I came across some slips of paper from Maker Faire New York this year which can best be desribed as ephemeral low resolution digital art. Above is a B&W selfie from the Qduino Mini Thermal Printer.
The ASCII Art Camera from Hive76 used a small inkjet printer and a webcam.
Plinko Poetry created poetry by detecting the path of a disc falling between pegs across scrolling headlines.
The most extreme example of this art form I came across was the word.camera ITP project by Ross Goodwin which algorithmically generates a sort of novelette from a source picture.
word.camera uses convolutional neural networks (via Clarifai) to extract concept words from images. It expands those initial words (mostly nouns) into sentences and paragraphs using a lexical relationship database (ConceptNet) and a flexible template system.
The source picture for mine can be viewed on the word.camera site along with the full text. You can generate new ones by uploading a picture, but that is not nearly as satisfying as interacting with it in person. The physical project was housed in a vintage camera body with a small thermal printer, so that the camera itself was generating the art.
The confluence of inexpensive electronics and relative ease of working with embedded systems that made all this art possible can also generate unexpected results. This last piece of accidental glitch art is from Quin’s project: while trying to print a picture, it encountered an error and gave me a printout of unintelligible characters interspersed with bits of picture.
Related: CNC halftones with ASCII art
