• 40 Years of Amstrad CPC: A Textmode Tribute

    Teletext may be 50 this year, but there has been another big anniversary – 40 years of the Amstrad CPC. So naturally I combined the two mediums and created a small gallery of textmode artworks for the occasion! Some are new, others old and unreleased.

    Plus: a bonus AMSCII piece featuring the ever-popular croco dude, which placed second in Logiker’s competition for artwork hand-crafted in the format, held in June 2024.

    The first two pieces on this page were also featured in Yle Text’s Teletext50 exhibition in October and November 2024, no doubt befuddling its Finnish audience!

    October 19, 2024
    Art, Blog, Teletext

  • Teletext Dating @Small Cinema Liverpool

    A selection of templates for a little Liverpool Small Cinema @TeletextDating project celebrating BFI’s Love Film season.

    People would email messages to be shown on the big screen prior to film screenings. It is unknown if anyone got married as a direct result of this service…

    This harks back to teletext dating services popular in the UK during the 1980s and 1990s. European services still run phone dating services to this day – in fact in some cases they actually subsidise the whole teletext service.

    Liverpool Small Cinema closed in 2017 when the building on Victoria Street was converted to a hotel.

    November 12, 2015
    Art, Blog, Teletext

  • Videotext Forever – 35 Years of ARD Text

    Today, 1st June 2015, marks the 35th anniversary of German teletext service ARD Text.

    To celebrate its role in the survival of teletext as an artistic medium, here are a handful of pages remembering other events and technologies from the space year 1980.

    June 1, 2015
    Art, Blog, Teletext

  • Error Map of the UK

    The most important parts of the United Kingdom mapped out in HTML.

    Best viewed via the images here, since the original web page only works properly in Internet Explorer.

    May 8, 2008
    Art, Blog, Pixel art

  • What are you staring at, chump?

    Some early experiments with teletext art from late 2007 and early 2008, inspired by the VBI Microtel project.

    Editing software is Cebra, which is what we all used for teletext art before the plethora of freely-available editors made available post-2014. It has a distinctive typeface (Courier?) that makes it easy to identify from screenshots alone.

    I believe the raw teletext files are “lost media”, but these delightfully crunchy .gif images have survived the harshness of time. On the whole, they are edited image imports – Cebra is particularly good for this type of appropriation art.

    October 11, 2007
    Art, Blog, Teletext