I've never paid that much attention to the ASCII art that teams like R2R, aIR and others are/was using other than it's a cool detail. I remember that ASCII art was a pretty big thing when I was very young, but I barely knew how to use a PC at that age. A couple of my friends used to make very basic pieces for use in early social media platforms, MSN messenger, MySpace etc.

I recently read a bit about the history of this art style and about groups like Dark, iCE, ACiD, CiA and Blade and found it very interesting. There still seem to be quite a lot of people doing this today (maybe someone here even?) but it's of course not anywhere near as big as it used to be. I also found this old documentary with interviews of group members and about the rivalry that was going on between them.

16colo.rs seems to be a pretty extensive database over most of ASCII/ANSI/bitmap artworks, groups and artists. There doesn't seem to be any audio group related stuff on there though.

What's your favorite artworks/groups/artists? Maybe you have something you created yourself?

 

Here are some that I've found that I really like