ailadi (Italian, b. 1981) is a visual artist and illustrator who works with PETSCII, the character set from the 1982 Commodore 64 computer, blending 8-bit video game aesthetics with vertical comic-strip panels. She develops her PETSCII tools with her collaborator Sidabitball, the alias of Pierre Boquet, with whom she also performs live text-mode visuals as the duo PET.CORP.
Born Ailadi Cortelletti in the Italian Alps, she studied at the School for Poetic Computation in New York in 2018. She is based in the French countryside. Central to her PETSCII work is maximizing visual impact through minimalism: with only 256 symbols available in the format, her panels mirror the technical constraints of 1980s and 1990s video game design. Her practice grew out of 365 GIFs, a yearlong series of daily animations she made using the PETSCII charset. Animals and water recur across her PETSCII comics, reflecting a stream-of-consciousness approach rather than fixed symbolism.
