Glyph Drawing Club – ASCII art reimagined

mozfest-bot commented 6 years ago

[ UUID ] c2d76a0b-6e97-4579-bf80-93c7e478fc7b

[ Session Name ] Glyph Drawing Club – ASCII art reimagined [ Primary Space ] Digital Inclusion [ Secondary Space ] Openness

[ Submitter's Name ] Heikki Lotvonen [ Submitter's Affiliated Organisation ] Citizen of Finland [ Submitter's GitHub ] @hlotvonen/glyph-drawing-club

[ Other Facilitator 1's Name ] Gladys Camilo

What will happen in your session?

I will introduce participants to GlyphDrawing.Club (http://www.glyphdrawing.club/), a modern online ASCII art graphics editor that I developed and released this June. The editor is inspired by the limitations and possibilities of ASCII art, but made with inclusivity, accessibility, openness and experimentation in mind. It's best suitable for creating type design, modular design, Unicode art, concrete poetry and much more.

I will guide participants (one-on-one during the whole weekend) into using the editor to make ASCII art, which has been previously an exclusive and inaccessible artform. The one-on-one sessions can take from 5 minutes up to 30 minutes. Participants can also use their own laptops, so more than one people can use the editor at any given time.

What is the goal or outcome of your session?

The goal of my sessions is to —introduce people of all ages to text art, ASCII art, Unicode art, modular design and type design and hopefully get them interested in these topics and to use the editor at home also for their own projects —show participants that creating art can be fun, easy and accessible with the right tools and to inspire people to develop their own tools —get people to discover fonts and typography in a new, fun way —meet people who are interested in the project also in a technical way and discuss possibilities for creative coding —see how people use the editor, what works and what doesn't, and to brainstorm new ideas and features for the editor

If your session requires additional materials or electronic equipment, please outline your needs.

I will need a table and at least two chairs, power outlets, and optionally would be nice to have a big screen / projector (with an hdmi cable). I will bring my own laptop, but participants can also use their own laptops.

Time needed

All weekend, as an installation, exhibit or drop-in session

hlotvonen commented 6 years ago

See examples of what can be made with this editor at: https://www.instagram.com/heikkiveikko/

yochannah commented 6 years ago

@hlotvonen this sounds like a fun session! I have no idea if it's physically possible, but having a printer to print out artworks afterwards, or art supplies to hand to make analogue versions of the art, could be a fun way to extend this....

hlotvonen commented 6 years ago

@yochannah thank you! I can't personally take a lot of extra materials with me as I would be flying, but if I could arrange with the organisers or someone else, a printer would be fantastic so participants could also take their own creations home - physically! Recreating this kind of stuff with normal art materials could be a bit difficult but an analogue versions could be made with something like vinyl cut shapes or laser cut wood blocks! I'll definitely look into it :-)

carolinux commented 6 years ago

@hlotvonen I will be based in London by the time Mozfest rolls around, I could probably bring my run-of-the-mill printer to assist with that, if no other solution is available.

hlotvonen commented 6 years ago

@carolinux Thank you! I will keep that in mind!

KadeMorton commented 6 years ago

@hlotvonen There is a theme for the decentralisation zone that people might want to use your editor to contribute to. If people want to print their work we would be happy to display it https://github.com/KadeMorton/Xenshana

Carotejada commented 6 years ago

Thank you Heikki for submiting! This is a really cool proposal 💙 and I love the idea of printing out artworks.

I'm sure people will enjoy this session a lot. Can you elaborate a bit more on how does the session connect with the Digital Inclusion theme? Happy to have a chat about it!

hlotvonen commented 6 years ago

@Carotejada Thank you! I'm glad to hear that :-)

I put the project in Digital Inclusivity for a couple reasons:

There are no modern tools for creating digital text art (ASCII art) with Unicode support. There is only a handful of ASCII editors out there but they are all platform / character set specific. I created Glyph Drawing Club specifically to break out of this platform exclusivity, because with my editor you can use any font and any glyph from any font and any combination of fonts, and in this way bring text art more accessible to people who are not necessarily interested in just pixel fonts.
The editor can emulate all kinds of different text art styles, such as Taiwanese ANSI, which is specific to Taiwanese PPT bulletin boards and the editors are all in Chinese language. In this way I want to make these kinds of more obscure (to western countries) forms of text art more know, appreciated and accessible to a wider range of people.
The western ASCII art subculture is small (roughly 1000 people worldwide), quite exclusive and hard to get into. One of the key elements of the ASCII community (especially ANSI art) is elitism and exclusivity. The community is also quite toxic towards women and LGBTQI+. In the last 3 years that I have been part of this subculture, there have been only a handful of new artists joining the community. I wanted to make the editor as accessible and open to combat this issue, and start creating a new kind of community around it that is open to all, and bring new people to the world of text art.
Text art in its various forms throughout the history has not really been recognised as a serious art movement (except for concrete poetry). It's an obscure art form. With the editor I want to promote text art as a serious tool for artists and designers also, not just as a hobbyist tool.

I hope this clarified a little bit my thoughts on why I chose Digital Inclusivity theme! But I'm happy to discuss if you have other suggestions for the theme :-)

hlotvonen commented 6 years ago

@KadeMorton Sounds great! Could fit very well into the language / design part. Let's talk about this later :-)

mozfest-bot commented 6 years ago

Thank you for taking the time to submit a session to MozFest.

Due to the high level of submissions, we’re unable to accept all proposals and unfortunately, your session was not part of the final group.

You'll receive a follow up email from us in the next few days.

MozillaFestival / mozfest-program-2018