple complex in Delhi, has pointed to a socio-spatial transformation that is currently underway in Delhi and a number of other Indian cities:

. . . the making of “clean spaces” . . . proceeds apace with the removal of “unclean spaces” such as jj colonies. . . . The “cleared land” is to be put to various uses, including new leisure and commercial activities. . . . Akshardham sits just across the river from the erstwhile jj colony of Nangla Machi, demolished in 2006. There is a telling relationship that each of these sites has to discourses of legality and illegality. (Srivastava 2009, 241)

The morality discourse here coexists with politico-legal discourses that seek to remake the city in the image of a global city conducive to the manoeuvres of Big Capital. The demolition of Nangla Machi to make way for a temple complex that projects the commercial side of religion is not an isolated case. For instance, the Pritampura Sudhar Samiti petitioners who demanded the removal of slum dwellers because they were unclean, also pointed out that the slum should be removed to “prevent the spread of any dangerous disease, [due to which] . . . foreigners [have] stopped (coming) to India [and] that has . . . affected foreign trade resulting into [the] loss of crores in foreign exchange” (qtd. in Batra and Mehra 2008, 402). And the legal authority seemed to agree:

Delhi being the capital city of the country is a show window to the world of our culture, heritage, traditions and way of life. A city like Delhi must act as a catalyst for building of modern India. It cannot be allowed to degenerate and decay. The slums that have been created . . . [are] the cause of nuisance and breeding ground of so many ills. The welfare, health, maintenance of law and order, safety and sanitation of these residents cannot be sacrificed and their rights under Article 21 is violated in the name of social justice to the slum dwellers. (402)

The verdict is rather stark in its expressions of how the city is to be imagined. The geography of the “show window” has no place for slums that are a “nuisance” and “breeding grounds of so many ills”. This geography will “degenerate and decay” if the slums invade its pristine precincts. It is also interesting how the court verdict chooses to cast the city in a narrative that stresses the duality of its landscape: it is, simultaneously, a symbol of our culture, heritage, traditions”, and a catalyst for the building of modern [read, commercially vibrant and market-oriented] India”. This is exactly where I locate an important moment in the discursive production of the moral landscape of exclusion – in the collusion between right wing political activism (that stresses on the conservation of a certain way of life”) and Big Capital (that needs the city to be cleansed of the undesirables to attract investment).

The Political Economy of the Urban Moral Landscape

Implicit in the middle- and upper-class assertion of the moral landscape of the city is, as Leela Fernandes points out, “a new civic culture for the middle classes in liberalising India” (Fernandes 2004, 85). The drive to “beautify” the city, to make it a global metropolis that attracts “foreign exchange”, is in effect an effort to purge the city of its migrant poor, or to imagine the landscape of the urban as purged of the floating populations. Fernandes sees a new form of class-based socio-spatial segregation” in this re-fashioning of the urban.

This drive to demolish the urban refuges of immigrant labor needs to be read in the context of new coalitions between the state and Big Capital, formed and nurtured in the wake of economic liberalization and the arrival of private investments in urban development. To attract capital flows from multinational corporations and other developed markets, Delhi is forced to become a “smart city” shorn of its “underbelly”. The Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM), launched in 2005, is one example of this project of urban transformation. JNNURM aims to “encourage reforms and fast track planned development of identified cities”. Focus is to be on efficiency in urban infrastructure and service delivery mechanisms, community participation, and accountability of ULBs/Parastatal agencies towards citizens. While one of the goals of the mission was to “take up a comprehensive programme of urban renewal and expansion of social housing in towns and cities, paying attention to the needs of slum dwellers” (Ministry of Urban Development, Government of India 2017), as analysts have shown, the Mission in fact asked urban administration to do away with their pro-poor schemes and to work on further commercializing the urban space (Chatterjee et al 2012).

The politico-legal sanction for this process of exclusion and erasure is further brought out by the numerous evictions sanctioned and carried out in favour of “development”. For instance, in December 2015, the government agencies demolished Shakur Basti in North-West Delhi to make way for a railway project, leaving the slum inhabitants, largely migrant daily-wage labourers from north Indian hinterlands, to live in the open in the biting cold of the Delhi winter. In the melee of the demolition, Mohammad Anwar and Safeena Khatoon, whose families had moved to Delhi from Khagaria in Bihar, lost their six-month-old daughter Rukaiyya, who was crushed by falling debris (Iqbal 2015).

Liberalizing India was also the India were right-wing majoritarian identity politics gained ground as a political force. Within a decade of the economic reforms, right-wing parties would come to rule the federal government. In this context, the crystallization of the “Hindu” identity as the Indian identity has had a role to play in the spatial purification of the city – or in the effort to imagine the moral landscape of the city as an exclusively Hindu middle/upper-class space. In the wake of the Nirbhaya case, Mohan Bhagwat, the supreme leader of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), an ideological mentor to right-wing politics in India, commented that “such crimes [read, rape and sexual crimes against women] hardly take place in Bharat, but they frequently occur in India” (qtd. in Shandilya 2015, 472). Here the space of “Bharat” (an ideological space which privileges Hindu traditions, customs and ways of life, and a mythological space of Hindu domination) is pitted against the actual, everyday space of “India” where teaming millions, including the underclass and the minorities and the marginal, defy ideological regimentation and domination. Also, note that the statement refers to “Bharat” in the present tense (and not in nostalgic past tense), thereby claiming the simultaneous existence of two parallel landscapes – one that lays claims to a moral high ground derived from Hindu traditions; and another one that is invaded by the Other and thereby, in immoral chaos. It is no coincidence that, as shown by Shandilya, right-wing political activists and organisations were active in consolidating a nationalist campaign around the Nirbhaya case, where the victim was elevated to the status of a martyr and the incident was seen as a reminder about the need to “save” Indian culture and tradition.

The right-wing discourse often works on the fear that floating populations, who often fall outside state surveillance, can be a threat to national security. Fernandes has read these fears alongside right-wing political narratives that have dominated the Indian landscape since the late 1990s, to analyze the production of “a form of purified Hindu citizenship that converges with the dynamics of spatial purification” (Fernandes 2004, 98). The question of visibility/invisibility in relation to state surveillance forms an important crux of this discourse – the haunting fear that anti-India, terrorist, and foreign elements use floating populations as a cover to infiltrate Indian cities. For instance, one of the major complaints against Ravi Das Camp, which emerged in the reportage of the Nirbhaya Case, was that this site was clearly not well-policed or administered, unlike the rest of the city (Bagga 2012). Another ubiquitous example is the narrative of “Bangladeshi illegal immigrants” and the grave threat they pose to Indian urban spaces, which is often played out in mainstream media.[7] In these narratives, the illegal immigrant” dissolves into the larger multitude of immigrant laborers inhabiting the slums of the city and uses the invisibility of the group to make his inroads into the city.

The threat of terrorism further complicates this discourse: as one news report claims, “[t]he fear that, along with innocuous ‘economic refugees’, the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence and Al-Qaida-linked terrorists may also be crossing over is all too real” (Chakravarty 2012). This narrative heightens and feeds the paranoia surrounding the “invading Other” and drives the desire to cleanse the city of such elements, as Sujata Ramachandran (2003) has noted in her analysis of Operation Pushback (the action plan implemented by the Indian central government in 1992 to oust “illegal”, “undocumented” Bangladeshi immigrants); such operations are situated in a political-bureaucratic collusion with the sanction of centrist political movements. The implementation of this “operation” brought out the processes of othering implicit in the characterization, identification, and description of the spaces that the floating populations of the city inhabit. As Ramachandran points out, “all of the ’Bangladeshi prone areas’ recognised by the government and reported widely through the press were also insignificant and marginal spaces occupied by the urban poor”. And the way they were categorized brought out the insignificance that bureaucracy assigned to these spaces, “in relation to the rich mohallas they abut”:

Some slums were catalogued primarily through nearby landmarks like police station or monument and prominent land use features like ’shamshan ghat’ (cremation ground), ’ganda nala’ (open sewers), ’bara pul’ (big bridge) near or on which they were situated. (…) A non-Bangladeshi resident of a slum interviewed during the course of fieldwork pithily uncovered this link. ’Log garibi ko nahi, garibon ko hatana chahaten hain (People do not want to eliminate poverty; they want to eliminate the poor). (Ramachandran 2003, 639-40)

Here, a narrative of marginality encompasses the space of the slums, its inhabitant community and their insignificance. The cataloguing here is a clear indicator of a strategy of exclusion where the city locates, constructs, reads and rejects the “slum” along with the pollutants it rejects and expels from its landscape – dead bodies and sewage.

The Politics of “Relocating” the Migrant Other

The metaphors of the moral landscape find their physical spatial dimensions in the actual “removal” and forced “relocation” of the floating populations and communities of migrant laborers. The physical realization and consolidation of the moral landscape of the city is complete when you ghettoize the floating populations on the fringes of the city. The convergence of the narratives of right-wing paranoiac nationalism and Big Capital seeks the erasure of the floating populations from the landscape of the city. However, the city cannot do without its scavengers, watermen, and “maid-servants”. Hence, you install them in the ghettoes you assign – (reassuringly) away from your gated communities, while they (conveniently) still service your apartments. Kavita Ramakrishnan has written on one such ghetto – the Bawana resettlement colony. Hers is a testimony of lives uprooted and displaced:

Mostly rural migrants to Delhi, those who live in the resettlement colony express sadness at the stalling of what they formerly perceived as an incremental migrant journey to relative financial security in the city. Now displaced to the semi-rural periphery, people bitterly speak of Delhi’s ‘world-class’ city ambitions that mainly served to exclude the poor. Though nostalgia permeates narratives of basti life in the city, at times glossing over the hardships faced, they make a sharp contrast between the bastis of the past and the current situation. (Ramakrishnan 2014)

Their erasure from the imagined moral landscape of the city and the attendant “demolition drives”, and their forced relocations to the fringes and semi-urban landscapes farther away from the city, often prove hazardous. Their health and safety are endangered, while the movement away from the city centre curtails the economic ambitions that had originally driven the migrations. Moreover, As Ramakrishnan points out, “in these in-between spaces . . . women face sexual violence on an everyday basis, adding an extra layer of marginality to the already bleak lived realities” (2014). However, these are never reported, discussed or protested.

The dominant discourses on the security threats seemingly posed by floating populations often mask these stories of urban apathy, and elide questions of how urban spaces themselves threaten these marginal populations. Although cases such as the Nirbhaya Case have brought the issue of women’s safety in public spaces to the forefront, the lived realities of women (and children) who have to relocate to the margins are often kept out of these “mainstream” dialogues on women’s safety. As one of the women in the Bawana resettlement colony tells Ramakrishnan, “[t]he girls here are treated like insects, as if they have no dignity.” Here, the urban subterfuge, which seeks to hide away the economic necessity of floating labour and to project a moral landscape that excludes the perceived Other, also becomes a cover for sexual predators who raid these resettlement colonies. Settlements like Bawana live in fear of drunken men driving out of their city enclaves or from neighbouring villages. None of these stories are reported and no candles burn for these victims.

The narrative politics of the spatially contested city

The insecurity threat that the city perceives in the “flotsam” that arrives at its shores is often based on a contestation over space and the product of a discourse that legitimizes certain classes of the city over others. In this sense, this question of (in)security hinges on the “hospitality” that the modern city seeks to deny. In the narrative representations of the floating populations of Delhi, the idea of hospitality” moves from the ethical or moral realm of inter-individual relationships to the economic, political and legal realms of the city’s precarious relationship with a class of migrant laborers, played out as a conflict over urban space.

It may be fruitful to read these narratives against the backdrop of the present state and local government’s attempt to restructure the city (as a populated and polluted space) into a “functional” and “efficient” one. The decades following the economic liberalization have seen a new official vision of the city taking shape in the form of government projects to remake it as a global city. Politicians and planners aim to overhaul crumbling urban infrastructure and demolish its slums teeming with migrant laborers, to “reimagine” the city. And yet, inherent to such cosmopolitan” initiatives is a class-based sensibility and politics that attempt to flatten out contests over the different meanings and visions of the city.

References

All links verified 15 May 2018.

News articles

Bagga, Bhuvan. 2012. “Dens of Rapists: Delhi’s Underbelly is a Fertile Breeding Grounds for Criminals.” India Today, December 19. http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/delhi-gangrape-unsafe-delhi-crime-grounds/1/238440.html.

“Bangladeshi criminal gangs new challenge for Delhi Police.” 2013. Yahoo News, July 22. https://in.news.yahoo.com/bangladeshi-criminal-gangs-challenge-delhi-police-103908012.html.

Chakravarty, Sayantan. 2012. “The Bangladeshi Immigrants are Everywhere. They Even Have Crime Syndicates in Delhi.” India Today, February 6. http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/bangladeshi-immigrants-are-everywhere-even-have-crime-syndicates-in-delhi-ib-report/1/207062.html.

Desai, Kishwar. 2013. “Skimming the Surfaces of Sexism isn’t Enough.” The Indian Express, January 3. http://archive.indianexpress.com/news/skimming-the-surfaces-of-sexism-isn-t-enough/1053547/0

Directorate of Economics and Statistics. 2015. “Urban Slums in Delhi: Based on NSS 69th Round Survey.” February. http://www.delhi.gov.in/wps/wcm/connect/adcd1f0047a86473ab46ffbdc775c0fb/pdf+report+69th+round+slum+final.pdf?MOD=AJPERES&lmod=538772215&CACHEID=adcd1f0047a86473ab46ffbdc775c0fb.

Garg, Abhinav. 2015. “Defence Lawyers Blame Nirbhaya for Rape.” The Times of India, March 4. http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Defence-lawyers-blame-Nirbhaya-for-rape/articleshow/46451407.cms.

Ghildiyal, Subodh. 2015. “Landlessness key to rural deprivation, census says.” Times of India, Jul 13. http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Landlessness-key-to-rural-deprivation-census-says/articleshow/48047026.cms.

Halarnkar, Samar. 2013. “India’s Bare Branches.” Hindustan Times, April 24. http://www.hindustantimes.com/columns/india-s-bare-branches/story-CSEhacsxs3l2pQCncM4l2M.html.

Iqbal, Naveed. 2015. “Shakur Basti Demolition Drive: In Debris, a Birth Follows Death, Barely 50m Away.” The Indian Express, December 15. http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-news-india/shakur-basti-demolition-drive-in-debris-a-birth-follows-death-barely-50-m-away/#sthash.0kgKW3Fz.dpuf.

Mandhana, Niharika, and Anjani Trivedi. 2012. “Indians Outraged over Rape on Moving Bus in New Delhi.” International New York Times, December 18. http://india.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/18/outrage-in-delhi-after-latest-gang-rape-case/

Mandhana, Niharika, and Gayatri Sreedharan. 2012. “A Conversation with Suman Nalwa, Head of Delhi Police’s Unit for Women.” International New York Times, December 21. http://india.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/21/a-conversation-with-suman-nalwa-head-of-delhi-polices-unit-for-women/

Mangaldas, Leeza. 2013. “Misogyny in India: We Are All Guilty.” CNN, January 3. http://edition.cnn.com/2012/12/30/world/asia/misogyny-india/.

Ministry of Urban Development, Government of India. 2017. “Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission: Overview.” http://jnnurm.nic.in/.

Press Trust of India. 2013. “Delhi Gang Rape: Chronology of Events.” The Hindu, August 31. http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/delhi-gangrape-chronology-of-events/article5079321.ece.

“Profiles: Delhi Gang Rapists.” 2015. BBC, December 20. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-23434888

Ramakrishnan, Kavita. 2014. “Sexual Violence on the Margins of Delhi.” Open Security: Conflict and Peace Building, April 15. https://www.opendemocracy.net/opensecurity/kavita-ramakrishnan/sexual-violence-on-margins-of-delhi.

Udwin, Leslee. 2015. “Delhi Rapist Says Victim Shouldn’t Have Fought Back.” BBC, March 3. http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-31698154.

Yardley, Jim. 2011. “The Gurgaon story: A mirror to India’s growth,” NDTV, June 9. http://www.ndtv.com/gurgaon-news/the-gurgaon-story-a-mirror-to-indias-growth-458043.

Literature

Balaji, Murali. 2013. “Competing South Asian Mas(k)ulinities: Bollywood Icons versus ‘Tech-n-Talk’.” In Communicating Marginalized Masculinities: Identity Politics in TV, Film and New Media, edited by Ronald L. Jackson II and Jamie E. Moshin, 49–66. New York: Routledge.

Batra, Lalit, and Diya Mehra. 2008. “The Demolition of Slums and the Production of Neoliberal Space in Delhi.” In Inside Transforming Urban Asia: Processes, Politics and Public Actions, edited by Darshini Mahadevia, 391–414. Delhi: Concept.

Bhalla, G. S., and Gurnail Singh. 2010. “Economic Liberalisation and Indian Agriculture: A Statewise Analysis.” Economic and Political Weekly 44.52: 34–44.

Canales, Alejandro C. 1993. “Population Structure and Trends in Tijuana.” In San Diego-Tijuana in Transition: A Regional Analysis, edited by Norris C. Clement and Eduardo Zepeda, 65–76. San Diego: San Diego State University.

Chatterjee, Ipsita, George Pomeroy, and Ashok K. Dutt. 2012. “Cities of South Asia.” In Cities of the World: World Regional Urban Development, ed. Stanley D. Brunn, Maureen Hays-Mitchell and Donald J. Zeigler, 381–424. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield.

Dutta, Debolina, and Oishik Sircar. 2013. “India’s Winter of Discontent: Some Feminist Dilemmas in the Wake of a Rape.” Feminist Studies 39. 1: 293–306.

Fernandes, Leela. 2004. “Class, Space and the State in India: A Comparative Perspective on the Politics of Empire.” In Labor versus Empire: Race, Gender, Migration, edited by Gilbert G. Gonzalez et al, 80–104. New York: Routledge.

Foucault, Michel. 1972. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Trans. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon.

Hudson, Valerie M., and Andrea den Boer. 2002. “A Surplus of Men, a Deficit of Peace: Security and Sex Ratios in Asia’s Largest States.” International Security 26.4 (Spring): 5–38.

Ramachandran, Sujata. 2003. “’Operation Pushback’: Sangh Parivar, State, Slums, and Surreptitious Bangladeshis in New Delhi.” Economic and Political Weekly 38.7 (Feb. 15–21): 637–47.

Roy, Anajali Gera. 2010. Bhangra Moves: From Ludhiana to London and Beyond. Surrey: Ashgate.

Shandilya, Krupa. 2015. “Nirbhaya’s Body: The Politics of Protest in the Aftermath of the 2012 Delhi Gang Rape.” Gender & History 27 (August): 465–86.

Sibley, David. 1995. Geographies of Exclusion: Society and Difference in the West. London: Routledge.

Srivastava, Sanjay. 2009. “Urban Spaces, Disney-Divinity and Moral Middle Classes in Delhi.” Economic and Political Weekly 44 (Jun. 27–Jul. 10): 338–45.

Varia, Kush. 2012. Bollywood: Gods, Glamour and Gossip. New York: Columbia UP.

Notes

[1] Debolina Dutta and Oishik Sircar give an overview of the amount of journalistic and opinion-page commentaries that came out on the case: “There has been a surfeit of writing on the incident and the protests on blogs and social media. There was widespread international attention, with statements from the United Nations and international human rights organizations. Media from across the world covered the protests and provided regular updates, many of them recreating the colonial imagery of premodern victimhood.” (Dutta and Sircar 2013, 295) For an instance of international coverage of the incident, see Mandhana and Trivedi (2012).

[2]. As recently as in 2015, the Indian federal government estimated that 48.5 per cent of all rural households [in India] are saddled with at least one deprivation indicator” that the study focused on (the indicators ranging from lack of proper housing to illiteracy to landlessness) (Ghildiyal 2015).

[3]. G. S. Bhalla and Gurmail Singh have studied the visible deceleration” shown by the Indian agricultural economy in the post-liberalization period (Bhalla and Singh 2010, 34–44).

[4]. Yardley (2011) reports that Gurgaon has almost four times as many private security guards as police officers”.

[5]. Hudson and den Boer (2002, 11) take the term from a Chinese word, guang gun-er, “indicating those male branches of a family tree that would never bear fruit because no marriage partner might be found for them”, and the term is used in a study that draws a causal relationship among the gendered dynamics of Asian (especially Chinese and Indian) societies where male children are preferred over female, the disproportionate numbers of bachelor men and the increase in the security threats in those societies. Rural–urban migration brings these gender imbalances to the fore as there develops a “a large floating population”, “full of the poor, the unemployed, and the vagrant, all of whom were noted to be prone to violence” (ibid., 30). These “transient workers find bewildering differences when they first come to cities, often experiencing disdain or exclusion from urbanites” (ibid., 29–30).

[6] The mainstream Bollywood musicals, comedies, dramas, romances and action-thriller genres are commonly centred on the male “hero” who exemplifies heteronormative masculine ideals. As Kush Varia (2012, 99) puts it, “characters that are symbols of rebelliousness and ideals of hypermasculinity – these are men of action, not words”. As Murali Balaji (2013, 56) has noted, Bollywood has increasingly projected a “hegemonic masculinity” to promote “an ideal masculine image while marginalizing the Indian Other—the supposedly undesirable Indian masculinities that fall outside the hypermasculine heteronormative ideals”. Also see Roy (2010) for an analysis of the stereotyped imaginary of the hypermasculine Punjabi in Bollywood.

[7]. For instance, see the following report: “In a new challenge for Delhi Police, some Bangladeshi criminals have turned to committing big time robberies in the national capital and fleeing by road or rail back to their country for a few months – before they strike again. According to police, these Bangladeshis take rooms on rent in slum colonies. The women members of the gang work as maids in nearby neighbourhoods. The men, during the daytime, conduct recces of these colonies disguised as garbage collectors or scrap dealers.” (Quoted from “Bangladeshi criminal gangs new challenge for Delhi Police,” Yahoo News, July 22, 2013)

ethnographic-artistic research, performance, public space, street vending, tactic

Julia Weber
julia.weber [a] zhdk.ch
PhD-Student, joint PhD
Institute for Contemporary Art Research
Zurich University of the Arts – Art University Linz

Click the image to read the full text.

ANSI art, ASCII art, PETSCII art, text art

Anders Carlsson
info [a] goto80.com
Artist, researcher
protoDATA

Printable PDF version

This paper presents a critical overview of the genres of text art. It includes but is not limited to ASCII, Western and Chinese ANSI, Shift-JIS, Unicode, and PETSCII art. The paper shows examples and briefly explains its features, history and popular uses. A widely held belief is that these genres are merely a consequence of which technological protocol that was used to produce it. But some of these genres formed in user subcultures over long periods of time, and were gradually loaded with conventions and preferences. By the 1990’s, several subcultures had its own understanding of ASCII and ANSI.

Today, as text art is distributed as images or videos on the web, appearance has become more important on the expense of materiality (character encoding). Browsing the #PETSCII hashtag in social media shows graphics that looks like PETSCII, but does not necessarily use PETSCII encoding, or even PETSCII characters. The paper argues that neither materialism nor pop aesthetics alone can explain text art genres today. Depending on the context, they need to be combined accordingly. Text art genres might not be wrong, but they can certainly be better prepared for the future.Text art, character art, micrography, artyping, ASCII art, visual poetry, text mode art… There has been a variety of terms to describe visual works with typographical symbols over the past centuries. These terms have been based in aesthetics, artistic movements, and religious beliefs, but most of the terminology used today derives from technological concepts in general, and character encodings such as ASCII, PETSCII, and Shift-JIS specifically. A character encoding, simply put, assigns a code to each character so that it can be easily transmitted and decoded. A lowercase ‘a’ is encoded as 97 by ASCII and Unicode. EBCDIC encodes it as 129 and PETSCII encodes it as 65.

Technically speaking, it is crucial to identify the encoding in order to display text graphics correctly, which has led to genres like ASCII art, Shift JIS art and PETSCII art. But how relevant are they for aesthetic and cultural purposes? I first started to ponder this question while collecting and categorizing works for the blog Text-Mode. Browsing through tens of thousands of images of text graphics it became increasingly problematic – sometimes impossible – to identify the character encoding. Was this 1960’s print-out made using ASCII, EBCDIC, Baudot, Morse Code, or some other way of encoding?[1] And if the encoding is unknown, how should the work be categorized? Perhaps there are more relevant criteria for categorizing text graphics?

In popular terminology ASCII art is often used as an umbrella term, including works that has little or nothing to do with ASCII: typewriter works from the 19th century (when ASCII did not yet exist), twitter art (which uses Unicode’s UTF-8 encoding, not ASCII) as well as video-to-text conversions as seen for example in The Matrix (where the encoding is unknown or even non-existent). What matters here is the visual appearance, not the modes of production.

As such there are two opposing uses of the term ASCII art. In its broadest sense, it can be understood as a popular genre based on visual aesthetics, detached from technology, that changes across time and space. The stricter meaning mentioned earlier is based on technological determinism to essentially make an objective claim that any graphics made with ASCII encoding is ASCII art.

The purpose of this text is to give a brief overview of ASCII, ANSI, PETSCII, Shift-JIS and Unicode art and how these concepts have been shaped by technology, culture and aesthetics, to discuss alternative categories for text graphics that can be relevant also in the future, when these character encodings have possibly been made obsolete.

The Materiality of Text Graphics

Strictly speaking, character encoding does not say anything about the appearance of the work. An ASCII-encoded work can be displayed with a colourful vector typeface of warning signs or other pictograms, printed in high resolution on gigantic posters. A work like this would hardly be labelled ASCII art unless the production process and the encoding was known, if even then. This is not to say that materiality does not matter, but it needs to be refined beyond encoding.

The model below is useful for studying computer-based text graphics, but can also be applied to text graphics in media such as typewriters, books, and video where the encoding can be irrelevant. As such, the model caters for both generic pop cultural perspectives, and highly specific materialist studies. It is based on the model in Carlsson & Miller (2012) and identifies seven layers: from the perception of the viewer, through media and formats and aesthetics, to the abstract set of symbols that precedes the encoding into a character map.

ASCII Art

In a strict sense, ASCII art should only use 96 of the 256 characters in the ASCII standard.[2] In 1990’s internet Usenet groups such as alt.ascii-art, this was strongly enforced because other characters would not display correctly, and could crash the viewer’s system.[3] This encouraged an alphanumerical aesthetics of predominantly line-based text graphics, sometimes referred to as structure-based (Xu, Zhang & Wong 2010). The works were made for monospaced and monochrome typefaces and were often figurative interpretations of animals, faces and objects.

ASCII art had a similar basic meaning in the so called scene (see Albert in this issue), although it used low-res pixel fonts and often looked more similar to graffiti and logotype design than the Usenet ASCII art did. But there were, and still are, conflicting opinions in the scene about what constitutes “real” ASCII art. One such conflict concerns typefaces, especially between PC and Amiga text artists. Amiga ASCII is displayed with Topaz or similar fonts[4] where the slash and backslash characters – / and \ – join together with little or no gap when positioned next to each other (as seen in Stylez’ piece). This is not the case on PC where the MS DOS font is used. As shown in Simon Jansen’s piece, there is a gap between the characters which is one of the reasons why Amiga and PC ASCII art is incompatible with each other, and why they each developed different aesthetics.

Another conflict concerns works that use more than the original 96 characters, which many do. These works are often labelled as block ASCII, extended ASCII, or high ASCII, while die hard critics might dismiss it as “not real ASCII” since it uses more than the original 96 characters. There is a particularly strong divider between ASCII and ANSI art (see below) in this sense, although they both use the same typeface and encoding.

Shift-JIS Art

What is called ASCII art in Japan, AA for short, is usually called Shift-JIS or SJIS art in the West. It is made with Japanese characters encoded in either Unicode’s UTF-8 or in a Japanese encoding such as Shift-JIS or EUC, displayed with fonts such as MS PGothic or Mona. With a much larger character map than Western ASCII, as well as a variable width vector font, Japanese ASCII art is distinctly different from its Western equivalent. As demonstrated in the pieces by Illiozilli and Runte0531, it is possible to create more fine details and complex shapes, compared to Western ASCII art.

It should be noted that ASCII art is a more popular phenomenon in Japan compared to many other countries. Popular memes such as Pedobear and Mona originate in text-based web boards such as 2channel, and even appear in mainstream culture. Another mainstream form of ASCII art is kaomojis, a more intricate (and horizontal) equivalent to emoticons such as :) in the West. You might have seen happy faces such as (* ^ ω ^) or the table-flipping kaomoji ( ╯°□°)╯ ┻━━┻ or the Lenny Face: ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°). As such, ASCII art is common in online culture and is often copy-pasted and remixed by anonymous authors, which makes it possible for a different kind of perception and contextualization, compared to the West.

ANSI Art

From an aesthetic perspective, the main difference between ANSI and ASCII art is that ANSI uses colours. Both use the same typefaces, character map, tools and resolution but each text character in ANSI art can have two colours: one background colour and one foreground colour for the text character itself.

On the Amiga, colours are mostly used to colourize traditional line-based ASCII art, which is sometimes called Amiga ANSI. PC artists however, developed a distinct style using shading characters, from █ and ▓, ▒, to ░. ANSI art often focuses on these shading characters which makes it appear similar to pixel graphics, especially when using a higher resolution (more than 80 characters wide). Consequently, ANSI art is often misperceived as a form of pixel graphics rather than text graphics.

In Taiwan there is a thriving ANSI art scene at the popular text-based bulletin board system PTT. It is ranked as 860 on the list of the world’s most visited sites and makes extensive use of ANSI graphics. It uses a Chinese character map with a much larger selection of blocks compared to its Western equivalent. This has spawned an aesthetic that is not focused on the shading characters, but rather on the geometrical full colour blocks as demonstrated in the images by jacky90527 and else.

PETSCII Art

PETSCII is a character encoding developed by Commodore for 8-bit computers such as the PET-series and the Commodore 64. Today, PETSCII art usually refers to graphics made with the built-in typeface of the Commodore 64. The typeface has a large selection of semi-graphical characters like circles, blocks and triangles which makes it possible to create gridded mosaics in a similar way to ANSI.

Unlike ASCII and ANSI, PETSCII art was not released as separate artefacts in its own scene. Up until the early 2010’s PETSCII-graphics was only scarcely documented online, which changed after an increased interest for PETSCII around 2013. New programs to create PETSCII graphics were launched for modern computers with options to save the graphics as common image files and not only C64-specific formats.

All these conditions helped to to broaden the interest for PETSCII as a creative medium, as more detached from technical and subcultural norms than ASCII and ANSI is. PETSCII graphics, in some popular understandings, is just a typeface organized in a grid, presented as images and GIF-animations online. In the Commodore 64 scene on the other hand, there are still discussions about what constitutes “real PETSCII”.[5]

Unicode Art

Unicode’s UTF-8 and UTF-16 encodings are used in a majority of operating systems, platforms and websites today. As of version 9.0, Unicode covers more than 128,000 characters from scripts and symbolic systems from around the world. For text artists in countries like Japan where there were several incompatible standards, Unicode was welcomed as a unifying standard.[6] Even so, it seems rare to talk about “Unicode art”. ASCII art or AA still seems to be the dominant terms in Japan. In the West, it is even more rare to talk about Unicode art. A possible reason for that is that Western text graphics established itself before Unicode became mainstream, and now Unicode lacks support for those traditions.[7]

There are indeed few indications that Unicode art will replace ASCII art as a popular umbrella term in the West, even if most new text graphics technically is Unicode. But perhaps the future ASCII and PETSCII-artists will use Unicode art to describe “the other”, non-traditional, text graphics; works that require more characters, colours, vector graphics, and Unicode functionality: Japanese ASCII art, Chinese ANSI, Twitter art, emoji art or experimental text art such as Glitchr.

Final Discussion

The categorization of text graphics is a complex mix of culture and subculture, place, and technicity, as this text have shown. Categories like PETSCII, ANSI and Teletext are named after the encoding, although it is the low-res typeface and its characteristic semi-graphical characters that is the key identifier, in most contexts.

Other categories are based more on which characters that are used. When an ASCII artist in the East or West uses alphanumerical characters and focuses on lines rather than blocks, it is usually considered to be ASCII art, both in popular culture and in more specific scenes. But when ASCII artists – again, both in the East and the West – focus on geometric or block characters instead of alphanumerical characters and lines, it gets more complicated. The scene uses a number of fuzzy concepts based on either technology or aesthetics or both, to categorize it. In popular culture these works are sometimes even called pixel art in lack of better words. This style has also been called tone-based, as opposed to structure-based (Xu, Zhang & Wong 2010).

Here I suggest the term text mosaic to describe these works. As an aesthetic concept, I have found it useful to group together the blocky aesthetics typical for text graphics made in eg ASCII, ANSI, PETSCII, Unicode, Shift-JIS, Teletext, as well as the text graphics of many 1980’s 8-bit computers. These works are less concerned with alphanumeric and box-drawing characters and instead focuses on solid block elements such as █, ▖, and ▙, geometrical shapes like ◢ or ●, and shading characters characteristic for ANSI art: ▓, ▒, and ░. Text mosaic uses the same material underpinnings as ASCII art but has a distinct aesthetics that is visually akin to tile mosaics, ancient woven or knitted crafts, and painted minimalist works from the 1960’s. As such, it opens up new historical, cultural and aesthetic connections compared to the usual typographical ones.[8]

Throughout this text the term text graphics has been used as an umbrella term to refer to ASCII art, text mosaic and related phenomena. The avoidance of the art term is a conscious choice to connect text graphics to histories of crafts rather than art. One reason for that is that practitioners – since the early days of typographic ornamentation and typewriter works to recent days of scene art – have emphasized the role of skills and manual work over ideas, concepts and contexts.

Hopefully these terms, along with the text graphics model, can be helpful in future studies of text graphics that aim to combine both materiality, history, aesthetics and culture.

References

All links verified 14.6.2017

Carlsson, Anders, and A. Bill Miller. 2012. “Future Potentials for ASCII Art.” http://goto80.com/chipflip/06/

Danet, Brenda. 2003. “Pixel Patchwork: ‘Quilting in Time’ Online.” Textile 1(2): 118–43.

Whistler, Ken, Mark Davis, and Asmus Freytag. 2008. “Unicode Technical Report #17: Unicode Character Encoding Model.” http://unicode.org/reports/tr17/

Xu, Xuemiao, Linling Zhang, and Tsien-Tin Wong. 2010. “Structure-based ASCII Art.” ACM Transactions on Graphics (SIGGRAPH 2010 issue), 29 (4): 52:1–9.

Notes

[1] There are currently 174 encodings listed at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Character_sets.

[2] The early versions of ASCII were 7-bit, containing 128 characters of which 32 were non-printable control characters.

[3] See for example the alt.ascii-art FAQ at http://www.ascii-art.de/ascii/faq.html.

[4] Amiga ASCII-artists developed Topaz-like fonts especially for ASCII art, such as mO’sOul by Desoto, P0T NOoDLE by Nudel and B-Strict by Mortimer Twang.

[5] “If you can print it, it’s PETSCII” was the slogan of the Plain PETSCII Graphics Competition in 2013, which essentially limited the use of characters.

[6] Japan uses several incompatible encoding standards such as JIS, Shift-JIS, Unicode and EUC and there is no de facto standard.

[7] Unicode does not include characters from e.g PETSCII, MouseText, Videotex, Teletext, ATASCII, Amiga ASCII, or SharpSCII.

[8] See for example Danet (2003) who connects text graphics on Internet Relay Chat (IRC) with textile traditions such as quilting.

art and knowledge, visual remix

Michael Szpakowski
michael.szpakowski [a] writtle.ac.uk
University College Writtle, Chelmsford, UK

Printable PDF version

In recent years I have been making a number of works incorporating text, often in ways which might be regarded as contrary or perverse, for example a text in the form of a jpg, posted to the photo sharing site Flickr, about a photograph I decided not to take and a short movie about the city of Stavanger in Norway using Google street view images but eschewing the images themselves for a slightly poeticized textual description of them. Other recent works have included a series of 51 paintings incorporating apparently naïve textual self descriptions or reflections.

I describe and contextualise these works as artworks, led by my fancy rather than any research programme, but I also attempt to summarise some provisional lessons learned (or perhaps better and more modestly insights gleaned) from making them, about the relationship between image as image and the textual glossing of it, a question given particular sharpness since the rise of conceptualism.

To scaffold my discussion I draw on some of my own recent writing on questions of art and knowledge, Frank Sibley’s classic contribution “Aesthetic Concepts” as well as a forthcoming paper by the philosopher Constantine Sandis “If an Artwork Could Speak” on art and meaning.

prolegomenon

In what follows I am going to introduce and meditate upon three of the text related artworks—one a digital image, one a video and one a series of themed paintings — which I have been making over the past few years and try and make some observations about how they might illuminate, in some sense, the relationship between text and image and the nature of each of these.

I will justify discussing a set of paintings in a journal devoted to matters ‘audio-visual’ on three grounds. The first is that paintings are unarguably visual, the second is that I regard my work, which straddles the digital and the material, as indivisible and the third is that the paintings would not have existed in the form they do without the precedent of all sorts of networked/remix/moving image related practices.

The three pieces might be thought of as ‘stress tests’ of text, asking it to do jobs not normally associated with it, or placing it in an unfamiliar or counter-intuitive context, though I want to insist that the pieces under discussion and their companions do not constitute a conscious ‘research programme’ of any sort. It seems to me it is not the business of the artist to subordinate artistic practice to this end but rather simply to allow the free play of conscious and unconscious mind, of the body, of feelings and interests in a sort of grown-up playtime, leading where it will. That’s how these works came to be. I did not know completely in advance either what I would end up making and whether the pieces would be aesthetically successful or not (and this uncertainty seems to me, following Sibley (1959) to be a defining feature of all art making).

What I can safely say is that the legion of ambiguities around word and image and meaning are things that interest and engage me—I have always loved puns, for example—and they have constituted an important part of my personal intellectual and affective formation, never far from the surface of my unconscious. Indeed it is precisely the possibility of their presentation as paradox or puzzle, that make them, for me, interesting as subject matter for art.

Leaving Sibley to do the heavy lifting for rejecting the possibility of articulating a successful aesthetic strategy before one actually gets stuck in and makes, I want to cite a second, for me foundational, notion about the artwork and that is the rejection of the idea that artworks—visual, literary, musical—have something that we can term a ‘meaning’ or even a set of ‘meanings’. For a long time I have felt this ascription to be a category error:

…works of art are not messages but objects. They don’t say things nor ask questions, nor assert, nor investigate. Neither do they as objects have messages somehow encoded or embedded within them. To assert otherwise is a massive category error. As objects they may of course be brought in evidence, copied, become conversation pieces, be described well, be described badly, be described perversely, be seen, be half seen, be missed, be lost, be found, be written about, point to things, be compared and many other things, some of which have not yet been imagined. (Szpakowski 2012b)

and I was pleased to read recently a more rigorous and lengthy setting out of a similar position by the philosopher Constantine Sandis (2017):

Neither understanding nor communication is reducible to the acquisition of new facts. There is a difference between understanding the words a speaker has said, and understanding the speaker–understanding the ’why’ as well as the ’what’. Wittgenstein states that ‘if a lion could talk, we could not understand it’, not because of any insurmountable language barrier, but because we wouldn’t know what it was aiming to do with its words. We need to free ourselves from approaching communication as something geared towards the transmission of information. In the case of aesthetics this involves a rejection of the supposition that the meaning of a work of art is whatever the author intended to communicate with it, and that to understand this work of art is to understand this meaning; an old chestnut in a new fire. (Sandis, 2017)

If artworks cannot be said to have ‘meanings’ then in what sense can they assist us in any project of clarification of ourselves, the world and the things we do in it?

In (Szpakowski 2016a, 69–92) I make an argument for artworks in general as creators of a very specific kind of knowledge, which I call ‘knowledge-with’ and I also begin to sketch a mechanism by which this might happen. My concept of knowledge-with is related to but not reducible to notions of empathy, fellow feeling and understanding what a thing or situation or person is ‘like’. I propose that this kind of knowledge is intimately and inextricably entwined with the aesthetic charge of any work. A term in the argument towards this is my attempt to show that it cannot be said that it is a necessary condition of being an artwork to engender knowledge in the form of true facts about the world—what traditional epistemology deals with, and what has been termed ‘knowledge-that’ (Fantl 2016). I will not recapitulate my original argument here. The interested reader can find and follow it for herself, but it is important to mark the caveat that it does not exclude that as a by-product some artworks might on occasion offer us some measure of knowledge-that, an example being the use of artworks as secondary sources in history—how people carried themselves in certain situations, what certain institutions looked like, how people dressed for different activities &c.

Together these positions radically undermine any possibility of art practice as research in any sense analogous to how research in the sciences or social science is generally understood. I believe this undermining to be a wholly positive thing since it allows us to understand how art works might help us towards a different sort of clarity about things, people, practices and institutions in the world.

This will resemble much more a secular version of a koan (Fisher 1978) within the Zen Buddhist tradition than any increase in our repository of true facts. That is, a sudden realisation that ‘this is how things are!’ or ‘Ah, this is how things are connected!’. Neither is this sort of idea without precedent in the Western philosophical tradition—a preference for seeing things in their place and context over an attempt at scientific explanation can be found in the work of the later Wittgenstein, principally in the context of philosophy itself ‘Philosophy simply puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything.—Since everything lies open to view there is nothing to explain.’ (Wittgenstein and Anscombe 1989, 50), but in aesthetics too and also in relation to psychology and the history of religion (Cioffi 1998).

I want to make one final conceptual/methodological point. Elsewhere I have written of my sense of the artwork as not only the artwork proper but all the epiphenomena that spring up around it.

Just where and when is the actual art object? …Think of the physical object itself at any point in time as the visible section of the iceberg… Or think of it as casting a penumbra in time and space; this, not the physical object but nonetheless inseparably of it. Object plus ripples—critical commentary, the references in other media: advertising, stand-up comedy, song; the popular image—jokes retold at work or in the pub, references to these—echoes of echoes… So we should think of the artwork as a sum over time: of all its moments, all its sources and all its consequences—and though this totality will never be accessible to any single human being it is nonetheless a real thing, theoretically observable and enumerable, not ideal or mystical. (Szpakowski 2010, 24)

It is my strong feeling—and its fleshing out requires much more detailed future argumentation—that it is precisely in this dialogic extension of the boundaries of the work and in this eclectic rag-bag of practices and responses that our ongoing engagement with and absorption of ‘knowledge-with’ continues to develop ie. that there is an inescapably social dimension to it. I will try offer some evidential support for this hunch in my discussion of the third work.

I will discuss each piece in turn by describing its format and appearance as impartially as I can. I will also talk about my own process of making it. I will attempt, too, to step outside my authorship and put myself on the ‘receiving end’ of each work. Because I am the same person in each case I will inevitably fail to maintain this distinction with any real rigour.

1. a photo I didn’t take today

This was chronologically the first in this group of text related pieces.

The facts of the piece are these. It consists of a short text which I wrote simply as a text, being on one level an attempt to describe straightforwardly and accurately something that happened to me and the way it made me feel. I wrote it in Word and pasted the text into Photoshop to create a 4×3 ‘image’. I even gave it a small black border to emphasise its existence in a defined format and space. Close examination of the image will reveal ‘imperfections’—irregular left-alignment of the text, what appear to be anomalies of spacing, some incorrect punctuation—all easily correctible in a file encoded as text but frozen into place by the image–nature of the piece.

I then posted the ‘image’ to the photo sharing site Flickr under the title a photo I didn’t take today (“a photo I didn’t take today” 2011). The image posted to Flickr is 300dpi and approximately 30X58 inches, matching the high resolution original on my computer. This means that it would be quite possible to produce a good quality print at over a metre wide for gallery or other display. This sense of the physical potential of the piece was important to me in the same way as selecting a digital format—the jpeg—intimately associated with image files. I wrote above that on one level the piece was simply the description of something that happened and my response but it is, of course, much more. As soon as I began to write the question of style arose. I realised that to an extent I was channelling a favourite author, the late German writer W. S. Sebald, and producing a pastiche or perhaps even a gentle parody of his style. I opted to accept that this was the case and so I continued, consciously offering more and more carefully observed (or at least carefully recounted) minutiae, much of which was not strictly relevant to the incident (or lack of incident) itself but which built up a perhaps slightly comic picture of me as a somewhat clumsy, bemused and indecisive protagonist. Towards the end of the piece I further picked up steam as I inserted a quote from a Sinatra song and finally turned a sharp corner into a short coda with a terse but (it seemed to me) poetic account of another frustrated attempt at imaging something.

I felt that this slightly over-keen embrace of literariness rendered the writing more ambiguous, perhaps to the extent of casting doubt upon the facts of my over-fussy account of the original incident, and that this doubt somehow mirrored or rhymed with the wilful perversity choosing to present the whole thing in a visual format on a photography site.

I dislike the word overdetermined. It usually signals bullshit on the horizon but here I feel I really want to use it. I want to say that I set out to make something that was as overdetermined as possible.

I very recently learned that the year after this piece was made, the photographer and writer Will Steacy (2012) published a book entitled Photographs Not Taken in which a number of photographers write about a photograph they failed to take for one or another reason.

I want to assert that despite surface similarities my feeling is that the two projects are qualitatively different. My assertion would be that a photo I didn’t take today is positioned as a work of art and as such, in line with my initial arguments, carries no specific meaning and whose principle force would be aesthetic. This, with the qualification that I argued above that the ‘aesthetic’ is closely entwined with the kind of knowledge I have called knowledge-with. Clearly the presentation of Steacy’s project as a non-fiction book (where texts, if you like, belong, or at least are often accustomed to find a home) means that its reception is more straightforward. We can read about the technical, ethical and other scruples of professional photographers focussed through the prism of images they had hesitations about. In doing so we might then feel we can take away straightforward lessons in these matters.

It is entirely true that the textual a photo I didn’t take today contains references to some of these ethical and technical issues but they are contained, as it were, within the ‘inverted commas’ that characterise the artwork. A construct, a thing, not message or messages.

2. Stavanger Street View

The second piece I want to consider is a video entitled Stavanger Street View. I made the piece specifically to submit to a festival in Stavanger, Norway, where work was to be projected on outdoor screens in the city centre. I had never visited the town although I had previously visited Norway and I do speak and read Norwegian to a limited extent.

I decided to scope-out the town using Google Street View. I had used this as an input to artworks before, particularly for paintings, where I “transcribed” screenshots that particularly interested me as paintings, mostly in fairly thickly impastoed oils (an exercise, it might be said, in translation). I had also made a number of stop motion animations of my virtual passage through a place by means of Street View, the most fully developed of which is Shit Happens in Vegas (Szpakowski 2012a).

I suppose that precedents of both a photo I didn’t take today and the Vegas piece were still somewhat fresh because their conjunction, in the idea of describing rather than presenting, or perhaps presenting-through-describing-in-words images from Street View that I found particularly of interest, came to me quickly.

I found several such resonant images (although, for some reason, I didn’t take screenshots or URLs but remembered, with one exception, the ‘in-real-life’ addresses. I have not been able to find the location for the fifth, final section again.) and I wrote text about them in a mixture or English and Norwegian. Where my Norwegian let me down I used a dictionary or Google translate to fill the gaps. (I later asked a friend who is a native speaker to correct my text. She spent time talking me through her corrections so I could be sure that the final text corresponded as nearly as possible to my original intentions.)

Once I had a final text I created the video. There are five sections of text and each has its own title. The text for both occupies a line loosely along the horizontal centre from the top and bottom of the frame but slightly closer to the top. It is quite large, occupying approximately one sixth of the vertical space. The titles, both of the piece of a whole and the sub-sections, are motionless at the dead horizontal centre of the frame. The substantive texts move slowly across the screen appearing at right and exiting left and pass at a comfortable reading speed. Each text is divided up into subdivisions by two adjacent forward slashes. The texts resemble poetry both in their division into ‘lines’ and in their diction, which is heightened, though the vocabulary is simple. Once again I was mindful of the ambiguity of presenting a set of words which described (or related to) images in a format which would normally be used for something closer to what we normally think of as images.

Coming back to the piece, trying to see it ‘from the outside’ the first thing that hits me is the language. At the time of making the piece I understood every word of the text (since I had been through even the alterations to my original Norwegian in some detail with my language helper) but returning to it I had to refer to the English translation that I had posted online with the video (“Scenes of Provincial Life – Post #455” 2013). The stark and clearly intentional ‘designedness’ of the visual presentation elicits a frisson even prior to any attempt at understanding but feeling a degree of linguistic uncertainty reminded me what the experience of the piece would be for a non-Norwegian speaker and it became clear that understanding the words matters and is a key part of a full experience of the piece. (Something that is not always immediately apparent when one views work involving text in one’s own language, especially for native English speakers where so much of the world accommodates itself to us.) Nevertheless, the experience also led me to believe that the piece could be approached by a non-Norwegian speaker by carefully matching the English translation to the Norwegian text. This opens up interesting questions about what constitutes the limits of the work. Do we insist that properly it is constituted by the video alone or do we allow its extension into an accompanying translation? Would this render irrelevant or somehow artistically offensive making a ‘translation’ of the piece as a new moving image piece, for even into a close language such as English this would alter its appearance and rhythm? Languages with syllabaries rather than alphabets, and/or with logograms would take us much further away visually, as indeed would languages read from right to left (or, as in some literary traditions, up-down). The further thought occurs that for those speaking English or another Germanic language there are glimmers of understanding to be had even prior to having an accompanying translation, in that a number of vocabulary items will trigger associations (and this understanding will be almost total in the case of Danish and near total for Swedish speakers — one could perhaps assemble a ranking of linguistic distance in this way).

Hus, delikat blomst, plante, døren, dyp, bakgrunnen, vindu, vegetasjon, tre.

There is an interesting supplementary comparison to be made here with calligraphic traditions in languages whose writing is constructed with logograms, where calligraphy has both symbolic and visual content and where the interaction between the two gives rise to an affective power which could be said to be more than the sum of the constituent parts. Here is Sturman (1997, 134-5) discussing an eleventh century poem attributed to Yu Xin and written in so called ‘wild’ cursive Chinese calligraphy:

This roller-coaster movement is emphasized by some noteworthy conceits in the calligraphy, especially the manipulated placement of the poem’s directional words to prompt awareness of the writing’s physical dimensions. Dong (east) begins the poem at upper right, while bei* (north, part of Bei Zhu’s name) is found at the opposite end of the column. This can hardly be coincidental, since the fourth and fifth columns open, respectively, with the characters shang (up) and xia (down). Conscious intent probably also underlies the writing of the character chu (emerging) with a thick charge of ink that quickly fades into a paie feibai (flying white) effect in the next character mo* (disappearing) at the bottom of the third column.

Of course the minimalist design on the page in Stavanger Street View is massively different in degree from the case cited above, but that it is a question of degree in the conscious visually oriented arrangement of symbols, and not a qualitative break, is underlined by Sturman’s subsequent observation that within the Chinese calligraphic tradition Yu Xin would be regarded as a ‘vulgar fellow’ and the poem discussed above ‘fit only for wineshop walls’ (ibid), and his further observation that the central calligraphic tradition discussed by him is much more a matter of ‘…understatement: characters play off one another through subtle balance, creating movement that might be likened to a stately dance’ (ibid).

For someone who does not experience the language in Stavanger Street View as a barrier in any sense, to whom it is transparent, I think there is, or, at least, I find there is, a sense of mystery, of strangeness, in how the language is both descriptive of quite precise images, enabling us to conjure up a mental picture of some definiteness, whilst all the while being aware that the relationship of this ‘picture’ to the Street View original (and indeed to the actual place imaged by the Street View vehicle) is highly problematic, not just on the chalk and cheese basis that one is an actual image on a computer screen and the second is a mental image (and the third is something of a completely different order, a real place allowing an infinity of possible imagings).

Let’s allow the deftest of court artists to make a serious attempt to transcribe the words as image. With the best will in the world this could not be but radically different from its ‘original’. I feel a strong tension between the different sets and formats of information, a tension arising from the fact one must work to convert the words to mental image or physical sketch to replace a fully detailed image which we know to exist somewhere other than in the movie and further that there are an infinite number of possible ‘solutions’ to this. An added tension arises from the fact that all of this process is implied within a format, moving image, which might ordinarily be the carrier of that ‘lost’ actual image. A further layer of complexity arises when we consider the process, almost algorithmic, certainly one remove away from full intentionality, by which the original Street View footage was captured.

3. 51 paintings for children and adults

My final example is a set of 51 paintings, largely in oil and all on the same size canvasses — 14X18″ (although the pieces vary in orientation) — of which I made the first 50 in an intense burst of activity between Sept 2014 and January 2015. They are entitled 51 paintings for children and adults (Szpakowski 2016b) and were made with the idea that they might prove to be of interest to both groups. I conceived of them, almost from the beginning, as a single large scale cycle but I have exhibited individual pieces separately. With two exceptions they feature some kind of text—usually, but not always, capitalized—in addition to their image content, although ‘in addition’ traduces the process since there is no set location across the series where the text is located on the paintings. The text is painted on in the same materials as the rest of the painting, with varying degrees of prominence in relation to the image content ‘proper’ and usually in a way which makes it an integral part of the overall visual design. (I quite consciously had in mind Chinese and Japanese calligraphic traditions referred to earlier where the visual as well as the symbolic aspect of the text carries affective force.) In all cases my intention was to make individual paintings which were of a piece, where the viewer would feel constrained to absorb both image and text together as a unity and furthermore to flit back and forth between symbolic and visual ‘reading’ of the textual component. Having said this, there are pieces in the series where one could argue that the image ‘proper’ is dominant (and there are also two pieces entirely lacking text) and other pieces—particularly where the text occupies the greater part of the painting—where the eye is drawn first to the text’s symbolically conveyed ‘meaning’, though it is important to note that even in these pieces subsequent examination yields a surface full of painterliness.

The subject matter of the pieces was fed by my biography and interests, including my fondness for wordplay, my childhood memories and enthusiasms. The meaning content of the text ranges from simple description of its ‘partner’ image, to ruminations on/contextualisations of the image, to puns, jokes and occasionally flat ‘contradictions’ of what we see. The texts are almost all in English although Russian appears in two pieces too.

I deliberately set out to encompass a wide range of topics and tone within the series. Humour is present—#48 lists the names of the days of the week vertically and in a right hand side bar the words ‘Those were the days’ is written vertically, a joke of sorts in English when delivered verbally, its freezing in ‘painting-time’ doing something further odd and teasing to it—but so, too, is high seriousness. #29 contains a verbatim section of an account by my late father of his trial as an ‘Enemy of the people’ in the WW2 Soviet Union and the figurative component is a rendering of a photograph of a guard tower from one of the Gulag camps. The final piece, #51, was made the day after the Bataclan atrocity in Paris with the simple text ‘I know that somewhere there is light’ against a dark background suggestive of a barrier or wall. An indecipherable symbol, resembling a started and abandoned letter follows the word ‘that’.

#14 offers a variant on Magritte’s Le Trahison des Images with an image of a pipe (here of the sort used for transporting fuel or water) together with the text ‘THIS IS A PIPE’. #43 is a loosely painted transcription of a webcam screenshot of countryside near to where I grew up, whose text is simply the webcam data for the day and time I looked at it and #36 is a reworking in oils of a drawing I made when I was six years old, with misspellings—‘a map of a robery’—retained. #31 recalls an episode from Gogol’s absurdist short story ‘The Nose’ , # 11 a late poem by Wallace Stevens and #7 places a small copy of Christopher Wood’s painting ‘Zebra and Parachute’ onto a gallery wall with spectator and the prominent text:

‘ON THE WALL OF THE GALLERY HUNG A STRANGE* PAINTING BY CHRISTOPHER WOOD *AND MARVELLOUS’

The interested reader can consult high resolution images of the whole series in the online archive referenced above but I hope I have said enough to indicate that the 51 paintings are intentionally heterogeneous in tone and subject matter and are drenched in appropriation, reference and remix. They look out into the world. They stir the pot. They confuse what it is to write, to speak and to make images.

I showed all 51 of them in early 2016 in a group show at the 20-21 Visual Arts Centre in Scunthorpe, UK. I was fortunate to have the writer Teju Cole write a catalogue piece for them. When he accepted the task I had no idea what would be forthcoming. I want to mark here again my scepticism about art and conventional knowledge and to underline my sense of the artwork as something with expansive and fuzzy borders in both space and time, for what did emerge was not theory nor description nor commentary but a work of literature that echoed the structure of my sequence, sang its themes back to it in variant forms and in a sense completed it (although further ‘completion’ is by my account entirely possible).

Cole’s piece is entitled 51 Thoughts for Children and Adults (Cole 2016) and is a work of great density but also concreteness. The connection between his piece and my work is a complex and rich one. The 51 Thoughts… do not match, sequentially at least, the 51 paintings and their content only rarely includes an easily discernible address to a particular painting in the sequence which even then is dense, opaque and heightened:

6 Sometimes 6 is 8.

17 “Well?”: the ambiguity is ground-breaking

40 “Jailbirds”: More than a one-liner because, as we all suspect, punning lives next door to music, and might well be used for divining. (ibid)

There is great learning at play here—sometimes it feels as if a skein of careful links is being constructed from the painting sequence out to the world and to other writers and imagers of that world, mediated all the while by Cole’s humanity (by which I mean his being-in-the-world-as-a-human, not some vague compliment on his views or feelings or decency).

42 Félix Vallotton’s portrait of Gertrude Stein in 1907 was made methodically from top to bottom, as though he were lowering a curtain.

46 Toni Morrison said, “I am interested in what prompts and makes possible this process of entering what one is estranged from.” But what is just as astonishing, I find, is to enter what one seems to already be intimate with.

34 De Chirico, after the war: “Every object has two appearances: one, the current one, which we nearly always see and which is seen by people in general; the other, a spectral or metaphysical appearance beheld only by some individuals in moments of clairvoyance and metaphysical abstraction.” (ibid)

At other times Cole’s curiosity or interests or train of thought takes him far away from my initial concerns and he spins so far off into personal associations and recollections that I lose my sense of my own work, which is, I think, as it should be.

48 In one or other of the cities I know, I once saw children full of the light that their closeness to one boundary of life brings, and I saw their adults full of another light, the light of closeness to the other boundary of life. The children and their adults helped each other along, unconfused by the variations in what they knew. (ibid)

Cole’s text is a virtuosic exercise in tone and voice. Myth, humour, darkness, anecdote, the commonplace, ventriloquism, the list, the question… All these and many more are present. The breadth of tone and address matches that of the painting sequence and that is is a sibling work only the most wilfully blind or churlish could deny, or that this siblinghood proves to be a powerful and fruitful way of apprehending an artwork. (I cannot, of course, prove this. I can only say: “Look, think, feel. Do you not sense this too?”) I take this as confirmation that my starting points outlined at the beginning of this piece are not entirely misconceived.

A concomitant of some of those ‘scene-setting’ positions is that not only is art practice a problematic instrument for research as generally understood but that the central core of artworks might be more resistant to scientific dissection or explication than many might think. (This is not to dismiss art history, a different kettle of fish altogether, with procedures that can be perfectly well be included under the broad rubric of ‘science’.) What Cole’s lyrical response to the 51 paintings suggest to me is that we might learn more about an artwork from responses that are themselves in some sense works of art. This suggests that the exclusion by the academy of journalistic or belles-lettres responses to work as somehow not properly scientific or academic (as in, for example, and altogether shamefully, in the UK Research Excellence Framework) in favour of a model drawn from 19th and early 20th scientific discourse, is mistaken or at least that it draws an entirely arbitrary line.

In his piece Anti-Art as Cognition (2005, 82) Thomas McEvilley argues that ‘…the presence of language within the frame of the visual artwork does not need justification; it is not a radical break with established art practice but reflects a tendency which has been present for centuries…’ He goes on to list examples, spanning the centuries, from the Western canon to which he could have surely added entire traditions like the Chinese and Japanese where it is the separation of text and image which is the exception. He argues that with the advent of the twentieth century it is simply that the foregrounding of text/image combination and interaction gathers pace and assumes a much greater prominence (and indeed, one might suggest, then presents itself for the first time as a problem requiring a solution) and in this he is surely right.

I want to note this because it is important to stress that the presentation and thinking through of three of my own works here involves no claim to pioneer status, to originality or even to aesthetic value (although this last would be the single judgment from others I would most savour).

Many artists have made work with a family resemblance to mine, and well before I did so. Hollis Frampton, in particular, stands out as someone who, in films such as Nostalgia and Poetic Justice from his Hapax Legomena (2012) cycle, sets up some of the tensions between word and image I have discussed here in works of signal originality and luminous beauty.

It would be interesting to develop some of the ideas sketched here in connection with those masterpieces, but that is for another occasion.

References

All links verified 14.6.2017.

“A Photo I Didn’t Take Today.” 2011. Flickr. July 20. https://www.flickr.com/photos/szpako/5958365139/.

Cioffi, Frank. 1998. Wittgenstein on Freud and Frazer. Cambridge, U.K. ; New York: Cambridge University Press.

Cole, Teju. 2016. “51 Thoughts for Children and Adults.” In We Are Not Alone (Catalogue), edited by Michael Szpakowski, 14–20. Furtherfield. http://furtherfield.org/WANA/wana-catalogue.pdf.

Fantl, Jeremy. 2016. “Knowledge How.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2016 Edition). https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2016/entries/knowledge-how/.

Fisher, John F. 1978. “An Analysis of the Kōans in the Mu Mon Kwan.” Numen 25 (1): 65–76.

Frampton, Hollis. 2012. A Hollis Frampton Odyssey. DVD. Criterion.

McEvilley, Thomas. 2005. In The Triumph of Anti-Art: Conceptual and Performance Art in the Formation of Post-Modernism, 1st ed, 82. Kingston, N.Y: McPherson & Co.

Sandis, Constantine. 2017. “If an Artwork Could Speak.” In Wittgenstein on Aesthetic Understanding, edited by Garry Hagberg. London: Palgrave Macmillan: 355–382.

“Scenes of Provincial Life – Post #455.” 2013. http://www.somedancersandmusicians.com/vlog/ScenesOfProvincialLife.cgi/2013/10/28#post455.

Sibley, Frank, “Aesthetic Concepts” Philosophical Review 68 (1959): 421–450.

Steacy, Will, ed. 2012. Photographs not taken: a collection of photographers’ essays. Hillsborough, US: Daylight Community Arts Foundation.

Sturman, Peter Charles. 1997. Mi Fu: Style and the Art of Calligraphy in Northern Song China. New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press.

Szpakowski, Michael. 2010. “The Little Artists.” In “The Little Artists”: John Cake & Darren Neave ; Works 1995-2010. London: Group Of.

———. 2012a. Shit Happens in Vegas. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QlAm4WKLGqU.

———. 2012b. “‘Training for a Better World’ by Annie Abrahams.” http://www.furtherfield.org.  http://www.furtherfield.org/features/reviews/training-better-world-annie-abrahams.

———. 2016a. “Scenes of Provincial Life: An Online Video Sequence and Commentary.” (PhD by publication commentary, Westminster, 2016). http://westminsterresearch.wmin.ac.uk/17210/1/Scenes%2520of%2520provincial%2520life%253A%
2520an%2520online%2520video%2520sequence%2520and%2520commentary.pdf.

———. 2016b. “Paintings for Children and Adults.” http://michaelszpakowski.tumblr.com/?og=1.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig, and G. E. M. Anscombe. 1989. Philosophical investigations =: Philosophische Untersuchungen. 3nd ed., Repr. Cambridge, Mass: Blackwell.

crackers, demoscene, kinetic typography, scroller

Daniel Botz
daniel.botz [a] lmu.de
Lecturer
Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich

Printable PDF version

While moving typography in general had been a creative scope since there were moving images, as a vital part of the graphic design of commercials and movie titles, the scrolling “ticker” rarely received the praise of artistic adaptation. It served merely as a workaround for printing long messages using the limited space of a computer monitor, to wrap a one-dimensional line of text around a two-dimensional screen medium and, to this day, is associated with cheap closing credits of tv shows and stock market data on a news channel. This article traces the evolution of moving text as a stylistic element of “crack intros” and “computer demos” between 1984 and 1992, from a simple line moving from left to right at the bottom of the screen to massive 3D letters free-floating in space. Until the early 1990s, when text messages began to disappear from demos, the demoscene turned out to be the most explorative and innovating culture ever to use the scroll text as an artistic device.

Introduction

The computer demoscene has received quite some attention among scientific researchers in recent years. Many investigations concentrate on the origins of the movement, the software cracking scene of the 1980s and base their argumentation on the analysis of the artifacts of these cultures, so-called intros, which were placed in front of pirated computer games, and demos, independent audiovisual presentations running as executable computer programs (Polgar 2005). It has become an accredited belief to regard these productions as both communication media and artistic statements of the scene, which seems obvious regarding the nature of cracker intros and early demos as works combining text, image, and sound (Reunanen, Wasiak, and Botz 2016).

But still the demoscene is considered as a marginal underground phenomenon of the home computer age and especially the visual output of the scene has rarely been the subject of academic studies, which is remarkable when dealing with a subculture that clearly defines itself for its creative productivity and has done so for over 30 years now. It seems that in most cases, the visible elements of style and artistic expression of a subculture are only examined in detail when they reach popularity outside the scene and surface in mainstream fashion. And in the case of the demoscene, this never happened.

Like in many “deviant” cultures, the artistic innovations of the demoscene do not originate from nowhere. They are mostly based on subcultural appropriation, sometimes transferring the aesthetics of popular movies, graphics or video effects to the limited capabilities of the common household computer hardware and combining them in a specific way into an audiovisual presentation for real-time operation (Reunanen, Wasiak, and Botz 2016, 813). In some cases, however, stylistic devices develop a life of their own when adopted by a subculture. They can evolve from a marginal supporting role to a leading motive, from a simple communication tool to a fetishized object.

This overview traces the evolution of the scroller, a text line moving across the screen, inside the demoscene, from a technique for displaying text generally disregarded for its poor aesthetic appeal to one of the most complex artistic forms of moving typography, a development unparalleled in the history of computer graphics. It will try to answer why scrollers came into existence, how they changed over time and why they disappeared all of a sudden, showing that the fate of this form of moving typography was mainly depending on five factors:

1. The rise and decline of the cracktro/demo as a communication device.
2. The competitive character of the cracker- and demoscene, which demanded higher visual complexity and more spectacle in each new production.
3. The technological progress of hardware platforms, which allowed for more flexibility to create computer graphics.
4. The development of the pictorial space in computer demos.
5. The changing forms of presentation and perception of demos.

The Scroller as a Communication Device

On looking through various texts about demoscene art, the scrolltext or scroller is regularly mentioned among the “classic” stylistic elements of cracktros and demos (Reunanen 2010). This is indeed noticeable because this specific way of displaying information neither developed any design traditions outside of the cracker-/demoscene nor has it ever received considerable recognition as an artistic element in general. On the contrary, while shifting a large text page upwards at least qualifies as “big movie ending”, the rolling single line at the bottom of the screen seems to have a bad reputation altogether. Game designer Richard Rouse III complains about the inconvenience of reading scrolling text in the mission briefing for computer games (Rouse 2005, 209). German media art authority Peter Weibel compares it to annoying non-stop-music rushing past the ears (Weibel 2000, 159). It is a known resentment even in contemporary web design: The “Marquee” tag in HTML is considered to be one of the most notorious usability faults. And up to this day, the rolling text line at the bottom of a tv screen is unanimously identified with 24-hour news, weather or home shopping channels displaying stock market data.

With this in mind, the question arises: How became this unpopular mode of text display one of the key features in the products of a digital subculture? Like most of the basic style elements, crackers borrowed the principles of text organization for their intros from the title screens of early computer games (Reunanen 2010, 58). But when the cracker scene adopted the scrolling text, there was actually no big tradition to draw on. The arcade machines used to deliver the usually scarce game instructions by unraveling pages of text letter by letter like a typewriter and resorted to flashing words to indicate demand for action, like “Player one get ready!” Home video game consoles like the Atari VCS rarely wasted time for introductory screens and started the game right away when switched on. On early home computers like the Apple II graphical but usually static splash screens were used in front of the games (Scott n.d.).

The emergence of scrollers eventually resulted from a new technical feature – the hardware scrolling abilities of the 1980s generation home computers like the Atari 8-bit series or the Commodore 64. The Atari 400 Version of Taito’s Space Invaders from 1980 is possibly the first game to feature a scroll text displaying the copyright message and it was the American software house Synapse Software which made regular use of the smoothly crawling text line at the bottom of the game’s title screen, becoming a trademark for the company. In games like Protector II, Sentinel or Shamus, this line was used to display the credits for the game, the assignment of keys as well as announcing more forthcoming software titles in the fashion of “Coming soon from Synapse”. Like the early crackers used to deface the game’s title screen by substituting text elements with their own handles and messages, it did not take long until some of the first cracking groups on the Commodore 64, German crews JEDI and Antiram, occupied the scroller, not only claiming responsibility for the copy protection removal but also shamelessly absorbing the advertisement which was altered to “Coming soon from JEDI”, thereby announcing that every Synapse game published will be cracked by the group (see Figure 1).

The proud advertising inside the Synapse scroller and its détournement by the crackers revealed a vital potential of the rolling text: The chance to communicate to the viewer beyond the standard information about the game at hand. While most of the essential instructions for the product appeared as static text to be grasped at a glance, the scroller could be used to grow the corporate image.

Crackers on the Commodore 64 did not limit themselves to mess up the title screen of games like the Apple II scene did. In 1984 the first cracker intros, or short, cracktros, appeared, transferring the crack message into a separate page before the actual game title screen. They consisted of simple – sometimes animated – logotypes and small static text elements. The first cracker intro to feature a scroller is probably the Danish Crackers intro for the game Ghostbusters dating from 1984 (see Figure 2). Alongside the close resemblance to title screens of contemporary computer games, it shows the new communication needs: The scroll text displays the member list of the cracking group, an information task which will remain important in the future.

As the scene transformed into the well-organized business of software piracy, scrollers took on various additional jobs. Sometimes a cracktro featured multiple scrollers simultaneously, each delivering another dedicated content (see Figure 3). The first scroller could be a short message containing the name of the cracked game, the release date plus the enhancements the cracker attached to it like for example an “unlimited lives” function (Wasiak 2012). The second would often contain the greetings list, which recites the names of respected and befriended groups inside the scene, often in preferential order, or would be used for news, invitations to copy parties, comments on other cracker’s releases or ranting at disliked other cracking groups.

Due to this partitioning into multiple independent text elements, cracktros had become modular pieces of software which could be easily edited for use on different cracked games. In this regard, the scroller became the key feature to turn the cracker intro into a communication device for an evolving subculture. It also helped to establish the cracktro as the ideal medium for self-expression within the scene, and it became the best solution for displaying large amounts of information while keeping the graphic layout of the screen intact. At the same time, the cracker’s specific use of the scroller revealed a basic characteristic of moving type: The “news ticker”-like volatility, the short time span between the appearance and disappearance of the words implies that the message is new, fresh and relevant, like a telegraph output. On top of that, the scroller forces its own mode of reception upon the reader. The constant flow of letters dictates reading speed and reading rhythm and does not allow for breaks. You cannot take your eyes off the streaming message. A reading experience like watching a movie.

The Scroller as an Artistic Challenge

Due to the competitive nature of the cracking scene, crackers not only had to be fast at delivering the newest games, they also had to come up with innovative and unique visuals for their cracktros, like skillfully drawn graphics or colorful effects. Cracktros had to look “sophisticated”, new and individual in the way they presented information. In the first place, this included everything which set the design of an intro apart from the standard text output of the Commodore 64, which was 25 lines of text, each containing 40 square characters while one character cell consisted of 8×8 pixels. It was possible to generate individual fonts by drawing own characters and combining multiple adjacent character cells could be used to double or triple the size of the letters (see Figure 4). But the greater aim of intro coders was to make scroll text rendering more flexible instead of just moving a single line from right to left. The numerous tricks involved shifting the vertical position of letters according to a sine curve to generate a “swinging line” or applying color cycling to the letters, whereby an animated color gradient causes the scroller to flash up and fade out again.

Good design was not the only consideration while creating intros. Intro programmers on the Commodore 64 tried to test the limits of the machine by coding effects that seemed impossible by then. Flash Cracking Group and 1001 Crew were the first to navigate their scrollers through the border of the C-64, a monochrome “safety” area around the screen initially designed to prevent the screen content from distortion near the edges of the monitor tube. Placing text where it was not supposed to work qualified as a true achievement. This technical gimmick provided enough sensation to distribute the borderletter as an independent production, not longer attached to a cracked game and later to be called a “demo”. But just as scrollers were instrumental in creating the demo format, they were also at the heart of competitive demo programming. Coders aimed at producing the largest letters (megascroller, see Figure 5), the greatest number of simultaneous scrollers (multiscroller) or the largest amplitude of a scroller following a sine wave path (mega-DYCP).

As scrollers are given such creative names, it can be concluded that they are consciously perceived as design elements. The question remains, however, what defines a “scroller” within the demoscene in contrast to its “news ticker” antecedent. Here, the scroller serves as a good example of the concepts of genotext and phenotext as popularized by Julia Kristeva. Inke Arns uses these terms to describe the multiple levels of text involved in digital works of the net.art movement (Arns 2004). The genotext is what generates the phenotext. While the visible screen content is described as the phenotext, the executed program code is the genotext. In the case of a scroller, the genotext can again be divided into three different texts: The character code containing the written content, the font bitmap defining the shape of the letters and the program routine used to display the text controlling speed, path, and transformation of the scroller. As the labeling of scrollers rarely refers to content or typography but almost always to the way of movement across the screen, it can be assumed that the display routine is the most defining element for a demo scroller.

During the second half of the 1980s a new generation of home computers established itself and, year by year, the activity of crackers and demo artists shifted onto the new platforms among which the Amiga series and the Atari ST were the most popular. With the graphical capabilities of these computers, graphical quality, variety, and flexibility of scrollers increased. The Amiga demoscene gave birth to at least three new types of scrollers: first of all, the improved color management of the Amiga allowed for seamless gradients, which led to the infamous “chrome” style of the late 1980s, where letters featured a mirroring surface, beveled edges and all kinds of metallic gloss. The second innovation consisted of mostly monochrome scrollers being bent and twisted in many ways (see Figure 6). This resulted in letters winding around a horizontal or vertical axis (tubescroller), being partially magnified as if seen through a glass lens or wavelike distorted as if projected onto a water surface. The Amiga scene was very ambitious about challenging the convention of the reading direction with the innovation of scrollers rolling on a circle-like track (circlescroller) or following an arbitrary path across the screen (snurklescroller, see Figure 7).

The third and most noticeable invention of the amiga scene was the expansion of scrollers into three-dimensional space. Proceeding from simple vector-based line drawings to solid letters, scrollers became increasingly involved in the perspective design of the pictorial space. In Hunt for 7th October by Cryptoburners (1990) the words rush past the viewer like a fast train (see Figure 8). After six years of development, scrollers finally appeared as architectural formations, making the reading process a spatial experience.

The End of the Scroller Era

When scrollers entered the virtual three-dimensional space, they had discarded their initial communicative purpose long ago. The distribution of pirated software via BBS (Bulletin Board Systems) began to replace postal shipping of disks and the file_id.diz text file took on the tasks of the cracker intro scroller (Reunanen 2010, 10). When demos left the context of the “illegal” software piracy scene behind, the communication needs of the demoscene changed, and so did the contents of scroll texts. Some parts remained, like the greetings list, announcements for – now legal – demo parties or bragging about programming skills. But according to the self-reflective nature of demos, scrollers increasingly tended to comment on the circumstances of their own production. Coders provided explanations of programming methods they used and even excuses for bugs they could not fix in time (Bader 1990, 184). Various demos feature two scrollers, the first commenting on the artful deformation of the second. Sometimes, the text is aware of its own transformation – “Yeeeaaahh Bouncing!!!”, as it reads in Legalize It by Vision (1988) – or hints at its own illegibility: “If you can read the following text you are an alien!!!”, as in the Circle Twist of the Red Sector Inc Megademo (1989).

Until the early 1990s, demos followed cyclical patterns. Like the first cracktros, a demo part was an endless loop, in which all graphical and textual elements repeated itself until being terminated by mouse click. The viewer would decide how long to read the scroll text and when to proceed to the next demo part, or, in the case of a cracktro, to the game. But with the increasing popularity of demo parties, where demos are screened to a large audience rather than being watched on a computer monitor by a single viewer, this format was abandoned in favor of linear structures where short segments follow each other without user interaction. In this fast-paced sequence of effects, long scroll texts not longer worked (Botz 2015b, 315). Additionally, typography was a useful style element within the two-dimensional compositions of early demos but did not match with the consistently three-dimensional pictorial spaces of demos in the mid-1990s. When the demoscene emerged on the PC platform, it inherited most of the style elements of the Amiga scene, but one of the unique characteristics of the PC scene consisted in the dismissal of the scroller, as the catchphrase “scrollers suck” from the demo Panic by Future Crew (1992) became a popular slogan (Botz 2011, 353).

Conclusion

In the three-decade history of the demoscene, scrollers occupied a short time span only. For a long time they had been unanimously identified with the “oldskool” phase of the demoscene (Tasajärvi 2004, 65), often disdained as an old and boring demo effect. Today it is possible to comprehend why the scroller had been appropriated by the cracker scene and developed into an artistic category as well as a technical challenge. In a world where digital communication is a daily routine, the scrolling messages of the demoscene appear as an obsolete and romantic format, like decorated letters, which, more and more, detached themselves from their communication function and turned into artistic exercises.

Finally, in the 2010s, scrollers returned to the Commodore 64 scene. Their comeback on the first demoscene platform, however, is not completely accidental, as almost all of them appear to be further stages of the low-resolution scroller, a variant predominantly developed on the C-64 and later on the Amiga (Botz 2011, 352; see Figure 9). This type of scroller functions as a coarse display matrix where each pixel is represented by another graphical element like a bitmap object or – again – a text symbol. If this matrix is being deformed and distorted, the text appears to be rolling on a twisted LED ticker display (see Figure 10).

This marginal return of the scroller, however, reminds us of one of the core concepts of demoscene art: To this day, demos are executable programs which are passed on to the computer as code, as linear text (Botz 2015a, 103). This is what sets them apart from movies. Thus, in very simplified terms, one could say that even if we don’t see a scroller on the screen, if watching a demo, we can always imagine a single line of alphanumeric code running inside the machine.

References

All links verified 14.6.2017

Arns, Inke. 2004. “Texte, die (sich) bewegen: Zur Performativität von Programmiercodes in Netzkunst und Software Art.” In Inke Arns et al. (eds.): Kinetographien. Bielefeld: Aisthesis-Verl (Schrift und Bild in Bewegung, 10), (pp. 57–78).

Bader, Roland. 1990. “Elektronische Graffiti.” In Schindler, W. (ed.): MaC* – Reloaded: Perspektiven aus der Skepsis für *Menschen am Computer. Berlin: RabenStück Verlag, (pp. 182–93). Retrieved from http://www.josefstal.de/mac/days/2004/buch/bader_elektron_graffiti.pdf.

Botz, Daniel. 2011. Kunst, Code und Maschine—Die Ästhetik der Computer-Demoszene [Art, Code and Machine – The Aesthetics of the Computer Demoscene]. Bielefeld, Germany: Transcript Verlag.

Botz, Daniel. 2015a. “The Enhancement of Punch-Tape: Moving Type in the Computer Demoscene.” In Bernd Scheffer, Christine Stenzer, Peter Weibel, and Soenke Zehle (eds.): Typemotion. Type as Image in Motion [ZKM, Museum of Contemporary Art, Karlsruhe, November 16, 2013 – March 2, 2014, FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology), Liverpool November 13, 2014 – February 15, 2015]. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, (pp. 101–3).

Botz, Daniel. 2015b. “Commented Archive. Schriftfilme from 1897 to Today: Computer Demoscene.” In Bernd Scheffer, Christine Stenzer, Peter Weibel, and Soenke Zehle (eds.): Typemotion. Type as Image in Motion [ZKM, Museum of Contemporary Art, Karlsruhe, November 16, 2013 – March 2, 2014, FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology), Liverpool November 13, 2014 – February 15, 2015]. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, (pp. 308–21).

Polgar, Tamas. 2005. Freax: The Brief History of the Demoscene (Vol. 1). Winnenden, Germany: CSW Verlag.

Reunanen, Markku. 2010. Computer Demos—What makes them tick? Helsinki, Finland: Aalto University School of Science and Technology.

Reunanen, Markku, Patryk Wasiak, and Daniel Botz. 2015. “Crack Intros. Piracy, Creativity and Communication.” International Journal of Communication, 9(1), pp. 798–817.

Rouse, Richard. 2005. Game Design: Theory & Practice. Plano, Texas: Wordware Publishing.

Scott, Jason. n.d. “Apple II Crack Screens.” Retrieved from http://artscene.textfiles.com/intros/APPLEII.

Tasajärvi, Lassi. 2004. Demoscene. The Art of Real-Time. Helsinki: Evenlake Studios.

Wasiak, Patryk. 2012. “‘Illegal Guys’. A History of Digital Subcultures in Europe during the 1980s.” Zeithistorische Forschungen/Studies in Contemporary History 9/2012. Retrieved from http://www.zeithistorische-forschungen.de/site/40209282/default.aspx.

Weibel, Peter. 2000. “Chronokratie. Ein Gespräch mit Birgit Richard.” In Kunstforum International Vol. 151 (pp. 152–9).

Commodore 64, demoscene, slöjd, teletext

Raquel Meyers
raquel [a] raquelmeyers.com
Artist
http://www.raquelmeyers.com/

Printable PDF version

We live in a time where hardware and software become obsolete before most of the users have learned how to use them, or they disappear into the obedience to standards that made us passive observers and consumers. Keys of Fury is brutalist storytelling about technology and keystrokes, and an artistic statement based on the concept, research and practice of KYBDslöjd, which I define as “drawing and crafting by type in”. It is based on the text-mode, where the grid is the framework and the character set is the instructions, using the Commodore 64 computer, teletext system, typewriter, mosaic and cross-stitch as media. I claim that old technologies are an unravelling force, a critique of the parasitic abuse of technology by postmodernity and capitalism, instead of a case for nostalgia. A new understanding, a message in an unknown language that we are still learning. Keys of Fury (Les Clefs de la Fureur) is also the name of the ‘Artist in Residency Le Shadok & Strasbourg European Fantastic Film Festival’ exhibition, curated by Esté-elle Dalleu and Arnaud Reeb in September 2016.

I am ready to burn. I am ready to shine. No fear, just text. You will see the mistakes and the wonders. Nothing is to be hidden, everything is to be typed. Brutality itself. Because type in is the noise of my ♥.

In 2010 I started to research the concept and formats of the text-mode, a computer display mode in which content is internally represented in terms of characters rather than individual pixels. In collaboration with Goto80, we started the Tumblr site called http://text-mode.tumblr.com (2012–2014), where we collected all kinds of media related with the term. But my interest was not only on art research: it was, as well, a starting point for my own epistemological practice. As Mersch and Radosh (2015) pointed out:

Like the process of writing, it has no end, it collapses in on itself and despairs of ever achieving closure. The artistic experiment has no utilitarian result. It is content with the adventure of finding the paths that can taken (meta hodos), and their endless labyrinthine branches are a source equally of agony and enjoyment.

I had been working with pixels since 2004 to create animations and designs, but it was just the beginning of the lo-fi adventure. When I changed pixels to characters, the joy of the text-mode began. The path I was looking for. The origin of KYBDslöjd, which stands for keyboard dexterity.

To be more precise, for drawing and crafting by typing, using just a character set provided, in this case, by the Commodore 64 computer, the teletext system, and typewriters. KYBD is the acronym for keyboard, on which a drawing or an animation is typed in by using different keystrokes for each mark on the screen or the paper. Slöjd means dexterity or skill. A complete method of craft stored in text. KYBDslöjd uses keys, references and applied media instead of Manovich’s (2010) concept of new media, “When new media objects are created on computers, they originate in numerical form. But many new media objects are converted from various forms of old media.” The following sections define the whole spectrum of what it is and what it stands for. They are: ‘Slöjd’, ‘Demoscene and PETSCII’, ‘Teletext’, ‘Brutalism’, ‘Typewriter, Cross-Stitch and Mosaic’, ‘The Language’, ‘Myopia for the Future’ and ‘Talk Is Cheap’.

Slöjd

Slöjd is a Scandinavian system of handicraft-based education from the nineteenth century. Hoffman & Salomon (1982) noted on the origin of the word:

The word Sloyd (Swedish, Slöjd) is derived from the Icelandic, and means dexterity or skill. In old Swedish, we find the adjective slög (artistic or skillful). In the Low German dialect, the word Klütern has a similar signification.

They also wrote about handicrafts’ need for attention, physical powers and perseverance, which are in clear contrast to the basic, fast knowledge that creates emulation of a skill, of art. Handicraft is dependent on bodily labor through the dexterity of the hand and requires training and cultivation of our bodies and our senses:

Slöjd has for its aims, as a means of formal instruction-to instil a love for work in general; to create a respect for rough, honest bodily labor; to develop self-reliance and independence; to train to habits of order, exactness, cleanliness, and neatness; to teach habits of attention, industry, and perseverance; to promote the development of the physical powers; to train the eye to the sense of form, and to cultivate the dexterity of the hand. (Hoffman & Salomon 1892)

But slöjd was also gender restricted, all forms were not accessible to everyone. The system of slöjd “established manual schools in which spinning, sewing, and weaving were taught to girls, wood-work to boys, and gardening to both”, asserted Hoffman & Salomon (1892). Nowadays these definitions are not as binding as they were in the past, but they still have a strong effect on the Scandinavian society, close to what Rodríguez Carrión (2013) declared:

The word “craft” brings to memory the “handmade” object. It is generally associated with manual dexterity, skilled artistry, and the art of making (process), but can also express cultural identity (such as folk art) and past traditions.

Considering that I did not grow up in the Scandinavian system, I do not have the same relation with the word as they do. Bauman (2000) noted: “To create (and so also to discover) always means breaking a rule; following a rule is mere routine, more of the same – not an act of creation.” In my opinion, nowadays the definition of slöjd is connected to what Dormer (1997b) wrote: “It is not craft as ‘handcraft’ that defines contemporary craftsmanship: it is craft as knowledge that empowers a maker to take charge (assume control or responsibility) of technology.” Responsibility rather than control, or even better, commitment. As Sennett (2008) pointed out: “The craftsman represents the special human condition of being engaged.”

In the long battle between art and crafts, low and high status, slöjd opens up an opportunity to take back the concepts as honest and rough labor, like the statement by Walter Gropius in the Programme of the Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar 1919 (quoted by Conrads 1970): “Let us then create a new guild of craftsmen without the class distinctions that raise an arrogant barrier between craftsman and artist.” A mixed medium between craft and technology. A challenge, as Dormer (1997b) noted, “Computer technology now provides craft with its most serious philosophical and practical challenges.”

Demoscene and PETSCII

George Borzyskowski (2000) defines demoscene as: “[…] the subculture which survives on the basis of liberty and cooperation in the absence of coercive or cohesive structural influence”, and presents an overview of the ‘demo’ genre form in terms of function and audio visual syntax. In regard to demos, Borzyskowski continued:

Demos are not made without a cost. The amount of time, patience, knowledge and skill development required are far from trivial. To make a competent production in this genre, graphic, musical and programming ability must be integrated and the work can occupy from a few hours for an intro by a veteran group, to several weeks or months for a major demo release, as is often recollected in included texts.

AcidT* is my C64 demoscener name, and my first demoparty was Datastorm in February 2011, Gothenburg, where I started to work with PETSCII, one of the key media of KYBDslöjd. I learned the software and drawing technique at several demoparties along the years. PETSCII, also known as CBM ASCII, is the character set used in Commodore Business Machines’ (CBM) 8-bit home computers, starting with the PET from 1977 and including the VIC-20, C-64, CBM-II, Plus/4, C-16, C-116 and C-128. The character set was largely designed by Leonard Tramiel and PET designer Chuck Peddle.

Rodríguez Carrión (2013) noted:

We are seeing a new craft-resurgence in the figure of the digital craftsman within the subculture of hacking and tinkering (crafting) the algorithm (code) or the conception of parametric constrains. These computer enthusiasts are passionately pushing the boundaries of their work and are determined to investigate design boundaries within the virtual world.

This could also be related to Barbrook and Pit Schultz, who in their 1997 ‘Digital Artisans Manifesto’ propose the concept of a ‘digital artisan’, whose autonomous work is made possible in the manner of past craft workers (quoted in Cox 2010).

KYBDslöjd uses a particular way of working with keystrokes and PETSCII on the Commodore 64 with software developed by Mathman (Johan Kotlinski) called Nop. The program consists of two parts: a block of data statements containing the instructions where all the keystrokes are recorded and a section of code which reads in the data and outputs it as an animation and speeds it up. There is no menu, so all the instructions, like color, position and character shape, are typed on the keyboard. Only a black screen with just a blinking character is waiting for you to do something. This is the starting point, like a blank sheet where you are alone and no one else is to blame. Not even the technology for being obsolete. Sennett (2008) noted: “Getting better at using tools comes to us, in part, when the tools challenge us, and this challenge often occurs just because the tools are not fit-for-purpose.” In KYBDslöjd, hardware and software are a challenge, they are not decorations or sources of nostalgia. There is a narrative, a dialogue with the technology. I use the screen as a canvas, a rectilinear grid on which, one keystroke at a time, I build graphics and animations character by character, like crafting or the typewriter technique as Saper (2009) described: “In terms of the procedures to make your own typewriter poem, you should know at the outset that you cannot make corrections, so any unintended strikes force the artist to start over.”

It seems obvious to me how the notion of “skillfully executed” applies to the demoscene and KYBDslöjd, building the connection with craft and the link to typewriter art. The canvas and the characters are common to all, with the exception of hardware and software. As Saper (2009) noted:

Instead of looking to painting, drawing, or even typesetting as an analogy for typewriter poetry, one might look to a traditional folk art, embroidery on canvas, because both use a rectilinear grid on which to build the design one keystroke or stitch at a time.

Alan Riddell (1975) agreed, “One traditional craft has a similarity to typewriter work: embroidery on canvas. This has a rectilinear grid on which the design is built up one stitch at a time.” You cannot make corrections, so any unintended strokes force you to start all over again. This software is not meant for generative graphics. One special feature is that you can scroll up, down, right and left. As Hawking (1988) pointed out, “Imaginary time is indistinguishable from directions in space.” But when you go backward, the black blankness appears again. What you do is what you get. Straightforward. No shortcuts.

“The solitude of the draughtsman before the page is a way of understanding life… Enjoying the creative process is a unique privilege of the author. A pleasure-almost-exclusive for which it is worth to lose oneself”, as stated by Crespo (2015). I lose myself and I type.

Teletext

In 2016 I wrote a chapter called “Is it Just Text?” in the anthology Teletext in Europe: From the Analog to the Digital Era, edited by Hallvard Moe and Hilde Van den Bulck. The chapter looked at teletext from the perspective of an artist and of its artistic value:

It is argued that teletext is not just news on demand provided by television networks or a character set, and that it is about much more than nostalgia, profit, constraints, domesticity or zombie technology stored in a garage, because teletext performs in ways we have not fully designed it for and not yet fully understood. (Meyers 2016)

“Basically, what teletext did was make it possible to transmit digital text and graphics in color simultaneously with normal television programming… The viewer simply pushed a button on a remote keypad to switch from the network or locally originated video program to the main menu screen of the teletext service”, noted Graziplene (2000). By definition:

Teletext is a news and information service in the form of text and graphics, transmitted using the spare capacity of existing television channels to televisions with appropriate receivers. What the viewer sees on the screen of his teletext TV is a page of characters, 40 in a row, 20–24 rows, 800–960 characters per page. These characters can be presented in a limited number of colours, including coloured backgrounds, and the character set contains all the letters of the alphabet (both uppercase and lowercase), numbers, punctuation marks, special symbols, and graphics. (Meyers 2016)

Teletext is a means of building text and simple geometric shapes from mosaic blocks, and the second key media in KYBDslöjd. In 2011, when I got in touch with the teletext engineer Peter Kwan, who had developed an open source USB teletext inserter (VBIT), we started to work together in a long-term project for teletext live visuals. Teletext is not a physical object; it is the dark band dividing pictures horizontally on the television screen, used by the PAL system. Vertical blanking interval lines are like REM (rapid eye movement) saccades, a door to unlock the imagination. In the aforementioned chapter “I propose to look at teletext as techne, i.e. as knowledge of techniques and knowledge of a skillful or artful use” (Meyers 2016).

Teletext itself is free, a free technology. Business interest from television broadcast companies is long gone thanks to the internet – hobbyists took over as in the late 1970s. “The earliest users were home electronics enthusiasts who had built their own decoder units as add-ons to their television receivers using plans published in a popular electronics and wireless hobbyists’ magazine”, as Graziplene (2000) pointed out. Nowadays you can create your own teletext inserter with a Raspberry Pi and make your own teletext pages with an open source software called edit.tf, created by Simon Rawles. In late February 2017, at the “Block Party 2017: Teletext is the Future” event held at the Centre for Computing History in Cambridge, Dan Farrimond, Kieran H.J. Connell, Jason Robertson, Peter Kwan, Carl Attrill, Peter Fagan, Julian Brown, Alistair Cree, Steve Horsley, Simon Rawles and myself began to work as a collective to combine our skills, practice and knowledge with a technology that still has much to say. As Sennett (2008) claimed: “In technology, as in art, the probing craftsman does more than encounter mess; he or she creates it as a means of understanding working procedures.” Teletext, as well as PETSCII, become arousing tools that awaken the challenge between craft and technology. The future is not obsolete.

Brutalism

As Yuill (2004) wrote:

Brutalism, more properly known as New Brutalism” in its heyday, is arguably one of the most unpopular and least understood architectural styles of the 20th Century. It is mostly associated with rough-cast concrete buildings where its name is linked with the beton brut” casting technique used by Le Corbusier.

I claimed that KYBDslöjd is brutality itself. The character set, provided by PETSCII and teletext, is used unadorned and rough cast, like concrete, which connects it to the Brutalist architecture. Both capture the spirit of their time and contradictions, like in the novel High-rise by Ballard (1975): “An architecture designed for war, on the unconscious level if no other.” – an uncontrollable force. A message in an unknown language, which reveals what it is and what it does without adornment. Brutalism has the unfortunate reputation of evoking a raw dystopia, and old technologies, in general, easily become “objects of nostalgia”. But nostalgic‬, ‪retro‬, obsolete or ‪limited‬ are rhetoric qualities earned by constant repetition. Barthes (1989) observed: “Rhetoric, grandiose effort of an entire culture to analyze and classify the forms of speech, to render the world of language intelligible.”

But, most of the time, rhetoric is used to persuade rather than to argue. As Muckelbauer (2008) pointed out, “First, because of rhetoric’s traditional concern for persuasion (rather than communication), it has been intimately involved with questions of force rather than questions of signification or meaning.” A supplement where nothing else can be said. Hila Becher declared: “[Brutal architecture] is honest, it is functional, and reflects what it does. That’s why we like it.” KYBDslöjd and Brutalism are alike because their raw aspect and unpretentious honesty are ethical rather than aesthetic. Allison and Peter Smithson claimed that “up to now brutalism has been discussed stylistically, whereas its essence is ethical”. Both quotes appeared in the book This brutal world (Chadwick 2016). Yuill (2004) went even further:

It would be more precise to state that they are machines capable of manipulating binary patterns which simulate aspects of human mathematics. It is in those areas of coding that deal directly with this pattern-making process that we encounter a kind of Brutalism.

The rawness of old technologies made KYBDslöjd a brutal medium.

Typewriter, Cross-Stitch and Mosaic

Typewriter is a reference medium in KYBDslöjd, while cross-stitch and mosaic are media applied from PETSCII and Teletext. “Although pictures have been ‘drawn’ on typewriters for many years in the past, a written pattern for reproducing a picture is something entirely new. They can also be reproduced on many types of computer”, noted Neill (1982) on the program for the Commodore PET micro, written by Nick Higham, which produced a printout of a Prince Charles portrait, included in the book.

I started to work with typewriters with the project Secretary Part I (2014) and Noise My Txt (2016). Both are live ‘type in’ performances that mixed the Commodore 64 and typewriter. I have been using typewriter as an ironic link to the secretary subject. For me the word secretary has more to do with the late medieval English meaning, “person entrusted with a secret”, rather than the “female work-force”, which originated at the end of the nineteenth century, as mentioned by Riddell (1975): “More than taking the drudgery from writing, it has transformed business and created the largest female workforce in history, the monstrous regiment of typists.” The typewriter “was instrumental to the emancipation of women” noted Tullett (2014). Typewriter is the machine of modernity and standardization, the reference media whose development “broke the male hegemony in text production and thus completed our modern trinity of the Real, the Imaginary and the Symbolic”, quoting Kittler (2013).

Cross-stitch refers to counted-thread embroidery and is a medium applied from teletext in KYBDslöjd. A craft that uses the X-shaped stitches in a tiled, raster-like pattern to form a teletext page rather than a picture. It takes KYBDslöjd out of the screen and makes it analog. The example below is a teletext page called Monster Girl (2015) selected for the Museum of Teletext Art (MUTA), broadcast on the Finnish teletext Yle page 805 and at Der Teletext im Ersten / MUTA im ARD Text pages 884–5 (2016).

During the residence at Le Shadok, Strasbourg, in September 2016, I laser cut several text characters from the Commodore 64 character set into acrylic (PMMA) objects. A PETSCII drawing was produced by arranging together the PMMA pieces. The result was a mosaic built off-the-grid, shown at the exhibition Keys of Fury (Les Clefs de la Fureur). Mosaic became a medium applied from PETSCII in KYBDslöjd.

As well as with the mosaic, I made several rubber stamps with some of the Commodore 64 characters. During a workshop I conducted at Campbelltown Arts Centre in March 2017, the participants used the PETSCII stamps to create patterns and designs – another example of applied media in KYBDslöjd.

Lord (2014) noted: “Ancient Greek potters saw the clay bodies of their vessels as surfaces that could be painted initially with geometric patterns, but then increasingly with imaginative narratives.” The geometric patterns included in the Commodore 64 character set do the same. It is how you connect them together in an additive way, where one character follows the other, that builds the imaginary using the grid or off-the-grid canvas.

PETSCII and teletext give redundancy and practice economy in construction, like Arnheim (1971) observed on a child’s drawing that represented a skyscraper:

He has recognized the redundancy of the window pattern and has practiced economy by a shortcut in communication. If his procedure strikes us as amusing, it is because we realize that to display structure to the eyes is the very purpose of a picture. […] In dealing with structure, as is constantly done in the arts, regularity of form is not redundancy. It does not diminish information and thereby diminish order.

The shape of the characters and how they are combined is like crafting, but in the sense of how Greenhalgh points out that the phrase “’the craft’ had (and still retains) the meaning of power and secret knowledge”, as cited by Dormer (1997a). Imagination is shaped into characters, a new language to be learned. Based on what Saussure (1959) said: “Language is a system that has its own arrangement.”

The Language

KYBDslöjd is not only a type in method, but also a system of text characters (signs). It is a language. Saussure (1959) noted: “Language is a system of signs that express ideas, and is therefore comparable to a system of writing, the alphabet of deaf-mutes, symbolic rites, polite formulas, military signals, etc.” Its arrangement uses them as instructions on the grid. “The grid as a controlling principle in the form we know it today still remained to be invented”, noted Müller-Brockmann (2008). The grid is the ethos, the system of order. The character set is the narrative for technical knowledge. Like Rodríguez Carrión (2013) describes:

In the context of the digital medium, craft exploration refers to the circumstance where designers apply specific technical knowledge (skill) in an undetermined and open exploration of form, constrains, and limitations that they establish to guide the form generation that is their unique expression.

It is not arbitrary that part of the character set is based on basic geometrical shapes. As Frutiger (1989) pointed out:

It appears from archaeological evidence that humankind has an innate feeling for geometry. Traces of primary signs of the same form are found in many regions of earth, and it may be assumed that they expressed similar meanings for the most varied races at widely different times. This survey is deliberately restricted to a small number of characteristic figures: the square, triangle, and circle among the closed figures; the cross and arrow among the open ones.

The character set is now the property of everyone, control over it is lost. In the case of Teletext, VBI is on the PAL signal, and in the case of PETSCII, Commodore International, defunct in 1994. As Saussure (1959) noted:

The prescriptions of codes, religious rites, nautical signals, etc., involve only a certain number of individuals simultaneously and then only during a limited period of time; in language, on the contrary, everyone participates at all times, and that is why it is constantly being influenced by all.

It is a straightforward language based on keystrokes. Like in ‘tangram’, you have to use your imagination to assemble the characters. Frutiger (1989) stated:

We form one complete sign from the basic signs of the square, triangle, circle, and cross already mentioned in our considerations. This piling up of the different elements produces such a complex and opaque expression that it can no longer be called a sign, but rather a schema with thousands of possibilities.

It is not a task of management or boredom. On the 50th anniversary of BASIC, in the article Thank you, Basic: Developers remember 50 years of creative coding (The Guardian, 2014), Bellis claimed “It felt like magic, learning a secret code”.

At this point it is important to admit that I am just a mediator, even if I learnt the basics of the (not so) secret code. As Barthes (1977) put it: “In ethnographic societies the responsibility for a narrative is never assumed by a person but by a mediator, shaman or relator whose ‘performance’ – the mastery of the narrative code – may possibly be admired but never his ‘genius’.” I am a KYBDslöjd shaman, a performer who fights the absence of meaning in emerging media technology.

Myopia for the Future

THIS IS A STORY OF THE FUTURE – NOT THE FUTURE OF SPACE SHIPS AND MEN FROM OTHER PLANETS – BUT THE IMMEDIATE FUTURE

Written prologue for Michael Anderson’s film 1984 (1956).

The hypersensitivity to reward in decision-making has been termed by Damasio (2006) as “myopia for the future”. To be “oblivious to the consequences of their actions and guided only by immediate prospects”, argued Bechara et al. (1994). Some political scientists apply this concept to society as the tendency to choose that which rewards us now, regardless of the damage it may cause in the long run. I claim that immediate satisfaction can be applied to technology as well.

We hunt and are hunted by fear in our cellphones. Quoting Steyerl (2012): “Your life condenses into an object in the palm of your hand, ready to be slammed into a wall and still grinning at you, shattered, dictating deadlines, recording, interrupting.” As well as Leader (2016): “People complain of being too attached to their phones and tablets, as if their hands just can’t stop touching them. The hand, symbol of human agency and ownership, is also a part of ourselves that escapes us.” We are trapped between autonomy and self-determination. Fuck the long run! Long live myopia for the future!

We live in a time where modern technology does not seem to challenge us, or as Svendsen (2005) noted: “The problem is that modern technology more and more makes us passive observers and consumers, and less and less active players. This gives us a meaning deficit.” Convenience is king and apathy arises. He also mentioned that

Technology involves the dematerialization of the world, where things disappear into pure functionality. We have long since passed a stage where we could keep track of technology. We scurry along behind, as is perhaps particularly clear in IT, where hardware and software have always become obsolete before most of the users have learned how to use them.

There is no quest for knowledge and imagination, only a new order of speed, escape and passivity.

There is a misconception in regard to old technologies, thanks to media archaeology and Bruce Sterling’s Dead Media Project (1995). They are not “unrealized dead media” or “a recurring pattern of media activity is the use of electronic or technological media to bridge the divide between the living and the dead”, as claimed by Huhtamo and Parikka (2011). They are not zombies to be reanimated or kept stored, they are meant to be used. They are not souvenirs from the past or a nostalgic cliché. As Graburn (1979) pointed out: “Souvenir gift objects can become visual clichés, conforming to the consumer’s popular misconceptions.”

We are now in a future invention nightmare originating from the late 1970s’ computer utopias in California and their propaganda on how computer networks could create order in society shaped by neoliberal wisdom. Simply put, economy is the king. Anything that goes against it must be neutralized (destroyed). Bauman (2007) emphasized that

Progress, once the most extreme manifestation of radical optimism and a promise of universally shared and lasting happiness, has moved all the way to the opposite, dystopian and fatalistic pole of anticipation. […] Instead of great expectations and sweet dreams, ’progress’ evokes an insomnia full of nightmares of ’being left behind’ – of missing the train, or falling out of the window of a fast accelerating vehicle.

When I started to work with old technologies in late 2010, it was clear to me that it was a responsibility, not an aesthetic choice, not a pursuit of self-identity, not an ego trip, not an idle occupation to pass time. It is an unrevealed force, which tests me every time and it has always been there. I just did not know the language, so I learned it. It makes me free and my imagination awakes like an earthquake. There are no constraints, only possibilities. I am free and I get out of the “fast accelerating vehicle”, to quote Bauman.

The distorted and oversimplified vision of freedom does not help either. “If you allow individuals too much freedom you will get anarchy”, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (2011). But anarchism is not this egoistic primitive concept of doing what you want no matter what, like Ayn Rand’s libertarian vision and rational/ethical egoism that doomed us to the Californian ideology. For an anarchist as Daniel Guerin, as noted by Chomsky (2005) “freedom is not an abstract philosophical concept, but the vital concrete possibility for every human being to bring to full development all the powers, capacities, and talents with which nature has endowed him, and turn them to social account.” Virilio (2012) goes even further:

Speed, the cult of speed, is the propaganda of progress. The problem is that progress has become contaminated with its propaganda. The computer bomb exploded progress in its materiality, its substance in the sense of reality, geopolitics, temporal relationships, rhythm.

It does not matter what we do. We retreat and do not hope for the future. Curtis rubbed salt in the wound with HyperNormalisation (2016):

Even those who thought they were attacking the system, the radicals, the artists, the musicians and the whole counter-culture, actually become part of the trickery. Because they too, are retreated into the make belief world which is why the opposition has no effect and nothing ever changes.

I do not retreat. I am wearing my glasses. I use old and free technologies. I do KYBDslöjd.

Talk Is Cheap

Taken from Bold’s song from the album Speak Out (1988). Bold is a late 1980s’ New York youth crew hardcore band. I was born in 1977, the year of punk, but also as Steyerl (2012) noted: “In 1977, human history reached a turning point. Heroes died, or, more accurately, they disappeared. They were not killed by the foes of heroism, but were transferred to another dimension, dissolved, transformed into ghosts.” The DIY and hardcore scene is part of my background. Photocopies, collage and analog photography, not computers. That is why I have no nostalgia for old technology – I never had it. When people were at home doing data and learning machinery, I was screaming in a basement with my band or lost in a polluted town with a tripod and a 35mm camera on B exposure. In my opinion, the 1980s were wild and the 1990s sober-minded, at least in Spain. I grew up surrounded by Hammer Horror Monsters and “fake advertising spots meant to ridicule real ads and propose alternatives to the consumer society” (Rico 2003). One of the several spots declared: “Use the machine, don’t be the machine.” This idea stuck in my mind and never left. Not only as an anti-capitalist, anti-consumerist and anti-authoritarian message, but as a quest for freedom through knowledge, imagination and creativity (Meyers 2016).

To borrow Cohen’s (1996) terms, “we live in a time of monsters”. But these monsters do not hunt our imagination anymore. “We are all hunters now, or told to be hunters and called or compelled to act as hunters do, on penalty of eviction from hunting, if not (perish the thought!) of relegation to the ranks of the game”, noted Bauman (2007). We are the hunters, the monsters, the zombies. Not the technology. “Your shell is hollow, so am I”, from Under The Surface (Neurosis, Times Of Grace, 1999), roars in my head. There is a void in front of us and we do not want to look inside. We keep avoiding it. At some point, it will eat us once and for all. It is irremediable. My modest social account to stand against it is my artisan imagination and KYBDslöjd. As pointed out by Gordon (2016): “It’s like the famous distinction between art and craft: Art, and wildness, and pushing against the edges, is a male thing. Craft, and control, and polish, is for women.” I will ride and stand along the “male-genius-artist behavior” (Steyerl 2012), wild and free. Fighting with the only weapon I have, my work, even if I fail or burn. I will rise from the ashes because accommodation and domestication are not my place. Type in Beyond the Scrolling Horizon. The Keys of Fury. The disobedience.

Conclusion: What the Hell for?

Quoting the writer (Stalker, 1979), “A man writes because he is tormented, because he doubts. He needs to constantly prove to himself and the others that he’s worth something. And if I know for sure that I’m a genius? Why write then? What the hell for?”

Keys of Fury is an artistic statement about KYBDslöjd, which leaves and transverses the discourse of old technologies as nostalgic–retro–dead media–archive for the future. They are not a souvenir from the past for purely aesthetic amusement. It is brutalist storytelling about technology and keystrokes, where I am merely a narrator who builds imaginary on and off the grid, shaped in text characters raw and unadorned. A type in artisan, a secretary entrusted with a secret code, a brutal language without CRTL-Z I keep learning. A tacit knowledge where there is no immediate satisfaction or gratifying closure. An open-ended form of defiance against the unbearable boredom and simplicity that reassure us behind our screens.

References

All links verified 14.6.2017.

Arnheim, Rudolf. 1971. Entropy and Art: An Essay on Disorder and Order. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Barthes, Roland, 1977. Image, Music, Text. Translated by Stephen Heath. London: Fontana Press, HarperCollins Publishers.

Barthes, Roland, 1989. The Rustle of Language. Translated by Richard Howard. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Ballard, J. G. 1975. High-Rise. London: Cape.

Bauman, Zygmunt. 2000. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

Bauman, Zygmunt. 2007. Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Bechara, Antoine, Antonio R. Damasio, Hanna Damasio, and Steven W. Anderson. 1994. “Insensitivity to Future Consequences Following Damage to Human Prefrontal Cortex.” Cognition 50(1–3): 7–15.

Borzyskowski, George. 2000. “The Hacker Demo Scene and Its Cultural Artifacts.” School of Design, Curtin University of Technology. Accessed January 03, 2017. http://www.scheib.net/play/demos/what/borzyskowski/.

Rodríguez Carrion, Awilda. 2013. “Art of Workmanship in the Digital Age”. In ACSA 101: new constellations, new ecologies: proceedings of the 101st Annual Meeting of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA), edited by Ila Berman and Edward Mitchell. Washington, D.C.: ACSA Press.

Chadwick, Peter. 2016. This Brutal World. London: Phaidon Press.

Chomsky, Noam, and Barry Pateman (ed.). 2005. Chomsky on Anarchism. Oakland, CA: AK Press.

Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. 1996. Monster Theory: Reading Culture. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press.

Conrads, Ulrich. 1970. Programs and Manifestoes on 20th-Century Architecture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Cox, Geoff. 2010. Antithesis: The Dialectics of Software Art. Digital Aesthetics Research Centre.

Crespo, Borja. 2015. Usted no es una persona normal. Granada: Libros de Autoengaño.

Curtis, Adam. 2016. HyperNormalisation. Documentary film. BBC.

Damasio, Antonio R. 2006. Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain. London: Vintage.

Dormer, Peter. 1997a. “The Salon de Refuse?” In The Culture of Craft: Status and Future, edited by Peter Dormer. Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 2–16.

Dormer, Peter. 1997b. “Craft and the Turing Test for Practical Thinking.” In The Culture of Craft: Status and Future, edited by Peter Dormer. Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 137–58.

Frutiger, Adrian. 1989. Signs and Symbols: Their Design and Meaning. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold.

Graburn, Nelson H. H. 1979. Ethnic and Tourist Arts: Cultural Expressions from the Fourth World. Berkeley, CA: University of California.

Graziplene, Leonard R. 2000. Teletext: Its Promise and Demise. Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press.

Gordon, Kim. 2016. Girl in a Band. New York: Dey Street Books.

Hawking, Stephen. 1988. A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes. Toronto: Bantam Books.

Hoffman, Benjamin B., and Otto Salomon. 1892. The Sloyd System of Wood Working, with a Brief Description of the Eva Rodhe Model Series and a Historical Sketch of the Growth of the Manual Training Idea. New York: American Book Company.

Huhtamo, Erkki, and Jussi Parikka. 2011. Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Kiss, Jemima. 2014. “Thank You, Basic: Developers Remember 50 Years of Creative Coding.” The Guardian. Accessed January 03, 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/education/2014/apr/30/basic-developers-remember-50-years-of-creative-coding.

Kittler, Friedrich A., and John Johnston (ed.). 2013. Literature, Media, Information Systems: Essays. London: Routledge.

Leader, Darian. 2016. “How Technology Is Changing Our Hands.” The Guardian. Accessed January 03, 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/may/21/darian-leader-how-technology-changing-our-hands.

Lord, Barry. 2014. Art & Energy: How Culture Changes. Arlington, VA: American Alliance of Museums.

Manovich, Lev. 2010. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Mersch, Dieter, and Laura Radosh. 2015. Epistemologies of Aesthetics. Zurich: Diaphanes.

Meyers, Raquel. 2016. “Is It Just Text?” In Teletext in Europe: From the Analog to the Digital Era, edited by Moe Hallvard and Hilde Van Den Bulck. Göteborg: Nordicom, pp. 31–49.

Muckelbauer, John. 2008. The Future of Invention: Rhetoric, Postmodernism, and the Problem of Change. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Müller-Brockmann, Josef. 2008. Grid Systems in Graphic Design: A Visual Communication Manual for Graphic Designers, Typographers and Three Dimensional Designers. Zurich: Verlag Niggli.

Neill, Bob. 1982. Bob Neill’s Book of Typewriter Art (with Special Computer Programme). Goudhurst: Weavers Press.

Rico, Lolo. 2003. El libro de La bola de cristal”. Barcelona: Plaza & Janés Editores.

Riddell, Alan. 1975. Typewriter Art. London: London Magazine Editions.

Saper, Craig (ed.). 2009. A Socio-Poetics of (Type)Writing. Florida: University of Central Florida Art Gallery. Exhibition catalogue, accessed January 03, 2017. http://www.readies.org/typebound/sociopoetics.pdf.

Saussure, Ferdinand de. 1959. Course in General Linguistics. New York: Philosophical Library.

Sennett, Richard. 2008. The Craftsman. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Steyerl, Hito. 2012. The Wretched of the Screen. Berlin: Sternberg Press.

Svendsen, Lars. 2005. A Philosophy of Boredom. London: Reaktion Books.

Tullett, Barrie. 2014. Typewriter Art: A Modern Anthology. London: Laurence King.

Virilio, Paul, and Bertrand Richard. 2012. The Administration of Fear. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e).

Yuill, Simon. 2014. ”Code ArtBrutalism”. In Read_me: software & art cultures, edited by Olga Goriunova and Alexei Shulgin. Århus, Denmark: Digital Aesthetics Research Centre, University of Aarhus.

ANSI art, ASCII art, Bulletin Board Systems, text art, warez scene

Gleb J. Albert
gleb.albert [a] uzh.ch
Postdoctoral researcher
University of Zurich

Printable PDF-version

It is relatively seldom that the contemporary computer user comes across text mode graphics. Apart from occasional frames and boxes in a Linux shell, it would most likely be an “infofile” from a pirate group with which a user would be confronted. In recent years, though, the aesthetic of text mode art has experienced a rebirth: one can buy ASCII logos printed on t-shirts, ANSI art gets featured on album covers, and some of the most proficient artists from the 1990s are making impressive comebacks. Yet all this mostly takes place outside text mode graphics’ natural habitat: the screen of a text-only operating system.

The history of character-based art is much older than that of the home computer[1]. However, one of the most influential and prolific breeding grounds of text mode art in North America and Europe has been the array of home computer subcultures that is known under the umbrella term of the “scene”, a term usually employed by the subcultures themselves[2]. The “scene” has its root in “cracking” proprietary software’s copy protection and circulating such “cracked” programs in the 1980s and early 1990s – an activity that found its form in a distinct subculture (often referred to as the “warez scene” in the US-American context) with own rituals and value systems, and later on gave birth to creative digital subcultures such as the demoscene or the music tracking scene[3]. Characteristics that unite these cultures, apart from their historical roots in the heyday of home computing, are their forms of socialisation (individuals taking on pseudonyms and banding together in groups that compete with each other in a particular field of computer activity), their approach to proprietary data authorship and ownership (the concept of cracked or self-programmed software constituting a “release” that is not to be altered and re-appropriated by other scene members) (Vuorinen 2007), their attachment to particular computer platforms (Reunanen and Silvast 2009), and last but not least, their affinity for artistic text mode graphics which they used for the digital “packaging” of their output as well as for the design of their pre-WWW communication channels. It is in this context that text mode art could gain traction and seep into ordinary users’ everyday encounters with their machines.

The aim of this short piece is to take a brief look at the history of text mode art as it developed within the scene. Text mode art has attracted only little attention from historical research, and even less when it comes to its history within the scene. Apart from brief mentions in standard works on demosene history (Botz 2011, 345–47; Polgár 2005, 121–22), a short general history has been presented by Anders Carlsson and A. Bill Miller (Carlsson and Miller 2012), while the text mode art scenes on the PC and the Amiga respectively have been dealt with in the qualification theses by Michael Hargadon and Heikki Lotvonen (Hargadon 2010; Lotvonen 2015). While Lotvonen roots the history of the art form in the subculture only very briefly and puts his focus on the aesthetics of ASCII art, Hargadon delivers an in-depth analysis of both the technical preconditions of PC ANSI art and its rootedness in subcultural practices, focusing his analysis on the early- to mid-1990s PC warez scene in North America. Hargadon’s research was recently taken up by Kevin Driscoll, who embedded ANSI art into the history of the North American culture of Bulletin Board Systems (BBS), the latter being a pre-WWW medium of communication and file exchange based on data transfer through telephone landlines and operating through text mode interfaces (Driscoll 2014, 191ff).

My perspective is a twofold one: on the one hand, of a historian working on a global social history of software piracy in the early days of home computing; on the other hand, of someone who had followed the developments of text mode art in the scene as a participant/observer for nearly two decades. The second perspective is not employed merely to delve into nostalgia, but is a necessity given the problematic archival situation of digital subcultures, especially concerning the history of BBS culture: While the files exchanged through the systems are often archived, the BBSs themselves, in terms of their functionality, outlook and textual content, are usually not (Driscoll 2014, 22–24).

The present thematic issue provides an opportunity to embed Hargadon’s findings into a multi-platform history of the scene, and to bring up a few general points regarding the history of scene text mode art which will hopefully stimulate further discussion and pave the way for further research in this area. Leaving aside the embedding of text mode art into art history and/or the history of aesthetics, and instead taking a perspective of media and social history, the points to be raised here concern the technological determinism behind the rise and fall of scene text mode art and, even more importantly, the internal subcultural dynamics that profoundly shaped the development and usage of text mode art within the honour and barter economies of the scene (cf. Rehn 2004).

The arguments I will make are limited not only in terms of geography[4], with the subcultures in question developing in Europe and the US, but also in terms of the hardware concerned. While certain forms of text mode graphics existed on virtually all home computer platforms that were relevant for the early scene’s development, it is on three of them where one can observe elaborate subcultural practices based on text mode creativity: the Commodore 64 (C64), the Commodore Amiga, and the IBM PC. While scene graphics using the C64 character set (PETSCII) have already received their own treatment[5], I will focus on the traditions and developments on the latter two platforms, since text mode art on both of them a) developed under similar circumstances in terms of communicational infrastructure, and b) share the same standard (ASCII/ANSI) with a high degree of inter-platform compatibility (despite peculiarities in the respective system fonts).

To explain the technicalities of text mode character sets on both platforms would exceed the frame of this paper, but a few introductory remarks are necessary. Both platforms shared the ASCII standard, featuring letters, numbers, punctuation marks, and a limited set of special characters. Also, both platforms supported ANSI escape codes, making it possible to choose 16 different colours for the characters and their background. The default character set of the IBM PC, however, known as “code page 437”, additionally featured a number of line and block characters (Driscoll 2014, 191–96).

This had implications for the range of possibilities for using these character sets for drawing. While the additional “high-ASCII” characters of the PC, particularly the “blocks”, allowed for figurative “drawing” focused on form-filling and shading (Fig. 1 and 2),[6] the limited ASCII character set of the Amiga did not provide such possibilities, leading artists to focus mostly on logo-type graphics based on outlines, not unlike graffiti “throw-ups” (Fig. 3). Drawing ASCII on Amiga, however, also had its advantages since Topaz, the standard Amiga font, had much more narrow spacing than the default MS-DOS font – thus, one could form almost seamless lines using slashes, backslashes and underscores.

Another consequence of the different character sets was the way text mode graphics were created. Since Amiga text mode artists used merely characters that were accessible through the keyboard, they did not need special software for creating their artworks and could use simple text editors. Text mode artists on the PC, however, could not access the “high-ASCII” characters by just pressing one keyboard key. This caused the rise of ANSI drawing programs for MS-DOS, with which artists could not only use different block characters via the function keys, but also assign fore- and background colours to characters.

Text Mode Art and the Scene Economy

The first point to be made about scene text mode art is that despite its seemingly self-evident aesthetic genealogies, it developed “organically” and independently, without any continuity from earlier forms of text mode art. The development of text mode art on both Amiga and PC is bound to the practices of data exchange and social bonding over modem-facilitated connections – this thesis, convincingly worked out by Hargadon for the PC scene, is in fact true for both platforms. Up to the late 1980s, when the predominant means of data transfer within the scene was via floppy disks through the post, text mode art played only a peripheral role in the scene’s communication. While on the C64, PETSCII graphics were used to design disk directories, there was no technical necessity to employ text mode graphics on the Amiga or the PC. Moreover, in the C64 as well as the early Amiga scene, most of the scene’s artistic self-expression, apart from the actual coded productions, happened through “old” media. The age of “mailswapping” was a flourishing period for paper art, with skilfully designed disk sleeves, letterheads and paper magazines.[7] However, when BBS became the scene’s standard medium for both communication and data exchange, artists were restricted to the limited set of characters transmittable over modem.[8] Thus, text mode graphics found their natural habitat.

Character-based graphics proved useful and meaningful to several actor groups within the BBS-based warez scene. On the one hand, it was the system operators (sysops) of “elite” BBSs who created the demand for text mode artworks – an argument which Hargadon developed for the case of the PC underground, but which holds true for the Amiga scene as well. The standard design of BBS software was simple and dull; to give their “boards” (as scene participants casually called BBSs) an individual look and let them stand out against countless competitors, sysops needed individually crafted design for their BBSs – and text mode graphics were the only technically feasible way to achieve this (Hargadon 2010, 128–34; Driscoll 2014, 191–97).

On the other hand, those users who supplied the BBS file areas with “releases” used text mode graphics for their own ends. Given the nature of BBS file listing, ASCII graphics were a way to make one’s uploads stand out (Fig. 4).

Additionally, “trading” data through landlines was a cumbersome and slow process. As first-generation Amiga ASCII artist and cracking scene protagonist Rotox recalled in an interview, he “started doing ascii […] to pass the time while trading releases to boards because at the time you didn’t really have much else to do other than watch a ZModem progress bar.[9] […] When I was trading a new release I used the time it would take to upload/download to create the file description logo, so the times would vary but usually around 10 minutes.” (Dipswitch 2003)

Through this practice of drawing logos and then pasting them into the “file description” field, file description text mode graphics became a solid part of the “package” around a scene release, alongside the infofile and the filenaming scheme. Just as much as the crack intro (Reunanen, Wasiak, and Botz 2015), this package constituted the act of turning a “digital object into an artefact” (Vuorinen 2007, 29) and converting a commodity of the software market’s monetary economy into the barter economy of the scene.

It is hard to say when exactly text mode art gained its solid place in release packaging in both the PC and Amiga scenes. While cracking groups have often included text files with notes about their releases early on (Garrett 2004, 5–6), the infofile as a regular feature of a release, carrying the .NFO file suffix, was introduced by the US-based PC cracking group The Humble Guys around 1989–1990[10] and soon became a standard feature of releases on the Amiga as well. The FILE_ID.DIZ text file format, introduced around 1993–1994 by the shareware producers’ community (Holler 1994) and serving as a means for program authors to have the description of their programs to be automatically displayed by BBS file lists, was immediately picked up by the scene on both platforms (Polgár 2005, 121). The format’s limitations (45 characters wide, 10 to 15 lines long) posed a special challenge for text mode artists, yet it was a rewarding one: the FILE_ID.DIZ file description was the first thing a BBS user saw of a particular release, even before downloading it. As FILE_ID.DIZ files were displayed automatically by the BBS software right after the upload, this format provided the warez groups with a chance to gain monopoly over how their releases would appear in a BBS file list, denying the uploaders the chance to add their own (possibly critical) comments to the releases. At first glance, this development might seem as a stifling of ASCII artworks, since BBS traders such as the aforementioned Rotox could no longer add their own artworks to their uploads. However, since the release groups used the FILE_ID.DIZ as a kind of trademark, they needed skilled artists to provide them with appropriate logos, thus assigning them a fixed role in the process of creating releases.

A Respected Scene Profession

Through the demand of both sysops and release groups, the creation of text mode graphics within the scene turned from a spare time activity of BBS traders into a self-conscious scene “profession”, along with other scene-internal roles such as cracker, programmer, musician or original supplier. Text mode graphics became a commodity with an ascribed value in the scene’s barter economy, and a means for text mode artists to gain “subcultural capital” within the scene (cf. Thornton 2005). Text mode artists and release groups thus entered into a symbiotic relationship. Groups were interested in having custom-made ASCII art for their releases, since the first visible aspects of a release, its “business card” so to speak, were reduced to text mode: the FILE_ID.DIZ, visible for the BBS user while browsing the filelisting, and the infofile, visible between downloading and executing a cracked program. Text mode artists, on the other hand, could gain fame by groups using their artwork: the more active and well-respected a release group was, the more its releases circulated through the BBS networks, sporting the artists’ logos. The more popular a group’s first “trademark” – the FILE_ID.DIZ logo – became, the more other groups wanted to have logos in the same style, providing the artist with more requests and thus with more credit within the scene’s honour and barter economy. When asked about the ways his group acquired its ASCII art for release-packaging purposes, the leader of Skid Row (one of the most prominent cracking collectives in the early 1990s Amiga scene) described two means of acquisition: either he would request logos from artists he knew and liked, or artists would send logos to him out of respect for his group (Subzero 2016).

Even though text mode artists often fulfilled other roles in the scene, this development meant that individuals proficient in this art form could gain entry into the scene’s inner circles without having any other technical skills, and thus profit from the scene’s social and cultural capital (networks, access to recent software, fame derived from affiliation with a well-known group).[11] For some individuals, drawing text mode artwork was the only feasible entry point into the scene. As a PC ANSI artist recalled, “I had a slower modem and not a lot of time so the only way I could get any download credit was to do ANSI really.“ (Ashes of Gehenna 2016).

The demand within the scene for text mode art is also manifest in the way BBSs developed their own techniques for soliciting text mode art, such as “ANSI Request doors” – BBS add-ons through which users could get in touch with text mode artists and pass them their requests for custom-made artworks.[12] Also, text mode graphics soon became a commodity that was exchangeable for other scene “goods” such as the aforementioned download credits on BBSs.[13] Even remuneration in cash was not uncommon, at least in the PC scene where the larger investment of time needed to create ANSI graphics made monetary compensations more justifiable. ANSI artists would approach other scene members offering their services, or even advertise them – complete with a price list – in their artworks, while the monetary transaction would happen via cash-by-mail (Ashes of Gehenna 2016; Misfit 2016).

Soon, text mode artists within the scene would organise into their own collectives: both ANSI/ASCII groups on the PC and ASCII group on the Amiga would appear during the first years of the early 1990s.[14] The fact that these groups would use the same infrastructures as the warez scene (being listed as “affiliates” on the same BBSs etc.) shows that these groups were deemed useful and worthy by the scene peers. Their output – in forms of ASCII collections (“collies”) and ANSI/ASCII packs (“artpacks”) – were considered “releases”, that is digital commodities in the barter economy just like cracked software, which could be uploaded onto BBSs to gain download credits.

Art for Art’s Sake

In time, at least in the Amiga ASCII scene, this sort of organising began to be considered too easy a way of entering the scene by those who saw ASCII art as merely a pastime (no matter how well-respected) of people preoccupied with other “trades” within the scene. This can be seen in discussions in several ASCII collections made by established first-generation artists who thought the new generation of artists were gaining entry to the scene too easily.[15] This tension can be explained by the fact that in the Amiga scene, the split between “legal” and “illegal” activities (Reunanen 2014) did not manifest itself on the level of BBS infrastructure: “legal-only” BBSs were rare, and the pirate releases of commercial software were often uploaded in the same file areas as the ASCII art collections, the latter clogging up the file lists from the perspective of those merely interested in cracked programs.

On the PC, the scene underwent a more pronounced infrastructural differentiation: from the mid-1990s onwards a distinct “art scene” appeared, with its own bulletin board systems and other means of communication such as Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channels.[16] Thus, when the PC warez scene moved its operations from bulletin board systems onto FTP servers during the second half of the 1990s, the “art scene” did not follow: It mostly remained within its own infrastructure of BBSs and IRC channels. Drawing requests for other scenes became less important for ANSI practitioners: aside from occasional requests by demoscene groups, the “packs” were dominated by pieces drawn either for “art scene” BBSs or simply for the sake of it. Those few PC art groups which remained closely connected to the warez scene and catered to its demand for text mode graphics, such as Superior Art Creations (SAC), were rather an exception. What was originally the standard mode of barter economy in the relationship between text mode art and the scene, was now to be found only on the periphery of the “art scene”.

With the enhancement of instant real time communication brought about by IRC (which could theoretically involve, unlike multi-node chat systems on BBSs, an infinite number of participants), artists’ competitions took a more predominant role in the scene – the most prominent of them possibly being Blender, where participants had to draw ANSI artworks based on certain topics within a limited time span.[17] Competitions which revolved around drawing artworks to be used in BBS layouts existed as well, but were less prominent.[18] The self-sufficiency of the PC art scene also became evident in that it began producing digital content other than text mode art, such as tracked music and even digital literature (on the latter, see O’Hara 2006, 112f.). Groups dedicated to these artforms rarely saw themselves as part of the (predominantly European) demoscene; they mostly appeared as sub-groups of existing ANSI groups, the bulk of which were located in North America. All in all, during the second half of the 1990s the PC art scene came to form a self-sufficient environment that had minimal interaction with other subsections of the scene.

On the Amiga, due to the reasons outlined above, this encapsulation from the rest of the scene did not take place in such a pronounced form. However, the sheer amount of ASCII artists and groups produced an oversaturation of the “market”, exceeding the demand for text mode art in BBS design and group release packaging. Major cracking and demo groups went on using the same infofile and FILE_ID.DIZ designs for years, which made perfect sense, as these served as well-tried group trademarks; newer artists, however, had less chance to see their works in circulation. As a result, the Amiga ASCII scene also experienced a turn inwards, although not to such an extent as the art scene on the PC: ASCII collections focussed less on the content than on design, requests took a back seat compared to gifts and logos drawn “just for fun”,[19] and several scene magazines focussed on the competition between ASCII groups and ASCII-related discussions than on catering the rest of the Amiga scene with artworks.

Death as Craft, Rebirth as Art Form

In the end, the same set of technological preconditions and subcultural practices that enabled the rise of text mode art as a distinct scene art form also proved its demise. In the course of the second half of the 1990s, bulletin board systems finally became extinct as the backbone of the scene’s infrastructure in favour of Internet-based means of communication. While the demoscene, both on PC and Amiga, began to conduct its communication over web-based forums, IRC channels, blogs and mailing lists, the PC warez scene moved its file exchange onto secure FTP file servers. The Amiga warez scene, experiencing its final peak during the third quarter of the 1990s, became extinct altogether due to the bankruptcy of Commodore and the subsequent dearth of commercial software that could be cracked; some of its BBSs, having gained a foothold into the Internet age by using the Telnet protocol, continued to remain online, but ultimately closed down due to the lack of users and new files.

For text mode art groups on both the PC and the Amiga, “art for the art’s sake” seemed to prove unsustainable at first. While there were at least 706 PC artpacks released in 1997, the number went down to 191 in 2000, 40 in 2005 and ultimately 4 in 2010.[20] As for Amiga ASCII collections, while at least 173 were released between January and September 1999, a mere 19 came out during the same months of 2003.[21] Text mode art lost its natural habitat within the scene, and while the art form largely failed to attract new practitioners doing it for the artistic aspects, seasoned artists, like the aforementioned Rotox, ceased to “see the point unless the logos are actually going to be used on a BBS, FTP site or by a Group” (Dipswitch 2003).

Only in recent years can a certain revival be observed. Fuelled by the new possibilities of instant long-distance communication through social networks, as well as the availability of new text mode graphics software enabling both cross-platform and networked drawing,[22] both old artists making their comebacks and even some new ones discovered text mode art in the scene tradition – including the tradition of forming groups and releasing art packages – resulting in 14 PC text mode artpacks in 2016.[23] A prominent trait of this new text mode art wave is not only the conscious breakdown of platform boundaries between PC and Amiga, but also experimentations with other text mode-based platforms such as PETSCII or Teletext.[24] These practitioners see platforms merely as different modes of expression, not any longer as habitats and objects of fandom – a development owed to possibilities of platform emulation and cross-platform software development. Also, contrary to the traditions outlined here, the new collectives, while being conscious of their roots in the scene, are not any longer part of a scene-internal digital barter economy. Instead, they act as self-conscious participants in the field of computer art, which even includes participating in offline exhibitions.[25] These artists take their skills, sharpened by their teenage scene experience, into a new context and use them as unique and valuable assets in the vast field of “grown-up” art.

Thus, one could say, text mode art in the scene tradition has only now evolved from an applied craft to a self-conscious, independent art form. However, while writing the history of this particular art form it is not enough to focus on its aesthetics; both the technical preconditions and the subcultural economies are crucial to understanding its genesis and development. Exploring these aspects in depth is a task to be taken up by future historians and media scholars.

References

All links verified 14.6.2017

Albert, Gleb J. 2017. ‘Computerkids als mimetische Unternehmer. Die „Cracker-Szene“ der 1980er Jahre zwischen Subkultur und Ökonomie’. WerkstattGeschichte, no. 74: in print.

Ashes of Gehenna. 2016. Interview by Gleb J. Albert. FB-chat, 24 December.

Botz, Daniel. 2011. Kunst, Code und Maschine. Die Ästhetik der Computer-Demoszene. Bielefeld: Transcript.

Cambus, Fredric. 2013. ‘Taiwanese BBSes and Unicode ANSi Art’. Fredric Cambus’ Blog. April 10. https://www.cambus.net/taiwanese-bbses-and-unicode-ansi-art/.

Carlsson, Anders. 2009. ‘The Forgotten Pioneers of Creative Hacking and Social Networking – Introducing the Demoscene’. In Re:live: Media Art Histories 2009 Conference Proceedings, edited by Sean Cubitt and Paul Thomas, 16–20. Melbourne: The University of Melbourne & Victorian College of the Arts and Music.

Carlsson, Anders, and A. Bill Miller. 2012. ‘Future Potentials for ASCII Art’. Paper presented at the Computer Art Congress 3, Paris. http://goto80.com/chipflip/06/.

Dipswitch. 2003. ‘Interview with Rotox/ART’. The Ascii Charts. October. http://files.scene.org/view/mags/the_ascii_charts/tac-0310.txt.

Driscoll, Kevin. 2014. ‘Hobbyist Inter-Networking and the Popular Internet Imaginary: Forgotten Histories of Networked Personal Computing, 1978–1998’. PhD diss., Los Angeles: University of Southern California.

Garrett, Ben. 2004. ‘Online Software Piracy of the Last Millennium’. http://pdf.textfiles.com/academics/online-software-piracy-of-the-last-millennium-1_0.pdf.

Gelder, Ken. 2005. ‘The Field of Subcultural Studies’. In The Subcultures Reader, edited by Ken Gelder, 2nd ed., 1–14. London: Routledge.

Hargadon, Michael A. 2010. ‘Like City Lights, Receding: ANSi Artwork and the Digital Underground, 1985–2000’. MA thesis, Montreal: Concordia University.

Holler, Richard. 1994. ‘FILEID.TXT v 1.9’. http://www.textfiles.com/computers/fileid.txt.

Irwin, John. 1977. Scenes. Beverly Hills: SAGE.

Lotvonen, Heikki. 2015. ‘Amiga ASCII-taide’. BA thesis, Espoo: Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture.

Meyers, Raquel. 2016. ‘Is It Just Text?’ In Teletext in Europe. From the Analog to the Digital Era, edited by Hallvard Moe and Hilde van den Bulck, 31–49. Göteborg: Nordicom.

Misfit. 2016. Interview by Gleb J. Albert. FB-chat, 24 December.

O’Hara, Rob. 2006. Commodork: Sordid Tales from a BBS Junkie. s.l.: lulu.com.

Polgár, Tamás. 2005. Freax. The Brief History of the Computer Demoscene. Winnenden: CSW-Verlag.

Ratliff, Brendan. 2007. ‘Why Did Freely Shared, Tracked Music in the 1990’s Computer Demoscene Survive the Arrival of the MP3 Age?’ MA thesis, Newcastle upon Tyne: University of Newcastle upon Tyne.

Rehn, Alf. 2004. ‘The Politics of Contraband: The Honor Economies of the Warez Scene’. The Journal of Socio-Economics 33(3): 359–74.

Reunanen, Markku. 2014. ‘How Those Crackers Became Us Demosceners’. WiderScreen, no. 1–2. http://widerscreen.fi/numerot/2014-1-2/crackers-became-us-demosceners/.

Reunanen, Markku, and Antti Silvast. 2009. ‘Demoscene Platforms: A Case Study on the Adoption of Home Computers’. In History of Nordic Computing 2, edited by John Impagliazzo, Timo Järvi, and Petri Paju, 289–301. Berlin: Springer.

Reunanen, Markku, Patryk Wasiak, and Daniel Botz. 2015. ‘Crack Intros: Piracy, Creativity and Communication’. International Journal of Communication 9: 798–817.

Subzero. 2016. Interview, Cologne. Interview by Gleb J. Albert. Audio recording, 6 January.

Thornton, Sarah. 2005. ‘The Social Logic of Subcultural Capital [1995]’. In The Subcultures Reader, edited by Ken Gelder, 2nd ed., 184–92. London: Routledge.

Vuorinen, Jukka. 2007. ‘Ethical Codes in the Digital World: Comparisons of the Proprietary, the Open/Free and the Cracker System’. Ethics and Information Technology 9(1): 27–38.

Wasiak, Patryk. 2012. ‘“Illegal Guys”. A History of Digital Subcultures in Europe during the 1980s’. Zeithistorische Forschungen/Studies in Contemporary History 9(2): 257–76.

Woo, Benjamin, Jamie Rennie, and Stuart R. Poyntz. 2015. ‘Scene Thinking: Introduction’. Cultural Studies 29(3): 285–97.

Notes

[1] A fascinating, ever-growing collection of examples spanning over centuries is maintained by Anders Carlsson at http://text-mode.tumblr.com/. I am very much indebted to him and the issue’s editors for comments and criticism of this paper, as well as to Brendan Ratliff for proofreading and Glenn Lunder for providing me with BBS file lists.

[2] For the historical roots of “scene” as analytical concept for subculture studies, see e.g. Irwin 1977; Gelder 2005; Woo, Rennie, and Poyntz 2015. For the (self-)usage of the term by home computer subcultures, see Reunanen 2014.

[3] For the cracking scene in the 1980s: Wasiak 2012; Albert 2017. For the demoscene and particularly its contested roots, see Carlsson 2009; Botz 2011; Reunanen 2014. For tracking music, see Ratliff 2007.

[4] Due to this geographical focus, this paper omits seemingly similar developments in other world regions, such as BBS graphics in Taiwan. Cf.: Cambus 2013.

[5] See the papers by Anders Carlsson and Raquel Meyers in the present issue.

[6] However, there are also text mode graphics on the PC that use “low-ASCII” characters, particularly the so-called “$-style” which makes use of the dollar sign for form-filling, and “oldschool style” inspired by Amiga ASCII, using slashes and underscores.

[7] For a constantly growing archive of these artefacts, see http://gotpapers.untergrund.net.

[8] As an exception, one has to note the curious case of the Polish Amiga demoscene, which relied on “mailswapping” until well into the second half of the 1990s and yet had a very prolific output of ASCII art.

[9] For Z-Modem and other BBS file transfer protocols, see Driscoll 2014, 226–30.

[10] Garrett mentions 1990 (Garrett 2004, 6), while the group entry for The Humble Guys at Demozoo gives a more precise hint at a particular release in 1989: https://demozoo.org/groups/7421/.

[11] For the application of Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of different sorts of capital onto the cracking scene, see Albert 2017.

[12] For an example from 1996, see https://files.scene.org/view/resources/bbs/food/foodmao1.zip. For BBS modding, see Driscoll 2014, 162f.

[13] For download limitations through ratio/credit systems on BBSs, see Driscoll 2014, 315.

[14] For ANSI groups, see Hargadon 2010, 136–37. For over 400 Amiga ASCII groups that existed in the course of the 1990s, see http://amiga.textmod.es/crew/.

[15] See e.g. Desert/Dezign, “28 Highlightz!”, 1995, http://amiga.textmod.es/colly/dezign28/; Rotox/Art, “Description Art Volume One!”, 1993, http://amiga.textmod.es/colly/art01/.

[16] For the phenomenon of “art boards“, BBSs solely dedicated to the text mode art scene, see Hargadon 2010, 150.

[17] For the entries of the competition, which was revived in 2015, see http://pc.textmod.es/crew/the.blender/.

[18] Such as the GO! ANSI Compo between 1997 and 1998, see https://demozoo.org/groups/38846/.

[19] On the composition and content of Amiga ASCII collections, see Lotvonen 2015, 19–24.

[20] Annual statistics at http://sixteencolors.net/Year.

[21] Calculation based on the release tables in the 1999 and 2003 issues of The Ascii Charts, https://files.scene.org/browse/mags/the_ascii_charts/.

[22] For PabloDraw, the most popular of such tools, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PabloDraw.

[23] http://sixteencolors.net/pack?year=2016.

[24] For the latter, see Meyers 2016.

[25] See http://blocktronics.org/exhibitions/; http://www.platine-festival.de/?portfolio_category=2013#platine-2013.