"ANSI art is considerably more flexible than ASCII art, because the particular character set it uses contains symbols intended for drawing, such as a wide variety of box-drawing characters and block characters that dither the foreground and background color. It also adds accented characters and math symbols that often find creative use among ANSI artists."
European here. Since 90s, ANSI art were always a thing. Maybe the question isn't if its "an American thing", maybe the question is if you are so well informed as you think?
Indeed it seems I was not well informed. Back in the 90s I did see several pieces of ANSI art, but even then the people and magazines I knew always called all of it ASCII art. In fact I don't think I had heard the term ANSI art before today.
I guess this may similar to how we usually call all tracker music "MODs", though in fact there are MOD, XM, S3M, IT...
"ANSI art is considerably more flexible than ASCII art, because the particular character set it uses contains symbols intended for drawing, such as a wide variety of box-drawing characters and block characters that dither the foreground and background color. It also adds accented characters and math symbols that often find creative use among ANSI artists."
European here. Since 90s, ANSI art were always a thing. Maybe the question isn't if its "an American thing", maybe the question is if you are so well informed as you think?