This portrait of Serge Reggiani, an Italian-born singer, painter and actor (1922-2004), is composed entirely of the computer characters M, O, X and *. Created in 1969 by artist Jaume Estapa, it is an early example of ASCII art, a term used to refer to text based art. ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange, which was a character coding created to enable the representation of text in computers. Early computer printers were not able to output graphical images and so characters were used instead of graphic marks.

Traditionally ASCII art is formed from any number of printable characters out of a total of 95 possibles. In this image, Estapa has employed only a small number of symbols and has overprinted to define areas of dark or shade. The alternate light grey stripes of the background were a characteristic of early computer printing paper. They were designed to make it easier to follow lines when reading printed code or wording.

Works such as this portrait were produced using an early form of impact printer, such as a daisy wheel printer. The daisy wheel printer housed a central disc off of which extended arms or 'petals' that contained raised characters. The printer would rotate to the correct character, which would then be struck by a hammer and forced onto the printer ribbon beneath, leaving a printed impression on the paper. Daisy wheel printers were noisy and could only print around 10 to 75 characters per second. By the 1980s they had been replaced by inkjet and laser printers, which were much cheaper and faster.