Characters

Characters is a Greece-based artist working at the intersection of queer memory, digital infrastructure, and conceptual photography. Their process begins with original erotic images, which are rendered into ASCII—a hallmark of early internet visual culture—via custom Python scripts and printed onto deadstock dot-matrix paper. These works often take the form of human-scale scrolls—long continuous sheets that confront the viewer with a body at 1:1 scale, collapsing the gap between what is coded and flesh.

Rooted in the artist’s Caribbean upbringing—where online spaces long served as essential refuges for queer communities facing physical danger and systemic hostility—the work reframes what dominant narratives often dismiss as nostalgic or obsolete. While for many in the global north ASCII and early web aesthetics may signal retro fantasy, elsewhere they remain active architectures of survival. Here, nostalgic aesthetics point not to retro longing, but to an ongoing queer methodology—reactivating the urgencies they continue to carry in parts of the world where connection still depends on secrecy, code, and fragile digital shelter.

Through slowed-down formatting, obsolete machines, and character-based texture, Characters builds a living record of latency, desire, and ongoing coded presence. Anonymity in this context is a continuation of queer survival tactics—an echo of the forums, chatrooms, and command lines that required names be replaced with handles, bodies with symbols, and presence with trace. The artist follows in that lineage, letting the work speak in fragments and code.

Press Kit available for download here.