I suppose the final surreal days of the deep underground were seen in a period from 1995-1996. During that time there was a change in the world we knew so well up to that point. Not only were many of us forced to grow from MSDOS editor to MS Notepad, the artists of the scene migrated from TheDraw to higher platform art programs. These 32 bit monsters would become our medium of advertisement. But would it actually be advertisement? What was there to advertise now, but the smoldering remnants of underground renegade sprawls coughing on their last 500mb drive, or the new but unpopular telnet boards trying so desperately to keep the scene alive below the surface of internet?

The simple ANSI-based boards of yester-year were unique in that they called for a single streamlined genre of art that was accessible to most, and was fairly simple to learn. With ANSI, you mainly had to worry about shading and color coordination. It was an art form in itself. But ANSI was a canvas with limitations.

When you move to the realm of 32bit software, high-speed cable connections, and high-resolution software, the canvas becomes much more wide open. Suddenly the character-set of ANSI begins to look like the dress of the 70's era. Its simply outdated. Now comes the opportunity to make real, dynamic art. Think of it as ANSI with a pulse. Shading, lighting, painting, line tools. Hirez is wide open. With it, you can virtually do anything you want to do, express yourself in any manner.

Now, I do not condemn ANSI as "unartistic". Its simply that now we coexist in a different environment. Its no longer a DOS world. Its no longer a BBS world. Its now a web-world. Some of us may not like to accept the fact that the Internet has crunched our playground of simple interfaces,custom macros,and login schemes. But we have to live with the fact that boards are for the most part gone. There are new players, internationally. Gone are the long distance restrictions of the old days. We are global now. This is an world-wide scene we are dealing with. Competition is on the rise to create the best damn graphics out there, and if I can dazzle the world with a JPG, then let it be so, because i can never capture the imagination of this new world with an image drawn using a character-set.

Those of us who have been around, seen the sights, walked the walk of the underground; we know what the bbs art scene was all about. We lived it, and breathed it. It was simple and complex at the same time. I know there are some things that may not get close to the gleam of a well-done font in a login scheme of the bbs, but we need to take that knowledge to the next level. We've experienced the old school art forms. And though we'll always appreciate the old school, there always need to be a new school. Hirez is our new school.

High resolution graphics are going to be the realization of the blade-runner phenomenon. They're going to make the Internet sharp, precise grids of data folding back like neon across fields of lens flares and cubes of 3D data. Its going to project us into a high speed world of efficient communication and interactivity that will allow mankind to progress technologically farther than we have ever come before.

In essence, I've seen a lot of changes in the scene, but none more impacting than hirez art. Its brought new groups out of the web- work. Its allowed sites to grow because of the abilities of these artists. On a personal level, it has allowed me to import my real art and digitize it, so Im giving personal touch to something digital that someone can actually feel when they view it. Its more alive, and has more of a soul to it. Hirez has opened a new door to the scene and I think we all need to take note of it, while still remembering the doors of the past that got us here in the first place. -The Knave -iCE VGA Artist