A pink Warner Bros. logo appears on the screen. It was nothing like the special edition of the iconic image shown in theaters. barbieInstead, a random sequence of letters and symbols flashing rapidly inside a small box.
This week, 24 hours from Tuesday to Wednesday afternoon, barbie It was performed at the ASCII Theater.horror film genetically Broadcast from Wednesday to Thursday, citizen kane was on the marquee and was scheduled to play next.
The theater, first spotted by The Verge, utilizes basic ASCII technology. This is the work of MSCHF, a quirky art collective known for pushing the boundaries of copyright. MSCHF is not the first to use a character encoding system for movies. Star Wars But its theaters can show new feature films every day, and the screening speed is much faster.
MSCHF member Matthew Rayfield created an ASCII projector using JavaScript. He explained that the program takes video and splits it into 10 frames per second. Each frame is divided into chunks that match different text character sizes. That is, a small segment the size of a character or symbol, such as “&”.
The program then determines which character best matches the corresponding location on the frame based on the background and foreground colors and shape. To watch a movie, you need to open Terminal, a basic and rarely accessed app on your Mac. Pasting the shortcode will launch the movie within the app. On Windows, the movie runs in a command prompt. When you're connected and watching, a new frame appears every tenth of a second, bringing the movie scenes to life.
Layfield says he has built unique tools that give him more control over the film's visuals than other ASCII videos, including the inclusion of more colors. “We had ideas about how to make it look better,” Layfield says. “And we needed to do it in a few hours of film.” We also needed to do it quickly.
ascii barbie is fun, but it's unlikely to rival the blockbuster movies shown in theaters and Maxx. However, this project raises concerns of copyright infringement. Kevin Wizner, another MSCHF member, said the tool creates visually “highly distorted” versions of copyrighted movies. If someone were to copy and paste characters outside of the Terminal app, they'd just see a string of meaningless characters. “The Internet has a long history of creative but junky workarounds for pirated broadcasts,” Wiesner added.
MSCHF has a history of entanglements with large corporations, copyrights, and trademarks. The group has been sued by Nike, Vans and streetwear companies in recent years. He also founded a counterfeit museum, created 999 exact replicas of Andy Warhol prints worth $20,000, and sold them all, including the originals, without distinguishing which copies were genuine. .
Mark Bartholomew, a law professor at the University at Buffalo School of Law, said courts may not agree that ASCII Theater's efforts are “transformative.” In copyright cases, courts consider whether a derivative work comments on the original or serves a different purpose. Bartholomew said he doesn't think either argument is a clear winner here and is “skeptical that the court will view this argument as transformative.”
Representatives for Warner Bros. did not respond to emails seeking comment. barbie doll It was also screened at the ASCII Theater, but not at A24, the studio behind it. genetically. As of this writing, theaters remain open.
