New Tech Cares About the Past
When innovation considers history, digital art gets valued.
I just learned about “ANSI art,” but I’ve known about ANSI art. As a child of the early internet, its imagery runs through my veins — pixelated neon-over-back, sometimes in the shape of graffiti-style words.
ANSI art came up in a recent FAD Magazine article about a project by Oliver Payne and Kevin Bouton-Scott, a film called “The Art of Warez.” The film covers a pre-internet era where people used BBS computers to communicate via phone lines and “coded messages,” the graphic display of which came to be known as ANSI (named from the graphics standard used for IBM computers in the 1980s). People started using ANSI color block graphics, trying to “outdo each other” with these simple visual tools. It became a sort of anti-authoritarian counterculture. Most of the artworks, now, are lost.
Admittedly, I haven’t watched “The Art of Warez” in full, but in FAD Magazine’s interview with the artists, Bouton-Scott says: “Tech’s focus is always on innovation and the next thing financially, there’s no value whatsoever in anything that already happened…[Meanwhile,] art needs its entire past to stay valuable from an investment standpoint…”
In a sense, this dichotomy won’t apply to newer tech. Innovations like blockchain and AI are very concerned with what “already happened” — blockchain in the form of a record, AI because the only way it “learns” is by being fed past information. Innovation can find value in the past, which is why we’re in a particularly meaningful age for digital art.
