Artist 10

This is a still from one of the animation projects that artist Vuk Cosic created using ASCII, adapting the screenplays from select films into black and green pictures made up of numbers and letters moving rapidly across the screen.  I think this is a pretty cool concept, because it inherently forces a new perspective on the film, whether that be ambiguity or something else.  This is exemplified in the image to the right.  Without the context of the rest of the film, it is almost impossible to decipher what is going on in the still frame. 

In the New Media Art article the pointlessness of the ASCII format is repeatedly referred to, and I'm not sure what he means when he says his experiments with ASCII are carefully directed at their full uselessness from the viewpoint of everyday high tech and all its consequences.  I don't know how to go about adapting film into ASCII format, but I imagine that it is not that easy, or else I think he would have done more than five films so far.  And if this takes that much work, than why do it if one's view of of it is that it is pointless and purposeless.  This seems contrary to the whole point of art to me, that one creates art because one is driven to build, to create, and this inspiration is a purpose in itself, much less whatever kind of message that that creation emits.  Perhaps that message in regards to Cosic's art is purposelessness.