Digital Artists of a Rare Kind, later known as Dark Illustrated, or simply Dark was an underground computer artscene group that primarily released

ANSI The American National Standards Institute (ANSI ) is a private nonprofit organization that oversees the development of voluntary consensus standards for products, services, processes, systems, and personnel in the United States. The organiz ...

ASCII ASCII ( ), an acronym for American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for representing a particular set of 95 (English language focused) printable character, printable and 33 control character, control c ...

, and

high resolution Image resolution is the level of detail of an image. The term applies to digital images, film images, and other types of images. "Higher resolution" means more image detail. Image resolution can be measured in various ways. Resolution quantifies ...

artwork from 1994 to 1999. Though the organization did not operate as long as

ACiD An acid is a molecule or ion capable of either donating a proton (i.e. Hydron, hydrogen cation, H+), known as a Brønsted–Lowry acid–base theory, Brønsted–Lowry acid, or forming a covalent bond with an electron pair, known as a Lewis ...

iCE Ice is water that is frozen into a solid state, typically forming at or below temperatures of 0 ° C, 32 ° F, or 273.15 K. It occurs naturally on Earth, on other planets, in Oort cloud objects, and as interstellar ice. As a naturally oc ...

, or

CiA The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA; ) is a civilian foreign intelligence service of the federal government of the United States tasked with advancing national security through collecting and analyzing intelligence from around the world and ...

, Dark was a very influential and critically successful group. Dark was especially popular with

Canadian Canadians () are people identified with the country of Canada. This connection may be residential, legal, historical or cultural. For most Canadians, many (or all) of these connections exist and are collectively the source of their being ''C ...

ANSI artists, who made up a large portion of the member base.

Releases

175px, Dark artwork in ANSI format. Dark's monthly

artpack An artpack is an archive of computer artwork which is distributed in a compressed format such as ZIP or RAR. While most artpacks today contain either ANSI and ASCII art or ''hirez'' VGA, they may also include a combination of RIPscrip art, tra ...

s, referred to as "collections", were organized a bit differently than other

artscene The computer art scene, or simply artscene, is the community interested and active in the creation of computer art, computer-based artwork. Early computer art The history of computer art predates the computer art scene for several decades, with ...

groups. While the naming scheme for the collections was the common "month/year" format (i.e. for Dark Collection 02/95, or February 1995), Dark titled the digital artwork files themselves in a unique manner. Dark chose not to follow the traditional "two character" artist abbreviation format, where the first two characters of an

8.3 filename An 8.3 filename (also called a short filename or SFN) is one that obeys the filename convention used by CP/M and old versions of DOS and versions of Microsoft Windows prior to Windows 95 and Windows NT 3.5. It is also used in modern Microsoft opera ...

are reserved for artist initials, followed by a dash, then a five character title. Instead the first five characters were reserved for the artist's name, followed by a dash, then a two digit number representing how many pieces the artist had released for the year. In addition, Dark, not unlike

groups such as

Cia The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA; ) is a civilian foreign intelligence service of the federal government of the United States tasked with advancing national security through collecting and analyzing intelligence from around the world and ...

and

, used a shortened version of their group name as the file suffix for

files. In this case, became . Dark was also the only

group to release annual "best of" compilations.

Collections

* Dark Collection #01 (first collection) * Dark Collection #44 Disk A (final collection) * Dark Collection #44 Disk B * Dark Collection #44 Disk C

Annual Best of Compilations

* Dark Best of 1994 * Dark Best of 1995 * Dark Best of 1996 * Dark Best of 1997 * Dark Best of 1998

References

External links

Dark Domain
The ACiD Artpacks Archive on DVD ({{ISBN, 0-9746537-0-5), contains all available Dark Collections.
darkillustrated.org
Dark Illustrated's home on the internet. Very outdated. (offline)
Dark Illustrated Legacy: A Decadent Recollection.
(offline) 1994 establishments in Canada Artscene groups 1999 disestablishments in Canada