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By the turn of the millennium, teletext services across Europe were littered with advertisements for sex chatlines and phone dating services, often dominated by erotic semi and full-page pixel artworks.
Teletext Babez (alternately Teletext Babes) was a 2000-01 music video project by Dragan Espenschied and Maarten Ploeg collecting a large number of “raunchy pages” from private German TV stations, set to a song by Espenschied’s Eurodance act Bodenständig 2000. The band were known for utilising such visuals in background videos for live performances.
”I once got a really cheap TV capture card for my laptop because I wanted to snap some screens of my Godzilla VHS tapes. The card also had a teletext mode that wasn’t advertised on the box and I ended up using it more than the video capture.
“Probably everyone who went down the rabbit hole of phone sex pages on teletext admires the ability of the anonymous artists to depict a human body within the graphical limitations of teletext. Some true digital Berninis in there.”
— Dragan Espenschied
Speaking at the New York School of Visual Arts in 2019, Espenschied stated that the teletext phone sex advertisements were “especially interesting” because “to create with this colour resolution, colour space and create enough arousal in someone to actually call the number” was “true art,” and “only someone with a lot of skill can do that.”
The Teletext Babez music video was put together by Maarten Ploeg and shown for the first time on October 6th 2001 on P.A.R.K. 4DTV Amsterdam, Netherlands. According to the Wayback Machine, an archive of the video was posted online no later than February 2002, and could still be accessed as of October 2026.
Legacy
After being featured on popular tech blog Boing Boing in 2003, the project and its artworks would go semi-viral, becoming an influence on the VBI Microtel project in 2006. The music video would subsequently be mentioned as an example of “teletext as art” in Raquel Meyers’ chapter of the 2016 book Teletext in Europe.
Screenshots from the video would later be featured in the 2025 book (and accompanying stage show) A Sexual History of the Internet by Mindy Seu and Laura Coombs. It highlighted how the industry navigated the constraints of mediums such as teletext and ASCII in an environment of censorship, and how adult content is continually at the forefront of technological progress.
Erotic chatline artwork in general would continue to be featured prominently on numerous European services for more than two decades after Teletext Babez‘ release, funding commercial teletext into its later life and eventually becoming the most complex teletext art on many services as they fell into relative disuse.
Samples
Sources
- Teletext Babes, Dragan Espenschied, Park 4DTV, accessed October 2026
- What is Teletext?, Paul B Davis, VBI Microtel
- Interview: Dragan Espenschied, Digital Conservationist & Teletext Art Prize Winner, Dan Farrimond, teletextart.co.uk, 3 October 2018
- “A Digital Repertoire” with Dragan Espenschied, uploaded by SVA MFA Photo Video, 17 October 2019
- Teletext, Dragan Espenschied, 1x-upon.com
- Teletext Babez: Prehistoric, danceable ‘Net pinups, Xeni Jardin, Boing Boing, 2 April 2003
- The Bible, iPhones and hardware manuals inspired Mindy Seu’s book about sex on the internet, Olivia Hingley, itsnicethat.com, 21 January 2026
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