____          _               _             _     ____    ____  ___  ___  
 |  _ \  _   _ (_) _ __   ___  (_) _ __      / \   / ___|  / ___||_ _||_ _| 
 | |_) || | | || || '_ \ / __| | || '_ \    / _ \  \___ \ | |     | |  | |  
 |  _ < | |_| || || | | |\__ \ | || | | |  / ___ \  ___) || |___  | |  | |  
 |_| \_\ \__,_||_||_| |_||___/ |_||_| |_| /_/   \_\|____/  \____||___||___| 
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Ruins in ASCII  Exhibitions  Images  Video  Specs  Source  Donate  Author

Ruins in ASCII is a somewhat absurd video sculpture made of computer
hardware so old it is incapable of displaying anything but text, which
certainly makes the video look interesting. Playing on the 9-inch paper
white phosphor POS terminal display is an infinite loop of 180 distinct
7-second long video clips of various abandoned, ruined or otherwise vacant
buildings and infrastructure (cf. location list).

Sharp observers will note particular emphasis on the derelicts of New York
City, defunct mental institutions and subterranean structures of all kinds.
Otherwise known as Urban Exploration, the avocation is commonly defined as:
   "the investigation of manmade structures not designed for public
    consumption [...] usually such areas are off-limits"
                                              - infiltration.org

The primary constituent of the hardware is an IBM 4694-104 cash register
found in an Augusta, GA dumpster. Device controlled by a script written in
the BASH Unix command interpreter. Script depends on Arpad Gereoffy's
command-line mplayer to decode the MPEG files, which are then piped through
the aalib software library by Honza Hubicka & Kamil Toman, converting the
stream to text which outputs to the framebuffer device in real-time. Suffice
to say, none of this would be remotely possible without GNU/Linux operating
system- in this case, the SuSE distribution.

Ruins in ASCII was assembled over the course of 6 months from 2003-2004,
and the video was shot from 1999-present. It is not for sale.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
   Thanks to Julia Solis, David Benoy, Mike Morris, Rob Nelson and Google
      Unless otherwise noted, everything here (c)1999-2005 Aaron Benoy