The Teletext Community Advent calendar is back on Yle Text to celebrate a decade of textmode jollity and pixel art frivolity! Not only is this the 50th year of teletext’s existence, but we’ve been running our festive calendars for a diary-destroying ten years now.
In the early days of the medium, European services would exchange Christmas greetings cards in the form of fancy teletext pages depicting winter scenes and festive dreams. For Christmas 1982, close to the peak of its popularity, Ceefax received cards from Sweden, West Germany and the Netherlands to name but a few.
In 2024, artists have been invited to reprise that tradition for our annual exhibition on Finland’s wonderful Yle, who will be showcasing seasonal sixel art throughout December.
How does this work?
Every day leading up to Christmas (and until New Year), a new artwork will appear on page 832, symbolising a single door on a traditional Advent calendar. Many such teletext calendars would prompt you to press REVEAL to see that day’s design, but in our case you can type in the 3-digit ‘door’ number.
Previous days’ artworks can be found archived from pages 833 to 839.
As an added bonus, Wim Dewijngaert has once again designed a ‘countdown calendar’ that slowly builds up each day, reaching completion on Christmas Day 2024. This can be found on page 831. British viewers may be familiar with this concept from Ceefax and 4-Tel, who made great use of it in Christmases past.
View online
If you have access to Yle on your television set, simply press TEXT and navigate to page 830 with your remote control handset. Here you will find our calendars, plus the Museum of Teletext Art exhibition currently running on the service.
If you don’t have access to Yle Teletext, fear not! There is an browser-based viewer available online 24/7, live from Helsinki. You can also find various (unofficial) mobile apps that provide access to Finland’s premier purveyor of teksti-tv.
Click here to view the calendars
As designs are revealed, they will remain available on Yle Text until the end of the exhibition in January 2025. All open ‘doors’ will remain viewable throughout December and for a portion of January.
Once the exhibition has finished, you can see all artworks from an unspecified date on the delightful demoscene archive demozoo.org. We recommend that while visiting, you take in some of the other textmode treats on offer. There is also more teletext if you know where to look!
Artists
Our seasonal special features a grand total of 26 artists from Indonesia to the United States via Spain and Germany, and various places in between.
Poignantly, on the 10th anniversary of Bym‘s passing, we have included a selection of his work featured in the Teletext40 project from 2014.
This event also welcomes many newcomers to the teletext scene (Jackey, Jonas Haverinen, Susanna Talvitie and The Green Herring) plus a couple of familiar faces who are submitting to their first community Advent calendar (Nik Stohn and Fred Cambus).
- See artist bios on Yle Text page 840.
Participants (27)
Atonal Osprey (USA), Sarah Burgess (UK), Bym (Sweden), Fred Cambus (France), Carl Attrill (UK), CeeGee Toons (UK), Dan Farrimond (UK), Fidyan Genial (Indonesia), Steve Horsley (UK), Jackey, Jonas Haverinen (Finland), Justadude (UK), littlebitspace, Alex Grupe (Germany), Nik Stohn (Germany), Paul Rose (UK), Pete Fagan (UK), Pixelblip (UK) Raquel Meyers (Spain), Susanna Talvitie (Finland), The Green Herring, Thomas Boevith (Denmark), Max Haarich (Germany), Violet Suchomski (UK), Will Henry (UK), Wim Dewijngaert (Belgium), ZXGuesser (UK)
Artwork
We won’t post too much of the art here for the time being, since that would spoil your Christmas dinner! Nibble on some mince pies in the meantime, or visit here again at a later date to see more of the broadcast artwork.
(Art samples will appear here.)
(Link to Demozoo archive of this event will appear here.)
Special thanks
We’d like to extend a wholehearted thank you to everyone who has created, viewed and commented on our teletext pages this year! It has been a big year for teletext, and a fun one to boot, with numerous engaging events and workshops taking place in the past 12 months.
And finally, a special shoutout to Matti Rämö at Yle Text, who has been a big supporter of teletext art for many years now. A pixel artist himself, he has great respect for the medium and its artists, preserving artistic integrity and providing a wonderful platform for teletext artwork.
We will be back with more teletext art projects at some point in the future!
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