Why textmode futurism is the next movement of text art

Dec 6, 2025

When I see text art that most people do, it's either a tonal generation of an image put into an ASCII converter, or it is structure-based in that the edges of objects are created manually text, but it usually ends there. It's almost like text is being treated like pixels with a doodler mentality that textmode is just something that exists as a limitation of the past, an almost conduit for nostalgia. I don't mean to be pedantic, it's just how I see it. To me, it's not enough to just create a piece of text art and to show it off as a form of pure expressionism.

Text is a vehicle of symbology, and is not supposed to be limited to a monospace grid. The only reason ASCII art looks that way is because it was limited by the technology of the past, and we aren't in the past anymore; text can be 3D (even 4D sometimes), become an array, can be broken apart and extruded in multiple dimensions, arranged within compositions around vectors and rasterized pixels, and other manipulations that we aren't even aware of yet. Textmode art currently can be anything you want it to be.

The goal that I'm trying to accomplish to differentiate myself is to integrate design systems in each piece. I think the difference between art and design is that art is an expression (the "you" part) and design is being able to manipulate people's perception of that art (the "other" part); art:you, design:other. Mixing art and design together creates a visual language bridge for people who are not "into" text art to understand your art without you needing to explain it.

People ask me all the time what software I use, but they never ask why a piece existentially is hoping to accomplish, specifically because of this visual language bridge. The text images are comprised of components/objects, and those objects interact with each other like different parts of a factory. When materials (text) goes through a factory, there is a purpose for each section, and the end product is a story.