Mural by Leon D. Harmon and Kenneth C. Knowlton. 1966

ASCII art not only survives, but evolves and is still seen in e-mail and news groups in the form of small and ingenious pictures that depend for their effect on a mixture of tonal, line and letterform characterisations. Although it is a marginal and slightly arcane form of art, there are websites devoted to the display and discussion of such images.
Few would recognise it as such, but ASCII-art’s other incarnation has been as the emoticon which is commonly included within the body of a text messages as pictorial equivalent of a vocal inflection. Emoticons are essentially ASCII images but in the form of a highly reduced and stylised caricature of human facial expressions.
One of the most common is a wink ;-) which, when viewed sideways, indicates friendly irony.

Regular ASCII-art images use a fixed-width rather than proportional fonts to define the pictorial form. Fixed-width fonts are are so named for the fact that each character on the screen or the page, occupies an equal amount of horizontal space and maintains a fixed distance from its neighbour.
 
A fixed-width font is useful when printing programming data onto paper because the fixed column-and-row nature of the array ensures that the location of any character can be quickly identified. in ASCII art, the letters themselves maintain their positions in a fixed grid which is essential for viewing the image outline. A proportional font, on the other hand is one in which the proximity between letters is tailored for the purposes of economy and aesthetics. Its role in print typography is to harmonise the close arrangement of letters and to facilitate the ease with which the eye scans the line. Traditional poetry is set in a proportional font so that letters may be bedded comfortably together as words which in turn, comply with syntactical rules so that cadence and rhythm may be clearly expressed by means of stops, line breaks, indents etc. Concrete, pattern and sound poetry extend and make fluid the range of expressible effects by only provisionally accepting the rules governing the serial flow of text, the gravity of the baseline or the uniform scale of letters. Provisionally, because the tension or pleasure in concrete poetry often consists of shaping a differential between the typographic/syntactic rules and those responsible for mimetic/pictorial representation. Each poet handles this differential in his or her own fashion.
(See George Herberts, Guillaume Apollinaire or e. e. cummings)

The original figure employed as a nude in Submission and as a skeleton in Pu Hua is derived entirely from a computer-synthesised human form. The exhibition Women at the Darren Knight gallery in 2001, included a set of three images in which the body paragraphs were force justified, meaning that the type elements are obliged to fill the width of the line. In the work Bodymap, the body text paragraphs were force justified, meaning that the type elements are obliged to fill the width of the line. The treatment of the body is almost the antithesis to Submission. The surface features in this work are spread thinly across the picture plane like a skin that has been seperated from the volume of the body and stretched onto a rack.

The subjects of Eighteen Types are taken from photographs of two Tokyo bar-girls by the Japanese photographer, Nobuyoshi Araki. Each of these two women are represented as an ASCII image set in nine different typefaces and has been magnified from an image captured from the computer screen. The image as it exists on the screen is a dual impression - on the one hand it represents the instructional data of the file, on the other it is an impression in light that is only an approximation of that data. When the screen image is magnified or enlarged, it represents not a change in the file data but rather a modification of the way that data is approximated for viewing.

The text used in the work Untitled (orgasm), has been taken from that part of a pornographic story in which the female narrator describes experiencing climax. The climax itself is an event that is hidden from view and must give itself away to the reader of the story as a series of phatic gestures - groans, cries and profanities (...oh god, oh fuck, i gasped...), or is described metaphorically - as the shape of a landscape (a plateau, a runway, an ocean) or a movement (a rushing, a spin, a flight, an explosion). A photograph of course has a connotative function - it must convey the invisible event by means of a facial expression, a particular pose or by means of a caption. in the interpretation on the left, the descriptive letters are arranged in an unpunctuated parade-ground formation which camouflages the narrative trajectory. next to it on the right is an ASCII transliteration of the photo that corresponds to the same event in the written narrative. like other works in the ASCII series it is a form composed of letters, but these letters have no literal significance - they simply represent in an abstract and vaporous arrangement, the picture which in the story is designated as the illustration of the orgasm.