The Art of Warez — THE NEW ORDER /
A LONG TIME AGO IN A GALAXY FAR FAR AWAY … or alternatively in a world before the internet, the late 1980’s and early 90’s, bore witness to the rise of a movement, led by small or collectives and individuals found in rooms located next to their parents and brothers and sisters rooms or maybe in the garage … these computer users were communicating with their peers through the telephone lines by leaving messages for one another on Bulletin Board Systems or BBS’s.
The BBS’s were the perfect proverbial ‘letterboxes' for posting files for sharing as the Hackers and Pirates would use them to illegally distribute cracked software, known as Warez, and veritable treasure trove of other illegal materials. The avant garde phantasmagoric graphical artwork displayed on the BBS’s were called an ANSI.
ANSI art was the viscerally visual brother / sister to the BBS scene and represented the depth of the subculture of hackers, software pirates and computer game crackers. Fundamentally ANSI were pictures made from coloured blocks, created using the keyboard … ANSI art became a thing and birthed an underground art movement not dissimilar to Graffiti as a medium and movement ANSI artists also formed crews and competed to release the best ANSI artworks ...
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