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Entertainment

ASCIImeo Turns Vimeo Videos Into ASCII Art

Convert the rich pickings of the video sharing site into one of the defining aesthetics of net.art.

Still from Vuc Cosic’s ASCII History of Moving Images (Psycho)

Let’s all pretend like it’s the mid-90s and net.art is still the digital art du jour. That would make this website, developed by Peter Nitsch, just about the coolest thing you’ve ever seen. It takes Vimeo videos and turns them into a type of ASCII art, rendering the images in a jumble of code as opposed to pixels. ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) is a code for representing characters as numbers to transfer text between computers, introduced in 1963. With ASCIImeo, you can now do for the creatively fertile ground of Vimeo what the trailblazing net.artist and ASCII authority Vuc Cosic (co-founder of ASCII Art Ensemble) did for some iconic movies. In his series ASCII History of Moving Image, he turned a series of films into the flickering data of ASCII.

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So if you fancy converting your fave Vimeo videos into code, you can see how it might look below. It shows a colored ASCII version (you can have the classic simple ASCII or block mode too, for a more pixelated effect) of a popular video that’s been floating around this week: Jellyfish Lake, Palau, which shows Sarosh Jacob swimming in a lake full of harmless jellyfish in Eli Malk island in the Republic of Palau.

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[via Kottke]