Aces of ANSI Art

~ the eulogy ~

ANSI art reached Turkey as an artifact rather than as a scene. A modem reached my house in Ankara in 1998, by which point these screens were .ANS files sitting inside zip archives, drawn years earlier for dial-up boards on another continent that had already been switched off. The work survives and I can read it. What I missed is the forty seconds it took one of those screens to paint itself down a phone line, which is the only context it was ever built for.

The room, in 1989, was San Jose. Two people in the local BBS scene, working under the handles Zyphril and Chips Ahoy, founded a group called Aces of ANSI Art and signed its releases <A.A.A>. Nobody had done this before. ANSI art up to that point was a sysop decorating his own board to pull callers away from the board across town, a practical problem with a practical solution. Treating it as a body of work by named artists, collected into packs and distributed to boards that had nothing to do with the artist, was the new idea.

It worked immediately and that was the problem. Within about a year of the founding there were ANSI groups everywhere, and the thing had acquired both a name and its own politics. The underground side of the BBS world took to it hardest, which is how color text art ended up permanently associated with warez boards.

~ the dossier ~

~ the schism ~

In 1990 a small group of members left. They founded ACiD Productions, standing for ANSI Creators In Demand, and ACiD became the first artscene group to operate internationally rather than inside one area code. Among the people who went was RaD Man, who would spend the next fifteen years as the scene's working historian, and who in May 1992 sat down to interview the author of the editor most of these screens were drawn in.

Aces of ANSI Art did not last long after that, and its membership list only ever ran to seven names. The group was gone by 1991, two years after it had invented the format that every group after it used.

~ what the packs kept ~

The artpack is the reason any of this survived. A group released a numbered zip file on a fixed schedule, boards passed it along, and because the format was plain text with escape codes, it kept working. There is a file called aaa-8991.zip, a remembrance pack holding work the members made between 1989 and 1991, and it opens fine on a machine built this decade.

Jason Scott put the rise of the art scene in episode 5 of BBS: The Documentary in 2005, by which point the people involved were in their thirties and the boards were a historical subject. The group that started it got two years. The files got everything after that.

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