ASCII art is a form of visual art that uses the characters and symbols from the ASCII character set to create images and designs. ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange, and it is a character encoding standard that assigns specific numerical values to represent text characters. In ASCII art, artists use a combination of characters such as letters, numbers, punctuation marks, and other symbols to create pictures, patterns, and designs that can be viewed when the text is displayed in a monospaced font. These creations can range from simple and abstract designs to intricate and detailed images.